Broadcom DX Application Performance Management Reviews

• Provided greater visibility to IT regarding necessary actions on its governance and relationship with suppliers and business areas. In the previous scenario, IT was surrounded by tools, but did not possess a vision focused on quality of service delivery and end-to-end. With the adoption of CA APM, we have accurate mapping, we're updated on what supports each business service and what, when, where an incident occurs and how it affects the business.
• Regained credibility of IT's role as a driving force for improvements result in greater business performance. In the previous scenario, IT was surrounded by tools, without any integration which forced us to dispense resources with a late result and sometimes without solving the issue. With the adoption of CA APM, there was a change in the relationship of the areas of IT, its own role and value to the success of the business.

The features which were instrumental in our choice of CA APM include:

• The options that we have to create use cases providing synthetic vision when applicable to the needs of the business
• The ability to accomplish the identification of the root cause of problems with applications in drill-down level by integrating the suite with tools for managing and monitoring.
• The existence of components for collecting information from other platforms and applications.

From my perspective, as I had the opportunity to evaluate CA APM compared to other vendors, one of the improvements we highlighted which would be necessary to improve the targeting interface is to make it more user-friendly and current.

No.

No.

We selected CA APM as opposed to other solutions in the market because it has a solid install base and is notorious for integration with other products including monitoring platforms, service desk and ERPs. We had the challenge of promoting a radical change of posture of the IT organization from reactive to proactive. One of the biggest factors was that the impact was a heterogeneous IT environment!

It was a simple initial configuration. In order to minimize impacts on the operations of the business, a strategy was adopted taking into account the application of low-impact stretching forward to the greatest impact. During this process there were continuous disclosure processes and changes to management which enriched the lessons learned that contributed significantly to the achievement of success.

The implementation was carried out by the CA team. We had difficulty finding professionals to deploy and maintain the solution in Brazil.

I also evaluated AppDynamics, BMC Software, Compuware - Dynatrace and Microsoft – SCOM Avicode

To have a proper result, consider:

• Spend time to do a proper mapping of your business processes, interfaces, dependencies carried out and the support (IT). In certain situations we are faced with a fragile and inadequate monitoring which doesn't amount to any APM!
• Any APM tool will not perform a miracle, it will only be an instrument with other existing tools, which should have processes and people behind them to reach the desired results. In our case, success occurred only when there was a fusion of interests and efforts of the areas of IT infrastructure and systems development.

This is a very particular vision of the existing IT environment in Brazil, however one can not generalize based on this.

Most valuable features and characteristics for me are:

• Quick setup and good out-of-the-box value provided
• Usable interface and navigation
• Variety and value of the provided metrics
• Qualified and motivated Support services
• Customization options, you can monitor almost everything with EPAgents

Most of our customers use the tool mainly for incident diagnostic and incident early detection. In this sense, I know that is quite useful for customers. Sometimes it is used to validate results of stress tests before going to production.

In my opinion the are some areas for improvement:

• CEM setup is significantly more complex to set up than Introscope, more automation of transaction detection will be useful.
• Command Center should be integrated in the Web environment and the server part should be integrated in the MOM.
• Support for commercial solutions (Oracle Coherence, e-Business Suite and other market leading solutions) is sometimes limited. Official fieldpacks from CA can surely improve this point.
• TeamCenter needs a little more maturity, although I know it is a new feature. CA is working on it. CA should provide new use cases for this new feature in order to adopt the new Team Center.
• End-to-end visibility of transactions in complex environments is not always satisfactory (for instance, transactions crossing OSB).

I've been using it for the last seven years.

Overall, we've had no issues with deployment.

I think stability of the CA APM software is one of the strong points of the solution.

We have managed environments up to five Enterprise Manager instances which can be considered a middle-sized environment. We have not find any problem with scalability.

SLAs are great. Technical level of the technicians is quite good and the level of motivation in resolving cases is very valuable.

It is the first APM suite that I have used.

The setup is quite straightforward, but in middle-sized environments it could be long. It would be interesting to have some kind of “cheat sheet” to hasten the initial setup, especially for non-experienced consultants. Documentation is good, but it can be costly to read.

This is a management role, but as far as I know pricing is in line with other top market tools.

No other options were evaluated.

I would advise them to look for an experienced partner, have clear objectives and expectations of what they need, and take a time to obtain the most of the tool.

• APM status console
• Traces
• Triage Map
• Application overview tab
• Dashboards

CA APM always helps in finding problems quickly rather than requiring us to check logs to pin-point the issue. The turnaround time to resolve the issues has improved after we started using CA APM.

Also, by looking at the dashboards, application teams are able to find the problematic component by just having a quick look at traffic lights and dial meters.

SmartStor database requires lot of improvement where we need to have an admin console to maintain the SmartStor DB. The functions that we'd like are removing data based on time and removing selected metrics for specific agents in an easier manner.

Also in terms of capacity, I would expect CA APM to handle quite larger metric load than the current architecture. For instance, our applications teams expect a single collector to handle thousands of agents with heavy metric load as well.

We've used it for five years.

There were no issues and deployment was very smooth.

If proper CA recommendations are followed, there is no issues in stability. But CA should consider the capacity issues. There are times where capacity is reached and we face performance issues where the system becomes unstable.

We've had no issues on scalability because CA APM is able to scale up well and good on increasing load. But when capacity is reached, the system breaks completely.

The customer service was fantastic.

The technical support is good in guiding in the right directions to figure out the root cause of APM so quickly.

We used a vendor team to implement it.

CA APM is a nice performance monitoring software, especially if an organization wants to monitor the end-to-end architecture of an application.

It monitors the environment from mobile to mainframe. The user interface is prescriptive to understand the problems rapidly without any technical knowledge.

• Applications graphs
• Dashboards
• Error snapshots
• Ability to receive metrics from various ways

An example would be the error reports, which shows the services with the higher error percentage and which errors occurs most, to they can be easily spotted to improve the application performance.

The application's discovery/triage mapping.

I've used it for seven years in three different companies.

Had some performance problems with a few applications and had to disable some probes.

Yes, but due the product being installed on a VM environment without the proper I/O speed.

No, it's pretty easy to add more collectors/servers.

10/10, CA is pretty close with our company, and they are actually in the same building.

8/10.

Only open source solutions.

Only open source solutions.

Both with an in-house and with a vendor team. They had the necessary expertise for the installation.

Could be better if other teams were convinced to use the tool, but it's good.

Make sure to test to see if there's any performance issues and do use a physical server.

• Ability to monitor any application (Java/ .NET/Other). 
• Ability to monitor the Applications using CEM (Customer Experience Manager), Application Servers/Web Servers/Databases, etc using Introscope. 
• Creation of Alerts and integration with Other tools to send out Notifications before any issue occurs. 
• Customised Dashboards that act as a unified view of all the Critical metrics that are being pulled every 15 seconds from the Servers. 
• Transaction Tracing that pin-points the component of code for an application that is failing or the Backend SQL that is taking a long time to respond.

We have implemented all the above features and some extra features like EPAgents, Web Server Power Packs, Unix Field Pack, MQ Power Pack, Perfmon Collector Agents, Error Detector, Change Detector, Leak Hunter (Occasionally), etc.

There is always room to improve any product to achieve new heights. Same applies to CA APM as well. The Transaction Tracing feature can definitely be improved. The Web Client can also be improved.

4 Years

We haven't experienced any issues in these areas.

On a scale from 1 - 5, I would give CA a 5 for both.

The setup was straightforward.

Initially we implemented using a vendor team. They had a good level of expertise.

It is great product with lots of features that help minimize the time taken to troubleshoot issues and root cause analysis to avoid loss of business.

The compatibility of the solution is its most valuable aspect.

The initial setup is very straightforward. The deployment was easy.

Support could be much better. Right now, we are not happy with the amount of service we can get.

I've been using the solution for two years. 

Technical support is not good. We are not satisfied and would prefer if they offered much more support for their product.

The initial setup is not overly complex or difficult. It's pretty simple, pretty straightforward. 

For us, the deployment took about two months. 

We had IBM and an integration company assist us with the initial setup.

We pay a monthly licensing fee. The solution does have a few different options, according to your needs. 

We're a customer and an end-user. We don't have any specific business relationship with Broadcom.

Overall, I would rate the solution at an eight out of ten. We're mostly happy with its capabilities.

The use case is for crash analytics. We want to know what went wrong, and what is the area in my code that I can improve on.

In terms of performance, we are still evaluating it, but so far so good.

The time to deliver, time to market, is the greatest improvement.

The crash analytics, and that it goes down to the level of code where it shows, "Hey, this is an area you need to check."

Custom dashboards.

It's pretty stable. I'm not the one who configures it but I'm the one who drills down to the reports and checks what went wrong. It's good.

I'm not sure because I'm not the one who configures it.

No support tickets so far. That means the product is stable.

We had a presentation from CA and everybody from the product management side was impressed by it. We are still evaluating it.

When my company is investing in a vendor the criteria are

• brand
• reliability
• scalability.

I give it an eight out of 10 overall because I don't see custom dashboards. Plus, some of the stat analysis features that were explained are not that easy to use. 

Otherwise, it does what it's supposed to do.

I would say go ahead and at least give it a try.