Broadcom DX Application Performance Management Reviews

When it was stable, Trending Reports and Response Time Distribution

Cultural issues prevent a product like this from making the impact it should have.

Stability

4 Years

No

Yes

Yes

Customer Service:

Poor-fair

Technical Support:

Poor-fair

Straight forward for technically competent people.

Minimal

No, it was part of a Business Partner larger purchase.

As a support engineer, the most valuable component was Customer Experience Manager (CEM). Being able to detect end user defects based HTTP response code and slow time, while differentiating between geographical locations or individual users was the biggest advantage to proactively managing root-cause analysis. And once integrated with the APM agents on those same applications, transaction tracing from end user to middleware/backend systems really did give that end-to-end view that organisations always get pitched when there is an open tender on any APM solution. From a Consulting aspect, this would have to be the new ABA (Application Behaviour Analytics) engine that is now available. It makes my job both easier and more efficient as well as clients. Being able to easily identify the end user transactions to low level internal java methods in the same screen automatically with bare minimal configuration is impressive.

Back in the support days, we were able to provide Business Service availability and performance statistics rather than just the number of P1 / P2 Incidents rose within the service desk each month. With the change of mentality to a Service Offering approach through CA APM, we first used the SLA numbers for each day to then determine which incidents where of most criticality to the business and technical support team. This meant that support resources where used more efficiently to resolve bottlenecks in load and performance during peak periods of the day.

The one thing that needs improving is the uplift of dashboards capabilities to HTML5 and flash based widgets. Some new vendors coming into the market have dashboarding capabilities that are flashier and shiny which can sometimes be a deterrent to CA APM’s proven track record to diagnostic triage.

I initially spent 2 years as a Web Application Support Analyst focused solely on using and administering the toolset for a large Victorian government department. Over the last 3 years, I have been working for a Professional Services Company implementing the CA APM solution for a number of different large companies.

Deployment of CA APM infrastructure and agents is quite easy and pain free. Issues do start to arise when you have a large enterprise environment comprising of multiple Pre-production environments and Production. The administration and configuration tasks involved to changing the configuration on agents and uplifting versions can be a long process without the use of a centralized management console for agent configuration purposes.

One of the biggest strengths with CA APM is that it is incredibly stable. In the 5 years I have used the toolset, I raised 2 support tickets about stability of which were resolved by configuration changes to suit the environment it was hosted in. The main deterrent of stability is whether it is designed to scale.

Scalability will only become a problem if your initial scope of deployment doesn't allow for the adopting of the solution in the wider business. Most solutions like CA APM are implemented in large commercial organisations that stem from siloed projects, which have an initial role of configuring, installing and providing a business benefits realization. Once this occurs and when done well, the solution needs to be able to grow and grow fast. The standalone or clustered architecture that CA APM adopts allows you to upscale and downscale your solution with minimal impact to the business, allowing for a solution that will fit all organisations deployment plans.

Customer Service:

My experience with CA Customer Service, from Sales and Pre-Sales teams, has been of the highest standard. The team always frequently drops by to just say high and follow up any enquirers.

Technical Support:

While working at different organisations I have overheard people talking about the lack of urgency and turnaround time when it comes to support. The CA Support team are very good at ensuring you know the progress of any given issues with constant updates.

At the end of the day, you should be selecting an APM tool that best suits your organisations requirements when it comes to Performance and Availability Management. I would recommend CA APM because I have used it both for Support and as a Consultant and seen that when done well, you can get instant quick wins straight out of the box.

The ability to monitor real time customer experience and to correlate the performance degradation back to system events. The ability to measure customer/user impact during outage and to assign a cost impact to the “outage”.

Prior to the product, we only measured user/customer experience when they actually reported the issue however now we have the ability to understand user/customer experience when it takes place or even predict it with appropriate metrics. This means we can respond proactively when service is impacted without disputing/denying user/customer complaints.

Linking the business transactions back to the backend systems, in other words properly following and mapping the business transaction through the entire backend environment (Webserver -> Application Server -> SOA -> Database -> User).

6 Years

No, however I have many years in this space. I do however know of other implementations that were not as smooth.

The CEM (Customer Experience Management) product is still immature and do have hiccups. Most of the time it is very stable with an occasional glitch.

Yes, but this was related to infrastructure capacity. We could not expand our infrastructure how ever we exploited the product beyond its original design (so self inflicted).

Professional and helpful however I got frustrated many times due to their level of expertise. When we experienced issues with the product or had questions, we rarely got quick and proper answers and had to figure it out ourselves (we found that we had more “working” experience)

Yes, we used open source utilities. We could not scale the open source utilities to manage our enterprise applications.

The product setup is straight forward, however then you need to understand the business transactions and expectations to align the requirement and expected results. You also have a very good understanding of APM else you would not be able to link the expectation and product capability. I have handed this solution over to individuals who knows the product very very well and they fail to deliver as they do not comprehend APM.

Interesting question as I was part of the 3rd party vendor who did the implementation at the time. So let me refer this back to my previous comment. If you do not have an implemented (vendor or in-house) who understands the concept of APM and who to derive business value out of it then you have a problem. Making the product work is one thing…..

Hmmmm… Huge J!

We had a strategy that we realised over a period of 10 years which means that we introduced certain elements piece by piece, we did not deploy all at one go. It is however a very expensive outlay and I am currently reviewing the strategy due to our annual maintenance that is becoming very expensive.

Yes, we also looked at Dynatrace

This is not a IT initiative alone but a IT/Business partnership. This is not a IT Operational deployment alone either but a joint venture with the application developers as well. If these three parties collectively approach this tool then you will have proper ROI, else you will not realise the true potential and then it becomes a very expensive monitoring tool (which it is not - if you think it is a “monitoring” tool then you are looking at the wrong tool).

Memory Leak in CA Wily Introscope

Handling of Issues has become proactive rather that reactive, with Introscope flagging issues before they become a crisis.

Product could be made more lean. POC for customers is troublesome.

I've used CA Wily Introscope and CEM for 5 years.

Deployment for large scale systems is an issue with lot of add-ons/additional products required. For example add-ons for Oracle / Siebel / Peoplesoft, etc.

We haven't had any stability issues with CA APM.

We haven't had any scalability issues with CA APM.

Yes. Other Products were evaluated. This product was found to be a close match to our requirements.

Java agent monitoring for IBM Websphere JVMs.

It helps the developers with performance testing, production pro-active monitoring and troubleshooting.

More monitoring capabilities and more flexible for setting up different monitoring alerts.

5 years

Yes. I had an issue when we were trying to deploy on Glassfish environment and WebSphere portal.

Yes, previous version APM infrastructure was not that stable. We have 5 collectors and collectors kept disconnecting from MOM, which caused false alert like JVM status.

I was not able to monitoring a WebSphere portal on a previous version.

Customer Service: GoodTechnical Support: Depends on different technicians. Some of them who I have been working with are very good. They really know this product and can provide me good suggestions and solutions. But some of them, I don't think they are familiar with or understand our issue. For example I had an issue when I upgraded and the support person gave me wrong directions.

Yes. IBM Tivoli ITCAM.

For Websphere it's straightforward, but when we implemented on glassfish, it took me a while to figure out where to put the argument. And the issue comes up when doing a glassfish system upgrade.

In-house

HP Diagnostic and ITCAM.

The capability to generate traces showing a tree view of transactions, this feature helps to find production issues in the monitored applications.

As a consultant, this product helps all of my customers find production issues quickly. It's capable of identifying the root cause of an issue within a few minutes. It helps monitor all of the environments of application servers and generate alarms if something is wrong. It generates sums to analyze and understand what is happening with the applications.

Support for more programming languages and a complete fusion with the Customer Experience Management product because the product needs an appliance to get the user experience.

3.5 years

No, the deployment of CA APM is quite easy.

No, the product is very stable if the environment sizing is done properly.

No issues because the product works like a cluster.

Customer Service:

Good, but has room for improvement.

Technical Support:

Good.

It was straightforward, you just need a server with a Linux or Windows to install the solution. And the agents was easy to configure too.

With this solution all my clients have reduced the number of incidents in production environment, and when they occur the time to solve these incidents has been reduced dramatically.

AppDynamics, BMC and New Relic solutions.

Time is very important to allow the solution to mature, and you need people who know the entire application and the business to help those that will implement the solution.