Broadcom DX Application Performance Management Reviews

We primarily use this product for monitoring our IBM WebSphere environment. It more generally monitors all of our JVMs for our web environments, used for all of our websites.

JVM memory monitoring and connection pool monitoring are valuable features.

It provides visibility into the performance of SQL statements, allowing for the identification of those that are performing poorly.

With respect to SQL monitoring, it would be nice to have a little more information because it doesn't provide the full statement all of the time. If it's really long then it only provides part of it.

It would be nice if the parameters that were used could be reported, as currently, it doesn't.

Having it monitor more of the environment would be helpful because we use applications such as Mule and Informatica, aside from the JVMs.

We began using this product between five and ten years ago when it was known as Wily Introscope.

This is a stable product.

In terms of stability, with our current setup, it is not so much. Unlike a situation where it was on the cloud, we'd have to be involved and it would be difficult to scale it up.

We have about a dozen people in the organization who use it.

We have had to call them and I find that they are not very supportive now.

The initial setup is complex.

We had assistance from either the vendor or somebody that they directed us to and are affiliated with.

The licensing costs are expensive.

We did not implement the latest release because they made some big changes to the framework. They probably have some of the stuff in their newest release that we would like. However, we didn't do that because they went to Kubernetes and some other technology that we weren't ready to adopt because it isn't in our environment yet.

Since Broadcom bought it, I would no longer recommend this product to other users. I think that they increased the price and the support isn't very good anymore.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

It has improved our transaction monitoring significantly.

The most valuable features are the end-user experience and transaction monitoring.

The installation could be improved. Also, they need to concentrate more on the cloud for cloud monitoring.

I have not experienced any stability issues with the product.

Customer Service: 4 stars out of 5.

Technical Support: 3.5 stars out of 5

We used HPE Diagnostics earlier. But since the client already had an existing license of CA APM, he wanted to leverage the existing toolset rather than going for new tools.

The initial setup was slightly complex.

The implementation was done through the vendor. The vendor, of course, had implementation experience.

The ROI is good when you have more applications for testing.

We evaluated Dynatrace and HPE Diagnostics.

Definitely a good product, worth going for. Since I first reviewed the product here, about two years ago, I would currently not change my rating of eight out of ten. CA APM hasn't changed much in that time.

I use it to track performance on the production environment and QA environment.

The time it takes to track problems in applications is the most valuable return that we have from this solution. 

The transactions rate feature is the most valuable feature. It shows the deep histories of everything that's running on an even transaction. That's why it is so useful.

I would like for them to develop a feature that controls .net agents remotely. It would be very useful and we don't have this feature now.

They need to improve the crossing over of data from large files and they should use LUNIX heavily. There's room for improvement there. 

I have a good impression of the stability. 

I use technical support a lot. They've performed well. They always respond quickly and they are assertive. We have had a good experience with support.

The initial setup was straightforward.

The quality of software is one of the main criteria that we consider when evaluating a solution.

I would rate it an eight out of ten. The reason it's not a ten is because they don't focus enough on improving over time like other competitors do who have a more modern and complete tool. 

They should develop the user experience so that you don't need to put in other agents. Today you have to use another host to bring up your vision. If they would have a single agent with all this information, it would be perfect.

It's for monitoring application performance and end user experience.

It secures traffic through the HTTPS. There are a huge number of cipher suites which are enabled. Unfortunately, some of the cipher suites are not being recognized by the APM tools. However, we are able to manage with the other cipher suites in the market, apart from ones offered by CA APM.

We have had a tough time getting these topics monitored.

In terms of end user experience, it is very useful. We use it to organize our client requirements, for example:

• How many users utilize the vertical URL and what are their experiences? 
• How good is the response rate?
• How many errors are the users receiving?
• What errors do they get?
• What screens are being displayed? Are they receiving, "Page Not Found" or "Error 404"?

We receive good transactions from it with good graphs, as well, documenting the activities of total visitors on the site. We can pull the reports and provide them to the client, as required.

In terms of application performance, we are able to identify the memory leaks within applications. We have been able to identify how an application is behaving in terms of a custom method of classes and how well the response is being solved. We can find the KPIs of the application along with its performance indicators.

The custom classes, suchs as hybrid net performance, we are able to identify and fix, accordingly. The solution is proactive. We can monitor how the application is connecting to the database and what queries are being requested, then how well those are being respond to by the solution.

Users no longer need to depend upon the console for a compatible Java version. Now, users can directly learn the version, perform all their actions, and see all of those performance-related issues.

Our users lag how to identify the root cause with this solution. If they could come up with a more user-friendly version, that would be a good thing, since other vendors currently have better features and more user-friendly products than CA APM.

As applications move to the cloud, we need more cloud-based solutions from CA APM. This is currently unavailable. I know that this is something that they are looking to do in the future, but I am not sure how with the current solution.

The stability is very good. CA APM is far more stable than any of the other tools available, though we have seen memory leaks with the solution.

Scalability is good. We haven't faced any issues.

We have about 50 users in our organization, from directors to analysts. Around 60 to 70 percent of our organization is using the solution.

We monitor more than 400 applications, which is done with two people who are system engineers (myself included).

The technical support has performed very well. We receive good information in a very quick and polite manner. They have very good technical personnel and have been very happy with them. Sometimes. I contact them when CA APM introduces new things.

The initial setup is very straightforward; it is not complex. It is well-documented. I can follow the documentation to get the tool working.

For a simple install, the deployment can take about a day, then I can monitor any application.

A complex install will need requirements to be gathered for how things are done and how deep the data is to be implemented and instrumented. If they are a huge number of classes to be monitored, then we need to collect all that information from the application team or client. Afterwards, we have to instrument the system. This may take a week or ten days based on the requirements. 

I'm not involved in the pricing.

We evaluated CA APM vs AppDynamics and CA APM vs BMC.

Consider the compatibility first, then consider the resources required, finally consider the applications that you will be monitoring. Then, you can go deploy them.

We used the Five-Pack when onboarding services. We also used SiteMinder and introduced synthetic monitoring, integrating with CA Spectrum and CA Service Desk. We use several CA applications. Everything is interconnected to get triggered and tickets routed to a particular thing automatically.

We look at the load patterns and server health by looking at server health parameters. Heap memory is of prime importance as well as how the heap is behaving and how the memory is behaving under load, as well as the CPU utilization. These are generally the parameters we will check.

In a production environment we check all the parameters. We can detect any leakage, any problems, whether RAM is sufficient, and whether CPU is crossing a threshold. We can determine if we need to add new servers or RAM or adjust the heap settings.

It helps save resources for a company.

It also helps us look at business-critical transactions and how fast they are happening. It helps us pinpoint the methods or functions that are taking longer to operate and we can advise the development team to look into it and fine-tune those areas. They can make adjustments immediately.

For me, the most valuable feature is being able to check memory patterns. We check them when we do load testing or soak testing to see if there are any memory leaks.

A CA APM agent takes a lot of memory. That is one disadvantage. If you configure CA APM correctly it will still consume around 15 to 20 percent of memory.

We haven't had any issues with its scalability.

When you submit a support ticket it will take them two to three days to reply. They told us they would resolve issues within 24 hours, but so far that has not happened.

There have been times when we were doing performance testing, load testing, where it didn't capture the required information we were trying to monitor. We called the CA APM support team. They suggested we increase the RAM and restart the agents. That was the solution they gave us.

The setup is not straightforward. It is a bit complex. I have not configured CA APM myself, but I use it for performance testing. When we are doing performance testing, we configure CA APM for a pre-production environment which is similar to the production environment. We will do load testing and take all the parameters and observations and send them, along with our recommendations and conclusions, to development. But I have not really configured CA APM.

Dynatrace is the most expensive of these tools followed by AppDynamics which is "medium-expensive." Both CA APM vs Dynatrace and CA APM vs AppDynamics are a bit lower in price. Because of this, our clients insist on using CA APM.

In my opinion, if you can afford it, go for AppDynamics instead of CA APM. But if our customers don't have the budget, we'll go with CA APM.

We have a comparison chart showing the license costs for AppDynamics, Dynatrace, and CA APM and other monitoring tools as well. We provide that information to our clients along with the advantages and disadvantages of a particular tool. We provide our opinion on which it is best to go with but we also listen to our clients' opinions. We discuss this at length to finally come up with a decision on which tool to go with.

I use many tools, such as LoadRunner, Silk Performer, and IBM. I also use AppDynamics and Dynatrace. The last two are actually the best for me at the moment because they support even the database level. CA APM does not support that much. It will only give me minimal information about the DB.

It reduces the downtime of applications, and has, in fact, minimized it to approximately 5 percent, and possibly even less than that.

1. Root Cause Analysis. For example, I have an application in my environment and it suddenly it goes down. I then need to find out which team to consult and whose fault it is: coding, database, network, or something else. No one is ready to accept that it is their fault, leading to the blame game. As a result, it takes me a lot of time to identify the right person, assuming I can find the right team. Then, identifying the root cause of the issue and resolving it will take more time, leading to loss of business. CA APM, however, easily updates the exact location of the error, which not only saves time but effort as well.
2. CA APM not only does root cause analysis, but it is smart enough to proactively identify an issue that could happen and advise me to do something to prevent it.
3. Over time there have been positive changes. For example, it now has automatic investigation, through the use of AI. CA APM has the advantage that we can create plug-ins. We can do whatever we want to do. It's like a Linux machine. Whatever you want to do you can, by scripting. That kind of customization is not available in Dynatrace or AppDynamics.

Automatic report generation needs work.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

Customer Service:

9/10

Technical Support:

9/10

I used logs to study applications' behaviour, but that requires a separate team to properly handle it. There was dependency on their workflow. Now, we don't require a separate team. Additionally, the CIO can see the reports on his mobile.

The initial setup requires some understanding of your applications. For example, you need to know how much response time is fair for a function in that program or the response time of a given page or the application overall.

Implementation should be done by an expert as an average implementer would only be able to provide 60 to 80 percent usage of the tool.

It varies depending on the environment.

You should only use a preferred partner of CA.

Over the couple of years, since I first reviewed the product here, my rating of it hasn't changed. I still rate it at eight out of ten. I rated it eight because it is a good CEM experience but there is room for improvement with CA APM. It is it's quite tricky to implement because you need to have traffic monitoring, etc. in place.

I have been using Dynatrace for the last nine months or so and I would rate it at nine out of ten.

We are using CA APM for Layer 7 applications, like SQL, as well as application debugging.

Compared to other tools, it's not good. 

First, there is no auto flow diagram. Second, the alert mechanism is not as good when compared to other tools. Third, there are many different folders, such as front end, back end, and BB queries, but it's very critical to centralize all the business connections. Fourth, there is an issue relative to the build all view. 

It's a very stable product.

There aren't issues related to CA APM's scalability.

Compared to other tools, the technical support is not good. Other tools give support in real time, whereas CA will only reply 48 hours after I log a call.

We have multiple solutions, like CA APM, and Pinpoint. 

For implementation, it's just straightforward. There is no challenge to correlation, continuation or estimation, and there is no complexity in our environment.

Java-based enterprise application servers monitoring: for example, WebSphere Application Server, JBoss EAP, WebLogic.

• User-defined transaction profiling
• Application topology discovery and visualization
• Application component deep dive.
  

It should enable you to see the usage and performance of all application dependencies like databases, web services, caching, etc.

• Root cause detection
• Easy installation and configuration
• It should facilitate real user monitoring to see what your users are experiencing in real time.