Broadcom DX Application Performance Management Reviews

We are a network operation center. We measure the performance of the system.

We monitor the network and the application performance for any degradation in the performance of the system. 

If it is down then we need to get notified very quickly so that we can inform the consulting team to resolve the issue. 

We also have to inform the management of the incident management process, and the customer response team to notify the customer's agents.

I like that it gives you a wide range of data where you can see the application outage response from concurrent locations and the number of stalled jobs.

I like these variant features that are present.

It's quite easy to understand.

It doesn't have a proper database, and the configuration is very difficult.

Broadcom APM has two solutions. One is the infrastructure monitoring and the other is the application monitoring.

The infrastructure monitoring is not very user-friendly. When it migrates the application APM tool, the configuration it's on an individual basis. There is no template that you can apply to all of the related servers or applications. You have to configure one by one and set the thresholds, set the periods, and the monitoring times. Everything needs to be configured manually, which is pretty bad, it's not good.

The main feature that I am expecting to be included in this solution is the template for the configuration. Also, the UAM tool should be more user-friendly. 

They should have the proper database setup where we can change the values on the backend. We don't have that option, it is mostly XML-based data files that can't be read.

I have been working with Broadcom DX Application Performance Management for almost two years.

We are not using the latest version. We are using version 10.7

There are a couple of issues in terms of stability. 

Sometimes, the interlinking between APM and UAM doesn't happen regularly. You need to restart other services, which is not convenient.

Technical support is good, but you don't always get a solution that works. It seems to be more of a trial and error process. At times you will be told that the issues will be resolved in the next issue, but it doesn't.

They respond immediately, and the communication is good.

We are currently doing a POC with AppDynamics.

It's more or less straightforward.

You deploy the agent based on the type of framework, whether it is Java or, .NET.

You deploy it and reset the services.

Pricing is not my area because I am a technical developer, technical engineer who coordinates the different teams but I know the pricing.

It is definitely expensive for what we get, but there isn't an alternate option at the moment. We can't really compare with other solutions.

I have evaluated other solutions to understand the market and which applications were leading.

I wouldn't recommend this solution. 

I don't have enough experience with AppDynamics but from what I have researched on YouTube and other sites, it seems that Appdynamics is definitely better than Broadcom. 

If they don't have anything in place, I can recommend Broadcom products, such as UAM and APM. It's easy but the configuration requires a lot to be done.

I would rate Broadcom DS Application Performance Management a seven out of ten.

I like the Transaction Trace Viewer and stalls feature on the front end/back end within the investigator.

It has helped to stabilize the environments and also quickly identify issues some while they are occurring and some proactively.

The extensive monitoring alert gave the ability to act quickly before an outage happens.

We haven't implemented the latest released version yet but I do believe there's a lot of improvement needed.

There's a lot of room for improvement in administration which I believe CA APM is slowly getting there, with their Agent Command Center. However, the interface and management of the entire APM infrastructure should exist via GUI.

I have used this solution for five years.

We have scaled CA APM a lot over the last few years. As time goes by, there is an increased demand for monitoring leads to underperforming enterprise managers and/or other memory issues. We are running on VM. However, CA recommends to run on a physical machine with lot of compute resources, which wouldn't be applicable to all companies with their standard environments and also in terms of the budget/funding that it requires.

The customer service is good but not excellent. I would rate it a 7 out of 10.

I personally didn't use any other solution, but my company did use the IBM APM tool.

The setup is complex. It takes some reading and understanding of the architecture along with some prior skills.

We have implemented it in-house. My advice is to install a PoC environment and familiarize yourself with all the components.

Compared to other competitors, this product is a little flexible with its pricing/licensing and is somewhat less than the other APMs in the market, with negotiations.

My advice is to implement the product and leverage all of the add-on free components. You should also compare it to other APMs in the market.

• Proactive alerting is one of the key elements of APM and works really well. The ability to detect problems before they become widespread high severity incidents is critical when you are managing production systems. All of our APM is visible to our global support operations centres, and each service is represented by a RAG summary alert button. Any AMBER/RED status alerts are checked instantly by our 24/7 support teams.
  
• Ease of deployment
• Product stability

APM is the tool used by all support areas to monitor Java application and infrastructure performance. We have standardised support for the services running on the Java platform into one tool.

Dynamic instrumentation, at the moment, I think it is a bit clunky to use and it should be available outside the transaction tracer. It can only be enabled during a transaction trace session. Ideally it would be nicer if this could be done via the Investigator view, and the available options are shown with a right click. That way they could be done without having to invoke a transaction trace session.

I've used it since 2004.

No issues encountered.

No issues, it's one of the main strengths of the product.

No issues, the product has evolved to increase scalability on existing infrastructure which is very good.

Excellent, really top quality always.

Same as customer service, top quality.

No, but we have retired similar solutions in favour of APM, e.g. Tivoli.

Straightforward, but we had professional services from the vendor to guide us as well.

Combined, and the vendor team was top quality.

It's not easy to quantify as the product is used to prevent mission critical services from going down. We can’t really put a figure on it.

Two full time employees are needed to manage the whole operation, which covers all production environments and two test environments.

Not before, but we have evaluated others since, such as AppDynamics, Optier, Dynatrace and others.

• Stay close to the vendor guidelines at all time
• Don’t customise it too much
• Always patch
• Join the user community

A new concept (APM) to be introduced in our workplace which was never there before. Never had visibility into application (layer) performance. Prior to this our main focus was on server and network hardware monitoring. Having visibility into app performance and backend layer has been quite an eye opener in putting together the entire picture for management. We've put together a complete portrait from an ESM (Enterprise Systems Management) perspective with Broadcom/CA Tools.

We are introducing 10.1 in our dev environment and then prod down the road. APM is a new culture here so we are working with customers in getting them introduced to the product. Want to show them how deep dive provided by APM can help them with DevOps lifecycle as well as proactive monitoring. The previous version v9.5.3. we've had for about a year since we introduced a the product in our environment has been a good hands on experience for our users. Now looking forward to getting hands dirty with 10.1 and utilizing the additional capabilities. Will continue to show customers the usefulness of this tool and how they can use it to generate reports on performance of their app as well as the service it provides. There has also been reactionary situations where we have used APM and pin point the issue or able to narrow down the focus.

Updated - 08/29/2018

We now have v10.5.2 SP2 running in our Dev & Prod environment since June 2018. So, far we've had a really good reception for APM by our internal app owners. The key is now for ESM Tools to be adapted by app owners (physical, network and app layer).

Updated - 2/3/2020

We now have upgraded to v10.7.0_SP3 which has provided yet another set up stability and more capabilities for our app environment. APM Command Center (ACC) has a more features and stability from a admin and maintenance perspective.

The next upgrade (v11) changes a lot of things as Broadcom has decided to go to Kubernetes platform as for as APM upgrade and/or rollout of v11 is concerned. It will be interesting to see how customers react to this and whether it pushes them to take a look at SaaS model.

Deep Dive and Transaction Analysis Triage capability. The AppMap feature is very very helpful in visualizing. Also ACC is a huge help with agent maintenance/management (life cycle).

User Experience is a BIG one. Integration of all of APM components into one swift deployment. Can't emphasis the above two more.

About 10 years.

On Windows Platform, it’s not great and/or stable (from previous experience). We had lots of challenges on that platform back then. But with the current employer we start things off the right foot with RHEL platform :)

Agent metric containment is a VERY BIG challenge for us. Constantly have to normalize the agents to reduce the number of metrics and/or metric explosion.

Customer Service:

4 out of 5

Technical Support:

4 out of 5

There was no application performance management solution prior to the introduction of CA APM. Thus, we are still in infancy from a culture perspective. Customers are still learning as they use it often as possible.

It was complex due to our network architecture. It tool much longer than anticipate with all the firewall hurdles and design iterations.

Implemented through CA (the vendor) with their Services Group.

not yet determined

If you can get a SME to architect and install then definitely go that route vs the vendor itself. There are upside to having the vendor due to the fact that they have access to unlimited resources for assistance.

N/A

It’s a great product and provides a lot of in-depth data. Focus and leverage this product as a deep dive one and have another layer above it (another high-level view product etc..)

Monitoring of customer applications. 

It has performed well. I won't necessarily say better than other solutions, but there's more focus because of the customer applications. 

A good example for us is Hurricane Irma. We have service territory that was impacted and our executive dashboard for APM was up and everybody under the sun was watching that, and keying off of that, for issues that were popping up, because we were performing storm restoration.

The executive dashboard we created gives a lot of visibility out there, so from that standpoint if somebody sees something go red and they say, "Hey, what's going on?" we have to be on our toes. There's no working on something for a little bit before someone knows.

But having said that, there's a lot of flexibility in being able to see stuff in those customer systems, which is vital for us.

The ability to have anything we want scripted feeding in there, and to add to it fairly quickly. So if we do see something that we need to change or monitor, we need to add something, we're able to get those in pretty quickly. 

For example, finding something that's not performing well on one of our applications. We had one not too long ago where we simply didn't have a threshold on something, something we hadn't seen before. We found it, and then were able to get in and put something in pretty quickly. So now we're prepared for that situation in the future. 

The APM SQL feature doesn't perform like we would like it to, and we actually have some open cases that are working through that. I know that's a new feature with 10.5, so it may be one of those things that gets a little better. But I would like to see that improved because, although it's not a major problem, we feel like it should run faster.

The stability is very good. We recently upgraded to 10.5, and the performance has been fantastic, especially since the upgrade. We had a few minor things before the upgrade, but once we've upgraded it's run like a champ.

No issues with scalability. We're able to add stuff to it without any issue. We've got a decent license count so there are no issues there, it's been easy.

We have used tech support. I would evaluate it as so-so. Part of the issue is, I've got some seasoned guys. Tech support is always saying, "Hey, what's with these log files," and the like, and we feel that we waste some time upfront because we've already checked A, B, and C. It's like if you called tech support, and they say ,"Well have you turned your computer on and off?" "Yes, I've done all that!" It's like that. We go through some stuff that we feel if we skip that we might get to some resolution faster.

With version 10.5, we went to it fairly early and we discovered some things that broke some things in the past. We did get through those. But I would say the bigger issue is, if we're at point A and we want to get to D, we want to skip B and C.

We do get the right person when we call, there's not really any run around.

And we have, I don't know what her title is, a service manager, and we meet every couple of weeks to review all the cases, and I feel that if something's not getting addressed she'll help us escalate that or push it forward. It's just some of the upfront stuff that gets a little frustrating at times.

My most important criteria when selecting a vendor have to do with the issue that vendors say, "Yeah we can do this, yeah we can do that." I want to see examples of where you did that. And I want to understand how hard it is to get to that point. Because a lot of times, sure, they can do that, but it entails all of this work, or all of this customization and maintenance and, at the end of the day, it may be a huge issue to get to that point. I want more transparency. 

And if it is that that additional work, that may be okay, but we want to know about it ahead of time so we can plan for it.

Brand may be important, but sometimes companies get lazy, saying, "We're so and so," and they don't feel they have to work as hard. I know there's a vendor that we had - not CA - but it was just, whatever you're doing, you know that you're going to have problems. They are a big brand name and they just do a poor job. So that's why I say the brand doesn't always make that big of a difference because it's more about your ability to come through and deliver on your commitments. And deliver on your commitments, meet deadlines, without us having to do a fire drill every day.

I give CA APM a nine out of 10. It does a really good job for us, the infrastructure seems pretty easy to maintain. We had to do an upgrade so that obviously threw a bunch of work in there but, outside of that, it seems to run pretty smoothly so we're not spending a bunch of time dealing with that. We're able to work with the monitoring functions of it and set some things up. 

The Team Center piece seems to be working really well now, we're starting to implement some of that so it's taking advantage of some functionality that was already there but didn't really work that well. We're starting to use that and add some more value to our customers.

Based on those things I'd give it a little bump up. It works well for us, gives a lot of visibility.

I would recommend it to a friend. I would just say make sure you understand your environment, and compare your environment to somebody that's already implemented, to understand some of that work. Get the right reference call.

In the newer versions of the application, they had something called a Triage Map. That basically breaks it down from a service perspective. You actually see it from a service perspective and then you see what components make up that service.

It really helps the business. They are not seeing individual servers or individual devices, they're seeing it from a service level, which is what everybody wants to see. It works the logic, the mapping, and how the application sticks to the database or the web server. It automatically creates that map for you.

• Acts as a troubleshooting-like application
• Deals with performance issues
• Helps in trending, like the data mine, the load which is running on the application servers
• Helps the development team to fine-tune and proactively manage the application.

Some of the reporting features. we are running maybe two versions behind, so we haven't explored the reporting functionality.

I believe the latest version of APM 105, there is a reporting capability, which we would like to leverage when we do the upgrade.

But I think that was something which was missing. Right now, if I need to run some reports, I need to run some manual queries, which is very time consuming.

Hopefully in the later releases, which is out there, we can explore the reporting functionality. There are some features that I would have like to see, which are not there in the current version.

I haven't had any prior stability issues. The only issues I have usually, is more like a question. In other words, if this can be done or it cannot be done. But I don't have that many issues pertaining to performance or the system going down or anything. I really love the product.

There were no real issues with scalability. If you have proper scaling, it depends on how you implement the product. You need to make sure it's a scalable solution, depending on the number of agents that reporting to the manager. In terms of providing scalability, it should be fine. I haven't seen any issues.

I would give technical support a rating of 8/10.

I have been here since 2010 and they have been using APM since. I really didn't have a APM solution, so this is the first time we've used an APM.

They use a database called Postgres, which is an open source database. When setting that up, we always run into issues. The application itself is not that complicated. You'll need to get it installed and then configure it. But when installing the database, we've seen a bit a lot of it, and there are issues with it.

We didn't really evaluate other options, but right now, we are in the process of doing it. Right now, we're trying to compare with AppDynamics. That's something we are working on.

They can surely give this try, but there are some other tools out there. When we implemented this back in 2009, there weren't that many competitors or vendors for APM. There were less nine years ago. There have been quite a few, like we have AppDynamics, you have Dynatrace, and they're pretty good tools too.

I would suggest that they can do a proof of concept depending on what the requirements are. Some features are good in one product, but the other product has something else to offer. It's still a good product, but then they can always look at some other solutions too, before making the final decision.

I think the most valuable feature is the deep dive feature. It has the ability to provide in-depth knowledge on the application code. It's invaluable.

For us, it's given us completely brand new visibility that we never had before. Application owners are able to completely understand the application better now on the back end, as well as on the front end. It’s pretty much an eye opener for them.
A lot of it, we try to do it through alerts and dashboarding. You want customers to spend a lot less time poking around and we want the dashboards to be a tell-tale sign of what is going on in their environment.

I think my biggest feedback from a negative perspective would be the presentation layer, which I think they're already working towards. The user interface, that presentation layer, I think that's already coming in the next few iterations, so I'm looking forward to that. That has been a big challenge for them.

Then also there's a lot of integration right now from within, which will be very helpful also. Mainly, on the customer experience manager side, it would be great if they could integrate that into the existing user interface.

It's pretty robust and scalable, so I haven't had any issues. I've been using these products for the last seven years, so stability-wise, it's one of the better, scalable products I have worked with.

The tech support is great. Yeah, actually, I know most of them by name since I've been there. They're very helpful, very intelligent, very professional; great customer service.

My experience has been mainly that an existing solution did not work as well, or doesn't scale as well, and so this one, CA APM, was looked at, evaluated, and decided. Some of them were above my pay grade. Once the decision was made, that's when I was involved.

I was involved with the CA professional services from the start of the deployment. We did the whole architecture and deployment. Once we were in ops mode, I also did an upgrade earlier this year. It's been pretty smooth.

There are competitors out there. When selecting CA APM, a lot of it is also the fact that, I think, it's scalability, usability, and the amount of data that it provides for the application from end to end. I don't think there are a lot of products out there that can do that.

I would definitely encourage others to evaluate it first, see what works for them. It's not for everyone. It all depends on the size and what you're trying to accomplish. I would definitely encourage them to evaluate the product as much as they can and decide from there.

It does a lot of good things. There are a few challenges. Mainly, I think it's the amount of knowledge that it provides to the application team; it's vast. I worked with two or three other products and I don't see them providing that much metric tools and information about that application the way APM does.

For APM, the most valuable solution is being able to do a root cause analysis quickly, and find the root cause visually so that we don't have to hunt around for the actual cause of the problem.

Our organization has over 21,000 agents running. Being able to monitor all those agents at the same time, with the ability to be alerted when thresholds are exceeded. We can know when we are having problems without having dedicated people to watch monitoring screens all the time.

I would like the ability to see a full end-to-end path of a transaction. I know the next version will be getting closer to that. I’d also like to see it get to the root cause of the issue faster.

Some of the visual aspects of the current version and reporting need to be improved. I know that you are fixing all this. It's a little harder to do some of this because I know so many of the things that are coming up.

Stability is pretty good. They are improving it with every version. I'm hoping that when the latest version is out, we will have a really stable environment that we can rely on 100%.

It is very scalable. As I said before, we're running more than 21,000 agents in all of our development operations. We feel that it could scale very well by just adding more servers and enterprise managers.

Technical support is very responsive. They will work with us to solve any of the issues that we are encountering.

I'm the administrator for our environment, so I do all the installations for our environment and also set it up. The setup is fairly straightforward. There is some complexity to understanding some of the tuning mechanisms that you can do to it. But that's with any enterprise-level software.

You definitely need to understand the size of your environment. Try to get a plan together before you start implementing it. It is a big help because then it goes a lot smoother.