Broadcom DX Application Performance Management Reviews

CA APM makes our customers very happy with one of its most important features. It has a random transaction trace which gives our customers the ability to look at how their transaction performs: The average response time of their transactions with the application which runs those transactions. It helps them understand whether the application is taking long to run, whether any transaction takes longer than expected to run, or if it is running within an optimal time for that particular application. It is very helpful, because they are able to figure this out with the help of the tool. That is one of the major things. 

Another thing that I can think of right off the top of my head is the customer experience part which comes with it. We do a lot of transactions. It is a retail company, so customer experience is very important. As far as our data moves from point to point, it is very important for us. This is why is the application is very helpful.

My production environment is still way back in the versions. I am only trying a sandbox of the newer technology. I have not yet exploited what it can or cannot do to the fullest. 

However, I am going to upgrade everything to the latest version level by the end of the year. Hopefully, next year when I have to come back to CA World, I will be able to tell you more about what I would like to see, if anything.

I would rate it as a nine out of 10. The reason why I am not going to 10 is documentation needs to be centralized. I keep saying this. It is all over the map. It is not easy to navigate to get documentation on CA APM. If it is all centralized, it would be a lot easier. 

It is fairly stable. I have used the solution and have seen it improve throughout the years. I started using it when it was Wily. My first encounter with it was in 2008. 

I have seen a significant improvement with the upgrades which have come with it. It has come a long way. It is like night and day. The application is very stable and extremely useful. 

It scales pretty well. For instance, I can give you an example of what I am doing right now. It is one of the few applications that pulls data every 15 seconds. The majority of the applications that I am aware of pull data in five minutes time. This application pulls data in 15 seconds. You can imagine the enormous amount of data which streams through. 

What I am happy with is their latest version has something called SmartStor, which has been improved for the database. The scalability, it has gotten much better. 

You are able to archive your historical data on two different collectors, then use your live data to be able to run the application effectively. That is what I do. It is very scalable. The number of collectors one can use per MOM. I have gone over that and the application is still stable, and it is very scalable.

Technical support has come a long way. Back in 2008, it was a different thing altogether. It would be maybe overnight before you would get a callback. Now, it is maybe within minutes, depending on how you put in your request. If it is something that you need or if it is a tool, someone is calling you within minutes of opening your problem. They will stick with you and make sure that it is resolved. It has gotten better. I can't complain.

In my current role, I came and the tool was already there. I was hired as a subject-matter expert on it, because I have had previous experience with it. I did not have to make that choice about changing solutions. 

I have gone between companies, where different companies use a different application performance monitor, and used the likes of Dynatrace. The difference between the two is the ease of navigating your way through the application. They both do the same thing, except how easy it is to use Wily. It is very intuitive in a lot of ways, which other applications are not.

The tool itself is a great tool. I will recommend it to anyone that wants to use it.

The most valuable feature of APM is gaining insight into the application performance so we can proactively take actions before the customer calls to report an issue.

We have used CEM to get insights into what the user is actually experiencing.

There needs to be more ability to report on the performance of the applications, so you could easily have a report run and give you all your performance stats for an application at the end of the month, or week, or after a release. This currently is not easily done, and you can’t schedule it.

In the beginning, there were issues operationalizing CA APM to work with our company. I wasn't involved at the time, though.

We have encountered issues with stability when best practices were not followed. It became more stable after using best practices.

We haven't had issues scaling it.

I'd rate customer service an 8 out of 10.

Technical support is an 8 out of 10.

I was not working in APM when we brought it in, so I don’t know for sure if it replaced anything.

I wasn't involved in the setup.

It was implemented with a vendor team.

We have an ELA with CA APM and it is very competitive with their competitors from that perspective.

Our company did evaluate another option, but I was not involved at that time.

Make sure to test as many application types as you can in your POC phase so you can work out issues early in your implementation. Also, make sure load tests are included in that testing.

Its ability to deep dive into the application code is the most valuable feature for us. It has help us to be more proactive instead of reactive when it comes to incident management.

It's improved our ability within the instant management realm. We are able to get the root cause faster than we had done before. We had to uninstall it two years ago, it was a matter of looking through log files and then making basically and guessing as to what the root cause was. It allowed us to avoid the same incidents occurring over and over.

Continued improvements with the integration of the URL and the ability to use AWS would be great. Understand that it may at first potentially break your application, but it might just be a case that maybe it's just poorly written and it's not Interscope that's the issue.

We've been using it for about eight years.

We ran into all kinds of problems and most of it was because of just the onboarding as our new-product education was a huge issue.

It's pretty stable. I just don't think that we've done a very good job of lifecycle management of the product.

We've had no issues with scalability.

We had nothing in place previously.

The setup was straightforward, but the interaction of it initially with our applications was the tough part. We needed to make sure the instrumentation itself did not break our application.

We did use some professional services to assist us in getting both the buy-in and in helping us to set up some bells and whistles to really get people excited about the product.

Our ROI is the fact that our applications have the ability to stay up longer because we are more proactive in how we monitor and performance test our applications so that when they go to market, they're fully functional.

I was not part of the process at that time.

If you purchase this product, work closely with their technical teams to help plan and deploy it. Make it as much of a repeatable process as possible.

The feature that I have found the most valuable is its user interface.

They can make it easier to configure. 

I have been using this solution for about four months. We're doing a proof of concept. We've currently deployed it on-premises, but we've also been looking at a SaaS model.

I didn't contact their technical support.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward. It took a couple of days to deploy.

We have our own team for maintaining this solution.

Broadcom is a better and cheaper option from a financial perspective. It also depends on the DLP plug.

You should look at the Broadcom DX version 11, which will be available from early 2021. It is a lot better than version 10.7. There are a lot of big upgrades in version 11.

There are not a lot of differences between AppDynamics and Broadcom DX Application Performance Management version 11. The user interface of AppDynamics is better, and the configuration for AppDynamics is a little bit more straightforward.

Broadcom offers a wider range and a bigger suite of applications. The APM module is just a part of it, whereas AppDynamics is a specialist at APM. AppDynamics is a better solution at the moment. You need to weigh the extra functionality you might get with AppDynamics and see if it is worth it. Dynatrace is also a better solution.

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

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.

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.

The traditional Introscope portion of the product is the most valuable. It provides good visibility to the JVM and Java application.

We use CA APM for monitoring and alerting of our Java applications.

CA has very recently upgraded its “Browser Response Time Monitoring”, as it was previously known. CA has been listening to its customer requirements, and the Digital Experience Collector is a positive step forward.

Unfortunately, my application is Java version 6, and CA has removed support for Java 6 starting with CA APM, Version 10.5, where the Digital Experience Collector is available.

I have used this solution since 2008.

Because my application is running on IBM WebSphere and Java 6, there were ‘workarounds’ I needed to apply. CA would provide a distinct copy of the Java agent and the associated configuration files to avoid the trouble spots. Unfortunately, these workarounds also disabled important functionality, such as deep tracing.

I have not had any scalability issues.

Technical support is good. They work with urgency.

We did not have any previous solutions.

The support documentation has gotten much better over the last few years. Installation is not difficult, once you understand the different components of the APM solution.

Consider the needs of your application and compare a few vendors.

I recognize Dynatrace and AppDynamics as leaders for e-commerce application APM.

Do a thorough proof of concept.

If your application is not current and can’t be upgraded, you are at risk because CA is moving very fast to catch up with Dynatrace and AppDynamics on functionality. But in the process, they will leave behind older technology, such as support for Java 6.

I run an IBM WebSphere Commerce application, which uses Java 6, and I bumped up against several limitations. As my application is public facing and has a large breadth of URLs, it is difficult to configure for very specific URLs. Rather, I needed to implement “URL groups”, which are generalized URL buckets. In an e-commerce application, that might be “product pages”, “category pages”, or “checkout pages”. Implementing the URL grouping is not easy, and if you get it wrong, you’ll have what is termed a “metric explosion”.

A metric explosion means too many distinct metrics are collected, which can put stress on the Java agent and/or the Enterprise Collector. Cleaning up a metric explosion is complicated, unless you are willing to delete all your historically collected metrics.

Again, I experienced these limitations with version 10.3 of APM and lower. The 10.5 version has made improvements, but my Java 6 application is not supported for version 10.5, so I cannot effectively provide feedback on it.

It’s used internally to help us get a grip of our infrastructure environment, including datacenters, network, applications, voice solutions etc. and to help serve over 10,000 customers utilizing the CA framework.

In-depth functionality, standard available reports and the dashboard.

Standard available reports provide us with an automatic insight into the top ten situations to watch. It would have been extremely difficult to program such a report ourselves, and to my knowledge no other competitor can match this functionality.

Dashboards are easy customizable and vary per persona, thus showing different kind/levels of information.

User interface - CA is moving towards HTML5, but still a lot is Java, old fashioned, non-customizable and not user friendly. It’s look and feel is still too technical.

No issues if you make sure you align the underlying infrastructure with the capacity needed.

It’s very scalable.

Customer Service:

9/10

Technical Support:

8/10

We have had numerous solutions. We are in a process of moving over towards the CA framework.

Complex, deep functionality matching with business requirements and design of platform.

We implemented it in-house with the support of CA.

Depends on the size of the product you need.

We evaluated many other vendors. We considered AppDynamics APM.

Plan before you act. Do not fall in the pitfall that you have extensive user requirements and try to implement this at once in the tooling. Start small and simple and gradually expand.