Broadcom DX Application Performance Management Reviews

Easily find bottleneck of our applications. We have a BSR (Business Services Reliability dashboard), so we can find out how our business is behaving, how we are getting the orders and how many errors we are getting. We find out how reliable our application is.

It's performed very well.

We can find out the bottlenecks before the customer encounters them. That's the major benefit.

It helps prioritize application performance issues because we can prioritize them in a test phase, or the development phase. We can find out that which queries are slow, what is the behavior of our application, and what we can tune our application to make it more reliable and faster.

Triage Map, Differential Analysis, Transaction Trace, error handling, cell counts. We have a complete dashboard, which tells us what's going on with our application, end to end.

It could be faster. For example, when we are upgrading the product, it takes a lot of time and there are a lot of things we have to do manually. If it is automated it would be really helpfull.

The stability is very good. We haven't had any lagging or downtime. 

We have already tuned it. It's very reliable. We have used suggestions from the CA communities and others. I already have experience with it so I have stabilized our environment.

It's very scalable.

I generally only use tech support when the issue is beyond my knowledge. Otherwise, I use the communities. 

When I have used their support I've been satisfied; not 100 percent, but a lot. The problem is it takes time. I prefer to use a community because lots of experienced people are using the communities and they reply faster than CA support.

It's straightforward.

The important things for us when selecting a vendor are 

• how good is their product and 
• the reviews of that product.

I would say try CA APM and tune it the way it is  recommended by CA Admins and from configuration guide. You'll find a lot of people complain about it because they do not tune the APM Cluster as recommended, and the agent as well.

This solution is an awesome monitoring tool for application monitoring, customized dashboards, and alerting. Many features are used, including its ability to dive into application data, the user experience, the application flow map, transaction traces, and the team center.

We use APM for application monitoring, which includes availability, performance of apps (stalls, errors, and response time), and transactions. The product is extremely customizable when it comes to setting up application monitoring. It provides app monitoring data with very effective, immediate alerting.

• Transaction traces
• Dashboards
• Email alerts
• Team center
• Average response time
• Error and stall detection
• Metric grouping to see combined data.
• CEM for analyzing and reporting

CEM needs to be simplified, because it causes too many interruptions in our daily work.

Stability is one of the strongest attributes of CA APM. It is very stable on all platforms.

CA APM is very scalable and used in a clustered environment because it supports more than its technical capacity.

Their support team is quite supportive and quick to respond. 

They communicated very well and their support was vastly experienced.

I have used AppDynamics in the past, and its customization is not as simple as that of CA APM.

Initial setup was very straightforward. It was simple to implement and customize.

I implemented this solution with an extensively experienced in-house team.

Setup costs are quite competitive relative to other solutions, and simpler.

We evaluated other solutions, such as AppDynamics.

Its presence is needed in our cloud solutions. Other solutions have been present from early on, but we use this solution to focus on the cloud.

It is a first line of defense for application performance monitoring and management to understand the customer usage patterns. When we get any major incident or a production issue, we can isolate the area where there is a probable problem. 

Adding a layer with built-in some service level guarantees between the operations, development, and support, give us one of the key disciplines that this product has pushed us to evolve into. Previously, it was bunch of loosely built operations metric infrastructure applications. I would get a call (someone I know), you know me and let's start working together, because there is a problem. Now, having this alerting in place and metrics showing themselves for what is in store and what we should work on, there is a service level that is being built across these teams so they exactly know how to work. That is a very good thing to bring as a discipline.

It is very hard, especially for banks working from the Canadian space, because we are traditional in nature. So, it is very hard to bring about change. A product like this has broken the ice in two years in good amount of time in Canadian market and Canadian technical space. It has been able to establish itself. There has been a little push for certain disciplinary changes and behavioral changes within the teams that work in the bank.

The first line of defense; we know we have a problem. We never knew we had a problem until we got calls into the call center saying, we have this coming up from the customers. Before, the customers would pick up the phone and give a call to our call centers. Now, we know we have a problem, because there is a primary layer of alerting or metrics monitoring put in place, that is the good part.

Its profiling. The uniqueness instead of me looking at sampling data, I need to know the m-1 event that actually triggered my scenario where that m event caused a catastrophic event, like a ripple effect; I need to know that m-1. What triggered my major event means I need to understand the event that triggered it and before the cause of that event itself. If I don't know that, and if I look at it from 10,000 feet, it's going to look like a blimp, but actually if I get into it, it's so nasty there. Without understanding that gap, no APM product can claim itself to be an APM product.

The only drawback of this product that CA has, actually it was Wiley product they purchased and they started adding patches on top of the Wiley product to make it an APM dimensional product, but it is a sampling product. Essentially it means it samples one every 15 seconds. A lot of things happen in that 15 seconds especially when its financial transactions. If you miss one spike within that 15 seconds, that means you are looking data from a 1000 mile height, which might not look like a problem until you go and take closer look.

The way the product itself is it allows you to identify a problem area but not exactly tell what the problem is. It is like you have a problem good. 15 years ago it would better to know that I have a problem and I have a problem in a specific area it works better. Now, the speed at which the technology and the customers are moving on, I need to exactly know what my problem is right then and there. That is a huge gap with CA APM.

No predictability and pattern analysis is hugely dependent on the sampling. In today's financial world, your individual attention is your success path for your business growth. That means, the more I get a product that suits me exactly, that means I am unique. Even if I transfer two dollars, I am unique in my own nature as a customer. If I get mixed up with a bunch of other boats, folks who are doing one dollar $10 and I get my product customized to them, that means I'm not being individually identified as a market. The same goes with your application dynamics as well.

If you are not able to do that individual identification of spikes and surges use cases, you are not looking at it very closely the way the market is actually driving you to look at it. Other than, that it is a huge relief. We had nothing before, so something is better than nothing.

It is a very stable platform, I can vouch for that. That first line of defense is not going to fail. It is a fairly stable product because it has been there for a while and all the knicks and knacks have been worked out. I can call it a matured product in what it does, but what is being sold is a different topic altogether.

Amazing. It is very nice for what it does.

Every customer is unique. Again to this market, it is that unique need, unique feature, unique necessity, or unique technology that brings forward your need to adopt your technologies or adopt your lifecycle to meet that need. With CA, if I throw out a solution, one pill does not work for everything, so you need to make that customization. You need to draw a line on what customization is, then what support is. Everything cannot be customization. 

I have a product that is unique to me, but I did really tinker it out, so you need to talk to me and understand what the tinkering is. It cannot be a customization request, it is a support. Drawing lines between customization and support, there are a few dialogues, a few dialogue lines that really need to happen along those lines. Otherwise, it is fairly good when we actually escalate. We have heard some nays back and forth, but it has been good.

The initial setup is complex. Size made it complex, and understanding the complex nature of our application landscape itself. It is very diverse. 

We acquired a bunch of banks and a bunch of wealth management companies which were put together as one bank. This means each of them have their own technical landscapes. You need to understand each of them and they also talk to each other. It is complex in nature from how we are as a bank from a technological front. This makes a complex nature to deploy a tool to work across the board.

CA was engaged for implementation

I'm checking customer experience, how they experience our website and how they use the systems inside the company. Customer experience, outside and inside.

It performs okay.

It helps me know everything. When I know everything, like when there is a problem, I can find it very quickly. It reduces the time for solving problems in the website.

Seeing what the customer is doing on our website. This is important for us to understand that they use the website as we planned.

I would like to see intelligence, deep intelligence or deep analytics.

Great. No problem.

Everything is okay. I have no problems.

Their technical support is great.

I have always used CA APM.

Dynatrace and CA, these are the best vendors that we checked. They're at the top.

The most important criteria when selecting a vendor are support and wide use of the product. Not that the product is there in one company or two companies, but worldwide. We want the company to invest money to improve it. So I'm looking for a product that is worldwide and used widely by customers.

I give it an eight out of 10 because it does not include all the features that I mentioned above, like intelligence.

Do a significant PoC, and in the PoC including something very difficult, not something light. See if in the most cases, the product is giving you the answers, and not just for the easy ones. 

Monitoring application performance.

As such, no improvement after using CA APM.

Regarding how we utilize CA APM for container monitoring, our implementation team is not able to this information. Our implementation team was not able to understand and share information regarding the impact CA APM has when attempting to triage complex application issues; and similarly regarding the visibility CA APM provides across complex application environments. We are not aware of how the solution allows you to monitor and gain performance insights into the various technologies across the application environment, like docker monitoring and the ability to see into the database. The same is true of how the solution helps monitor system changes, topological changes or code updates. We would like to receive documentation to understand the above features.

CEM - We have to produce reports of defective URLs by selecting the client site IP group, which helps us to identify status code of IIS. This gives an idea regarding obtaining the defect and finally understanding the issue.

Tool is so complex to understand.

No issues with stability.

No issues with scalability.

It's average.

This is our application monitoring solution.

Complex.

A few 24/7 Web monitoring solutions were evaluated for comparison.

Its complex to understand.

Monitoring of our internal business applications completely, through all business processes.

As all of our applications are monitored by CA APM, it's now easy to analyze unusual behavior in a normalized way.

In terms of container monitoring, we are currently in the rollout phase. In the end, all containers will be instrumented by CA APM agents in order to have a complete view of the current operative status of the dynamic and volatile container world.

All application servers are instrumented to provide a standardized monitoring baseline for the given technology. We defined sets of base monitors in order to normalize analytics capabilities from a technology perspective. On top of this we monitor application specific classes.

As we are currently in rollout phase we can't yet report on the visibility CA APM provides across application environments, yet.

Regarding monitoring and performance insights into the various technologies across our application environment, it identifies the "worst" application in terms of which app has the highest number of errors, slowest SQL queries, etc.

System changes, topological changes, or code updates that are introduced into our environment are analyzed by our architecture team using CA APM.

1. Cross-VM transaction traces provide a complete "what happened where".
2. Proactive snapshots of transactions and all details of a transaction are saved in case of an error.
3. Attribute decoration is a unique and very powerful feature. We can add meaningful meta information based on our internal demand.

1. Integration of third-party content into app maps (e.g. data coming from beats/elastic platform).
2. Support of new application server technologies, time to adopt new versions of them.
3. Dashboarding capabilities (as with all other vendors).
4. Application architecture of the central Enterprise Manager should be developed into a cloud native architecture.
5. Mitigation of SPOF – PostgreSQL database, behind Team Center.

Yes, we enountered stability issues. They were mitigated by performance tuning within infrastructure.

Yes, we encountered issues with scalability inside Team Center, a massive amount of universes, perspectives, applications.

Good.

No previous solution.

Straightforward.

Back in 2009/2010: HPE Diagnostics, Dynatrace; 2016: AppDynamics.

• System incident analysis 
• Performance monitoring

We run a very large OLTP system: Six IBM AIX 780 high-end applications and DB servers. Daily transaction amount 100,000,000 per day.

WAS GC monitoring enhanced our application performance and DB SQL performance.

It is very useful and helpful with the analysis of historical performance data.

• E2E monitoring
• DB web WAS monitoring
• App crash report
• User customizing report
• DB connection usage from WAS

• System incident analysis
• Performance monitoring

Currently, we are building a visibility dashboard which allows our level-1 and level-2 engineering teams to actually look at the events, and be able to designate which ones are critical, which are important. It alerts them. They are able to simply look at a dashboard to be able to predict and resolve issues.

The CA tools allow to me to get into detailed transactions for custom ranking, and be able to make predictions. It also gathers data. Some other tools may be good at one area, but not good overall, including the mainframe.

CA has been very famous for the mainframe. I think that's actually the edge, by the way, for CA products, as there are many, many dotcom products that don't touch mainframes. I think that CA should still keep that. 

The area where CA is changing is, I'll give you an example. The fresh technology should have been out a long time ago. But it appears to be we're catching up on the UIM, because Microsoft basically says they are not going to support the fresh, starting next year. That means they are a little bit behind on the waves in the architecture, etc. I think that can be improved.

Another thinking is, if the developer can get to the level-1 engineer level, they will develop a better product. I suggest the developers at CA really work as a level-1 engineer, because then you have a different sort.

Very good. The CA UIM is a very solid product. We love the simplicity of the robots and the agent installation and upgrading, because you can just do it right at your central station without rebooting the remote workstations or servers. The APM allows us to have inside-application  analytics, and very seldom do we need to reboot, etc.

The scalability side for the UIM is pretty solid. As long as you set up your database right, you should be able to handle, for example, $150,000 transactions.

APM, currently, our organization is moving to the cloud, so we have lots more APM analytics, etc., so we're going to see how that's going to scale up.

I like the old dashboard - I'm just going to be very open. The old dashboard allow me to create a case and be able to get my products, without going through some of the current things that are going on. 

I still like the old, for example, CA UIM support, where you can download directly through the UIM portal without going through extra steps. So I think that can be simplified.

When selecting a vendor, the reputation is important. One of the things that we have been thinking is, how many of these dotcom vendors will exist three years from today? You see AppDynamics are acquired by Cisco, you've got other vendors. Almost every week, some of these companies disappear. CA has been here for a long time, and we think that's the reputation. We definitely want CA to exist, definitely three years from today, and think that's helped.

The second area is the support. I think CA, has great people. 

On pricing, CA is very competitive. I think that's going to help in the long run. 

It covers from mainframe, all the way to dotcom, for example. CA currently covers Amazon, Microsoft Azure, Office 365 monitoring. They're getting to that. We notice it, we immediately install these probes as they become available from CA.

We think the stability of this product needs to be a little stronger on these newer products. We do suggest that CA keep it up in their area, because CA has mainframe to handle already. Now they want to expand into these other horizons. The addition of these products is going to help CA to sustain. The overall coverage of the product, not just in one area. Open source is very important, and we're looking to open source on all these too.

CA tools are great. The technical people I work with are great, on each product. On a one to 10 scale I will give it about eight. Now, there's a reason why I say eight, because I really like to work with the technical folks. So when CA approaches me, I hope they approach me from the helping us perspective, not trying to sell me another product. I think this is so important. 

That natural evolution comes when you, yourself, are technical. When you are technical, you are able to talk the sales language, and then it will come to the sale. Sales come very naturally as part of technical. I think that should be your overall coverage, not just one person knowing one area. It should be, you should have a master architect, master chief, who knows about every single product, and deal with it.