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.

Mainly for the application performance, the Java agent, and metrics collection.

It has performed well so far. Operationally, there are occasionally bugs in the agent, so we have to patch those or get those upgraded.

We are able to easily and quickly find some of the problems with the applications and coding, and some of the performance problems. Then, we monitor a lot of the performance via the application, and learn via the dashboard about the health and performance of all the applications.

• The tracing 
• The Java metrics that it collects, and the ease of accessing these. 
• The dashboards

There is a new capability, a bootstrap agent. I am excited about that. I have used another product that did a similar dataset. That helped with the agent upgrades, which are a major problem, because you only have a handful of clusters, but you have thousands of agents.

I have not seen it in operation yet, the bootstrap agent. We will be able to download the new version. Also, the ACC, we will be able to manage the agents remotely.

The interface is getting a little old, but the functionality is a major deal to me.

When we run into so many bugs, we are not sure if it is something we are doing wrong, or if there is a bug in the product, we contact technical support, who are good. They respond pretty quickly, and are usually knowledgeable about the product and some of the problems. They are able to point us to knowledge-based article, which will allow us to try to resolve the problem.

No, not for the APM part.

I came in later after the initial setup. We have done several upgrades since the initial installation. We did the setup for a new datacenter, and that was pretty straightforward. 

They did a feature comparison with some other products, but we are already a mainframe shop with CA products.

HPE, CA, and Dynatrace were on our shortlist. We chose CA because we already had a previous licensing agreement, and then the functionalities and the capabilities.

CA APM does the best when I am looking at metrics and stuff. Some of the newer products are focused on data transaction tracing.

We have an e-commerce application. It's more of a business-to-business model, and employees of most companies come to our websites to order product. The APM tool allows us to monitor performance of that application, where are the pain points, where are the slowdowns, to focus on where we can fix those.

Product performance is awesome. It's covering all aspects of the application; good database metrics and internal application metrics. Just tons and tons of data.

The improvement for us is in the customer experience. The quicker the websites are, the more satisfied, the better experience the customer's going to have, hopefully the more product they're going to buy. The sales sites are more reliable, more up time.

That it's customizable. If there's something that you really need to get at that doesn't come out of the box, you can pretty easily put together some custom metrics and get those in place.

One of the challenges is agent releases. So as we employ agents, they are done relatively manually. A little bit of automating of agent release would be helpful.

We've not had any problems with it.

It scales. We have a bunch of different applications using it.

We get really good support.

We did not have a previous solution. This was brought in because we had a new app. The app was not stable, it wouldn't stay up.

Initial setup is probably somewhere in between straightforward and complex.

It's the configuration, you have to know your application, you've got to know what parts to monitor. It's not a product that you install and it does everything for you. You have to put a little bit of effort into configuration.

There wasn't anything else on the market at that time. There have been some other players that have come in since then. CA was the first.

The most important criteria when selecting a vendor are 

• good support
• a company that's been around for awhile.

I give it a nine out of 10. It does pretty much everything we need it to do. It's just little things, fringe things, that need a slight upgrade, like configuration. It's getting better.

I would say get your employees some training, get some help from CA to make sure you know what best practices are.

We are a solutions provider. Obviously, depending on the customer, we are monitoring applications. 

We have deployed to several customers and they have all found benefit in seeing how the application is performing, what components are performing worse, and where they can improve. DevOps is definitely a big play for us. 

They are seeing that benefit to having the APM product instrumenting their applications and getting that insight before it goes to production. It is working well.

Our development cycle has definitely improved as far as the turnaround time on fixes and improvements. The solution that gets put out is definitely better because of it.

• The ability to see which component is problematic. 
• If they are meeting SLAs before it gets to production impacting customers.

I know they are working on a more dynamic agent that will be able to evaluate the application and instrument based on what it is finding. I think that is fantastic. 

Getting that agent deployment simplified would be an amazing thing. The upcoming changes for the deployment process of the agent will help a lot, in that others have gotten to that point first.

It is stable. There are enhancements that we have to make sometimes that are not necessarily easy to implement depending on the customer and the situation. For the most part, it is a definitely a solid product and every customer definitely sees the benefit in using it.

One of the biggest challenges was trying to gauge overhead of a particular customer, and that was difficult to do. I know they are making improvements to the product to help address that type of situation. However, we are still in play there. There is benefit to it, but it was just difficult to prove that it was not the agent. With any situation like this, it is not uncommon to have your development team look at monitoring as a potential roadblock. Ultimately, I think we are low overhead and providing value to the development cycle.

I think other products do have a little bit more flexibility in how large they can scale. For the most part, I think every customer I have observed has been able to work with the product. Either way, we have options to scale. It is just whether it is one cluster versus a couple of clusters, and they get what they need.

Technical support is good. They are responsive, and always willing to help you. The turnaround time just depends on the issue, which is understandable. They have always been responsive with great people.

Where I started with the company, we were seeing outages daily. No one could really track what the problem was at the time. 

Since implementing this solution and having that information, the data to work off of definitely reduced that to basically nothing. It is custom code, so it is definitely a little difficult compared to some others, but it definitely helped us. For the most part, we run constantly without any issue at this point because of APM.

The initial setup is pretty easy; nothing complex.

Not necessarily. Since then, we have evaluated others and they all have their strong suits. APM still tends to do a more thorough job where others may have simplified the deployment process. 

CA APM still has a strong place in the market.

You need to really evaluate the data that you are getting and what is important to you. Where one product may do a really good job in providing visualizations and that sort of thing, are you really getting the level of depth that you need from your product? Just take the time to evaluate the quality of the data you are getting.

I like to see the vendor who is committed to your success, primarily. That they have a solid product, which I think, for the most part, most do. Also, they understand that the need to stay with you throughout the process to make sure you are supported. I think CA has always done a good job with this.

My use case is that we have system called "Systemwalker", so we are trying to collaborate that product with APM. We are trying to use the triage of the APM, and we are still evaluating that system. 

It is performing okay. We are waiting for the new release. They have not released that yet. 

We want to sell the project in Japan. We have users in Japan. By combining the APM and our product, CA can sell it. 

We are a partner. We bring our customers to CA, and they can sell the product. Recently, CA is focusing on customers in Japan, the Fujitsu customers. 

The triage can find the root cause for pent up issues.

I created my own program to test the triage, and it works.

It should be easier to install or set everything up. 

I think that they are trying to add the artificial intelligence to the triage, so we are waiting for that. 

We are doing the PoC phase, so we have not done any of that kind of stability test. 

Not sure.

We have used the Japan CA team. They are helping us. They have been helpful and responsive.

We are also in contact with the people in Santa Clara, and they are also helpful.

We tried, but we could not do it ourselves. Japan CA did the initial setup themselves. They were helpful.

We have just so many settings. We could not figure out what were the right settings. We could not get the data fast in store. 

No. The president, my boss, told me to test APM, and find a solution with our product. 

If people are looking for the solutions from a big company, maybe I would recommend the CA. 

We use APM to monitor our production, our QUAIL Java environments, and our web framework environments.

It is heavily utilized. It functions very well. We look forward to new features, because as technology grows we look to incorporate some of that newer technology in our monitoring solutions as well.

We use this for ticketing. This helps us to realize not only from the monitoring standpoint, but we make custom dashboards for our development areas so they can understand how busy traffic affects their application with traffic. They can see how traffic directly affects their application in positive or negative ways. It gives immediate feedback to know, when we have a bad day, we have to look at this area because that slows down first.

It shows us where our weakest link is.

Our ability to know how our application is performing in real-time.

Client-side JavaScript monitoring, so we can have that end-to-end from the client all the way back to our host areas.

Stability could actually be helped because it is a wrapper or an agent on our system. If we are having a bad day in production or if other resources are being utilized, then we will get get gaps in our monitoring system. It does not happen very often, but it usually happens at the worst possible time.

I do not think we have had any problems with scalability. Other than right now it is just for Java agents. It does not have much JavaScript client-side monitoring.

Our monitoring team has used them and would need to be the ones to evaluate them.

I have heard good things. We work very closely with CA. We are a very large customer, so they get back to us pretty promptly.

I was not involved in the initial setup. We have had the solution for years.

I was also not involved in the upgrade setup. I was involved in a lot of the testing of the upgrade processes to make sure that it suited the needs of not only the development departments, but also the applications they monitor.

I think it is above a lot of the other monitoring solutions that are out there.

I would give it an eight out of 10, only because I know the ins and outs of the application. I know its capabilities and strong points. I think it has room to improve. 

It could be that we have it configured in a way that is not advantageous. However, it is also upgradability to it is a project instead of a patch. If it was actually an automated process to where it just fed updates to our product that would be great. Now, we have to spin up an effort to actually upgrade the solution. I think cost of upgrading holds us back from getting to the latest and greatest, where if it was more patch level, it would be easier for us to use those newer features.

Make sure to look for interoperability and ease of upgrade. Just because they have the solution, what is it going to cost to maintain the solution, because that is the cost that is hidden down the road.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: Of course, they have to be competitive on cost. Always. But now, it has actually shifted towards interoperability with other solutions. We have to have open APIs that are easily tied into so we can actually hook them up to our existing pipeline features.

Primary use case is to monitor our critical applications.

It performs pretty well. Right now, we use it to create dashboards and executive view dashboards, so our higher up managers can take a look and see where our application status stands. It creates transparency. We are satisfied with how it performs.

It brings our operation side and our application side together. When it comes to implementing the tool, like when we supply the agent, we have to get permission from the application side to say, "Hey, we're installing such and such agent on this server. Are we able to go forward with it?" Then, whether they tell us, yes or no, we can do it.

It helps us prioritize application performance issues. It has assisted triage where we can drill down and see where exactly the problem lies. If it is a database issue, we can see the exact query that is causing the issue. Or, if it is a web service call that is having any issues we can look there as well. It is pretty accurate when it comes to that stuff.

The dashboards.

The ability to dynamically create dashboards. Right now, we do custom dashboards. Everything is created manually. If there is a way when we deploy the agent it can automatically figure out how the application is set up, so we do not have to manually create everything, it would save a lot of time. It needs to be more intuitive.

It is pretty stable. We have not had any major issues. There has been some issues here and there, but for the most part nothing major or critical.

It scales pretty well.

Technical support is slow to respond and also asks redundant questions. For example, they will ask for some logs being sent, then we will send it and hear back from them again in a couple of days requesting pretty much the same things. Like "well let's take a look," "alright send the logs again," and I was like, "we just did that like four or five days ago." That is one of my few complaints. I would rate technical support a seven and a half out of 10.

I was not involved in the initial setup, but I have been involved with an upgrade.

The upgrade was complex. The documentation could have been a little bit better, but other than that, it was okay.

It was pretty much just us; just our team at work.

We have seen other competitors and what they provide. It is not as good as what CA APM provides. 

I would recommend this solution.

Understand what exactly you need to be monitored. For us, our biggest issue is making sure that our customer and our other critical applications are up and running 24/7. We understand for APM, it has the ability to drill down and do the end-to-end monitoring that we are looking for. Just understand what you are looking for.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: customer service. Making sure that they are responsive. If I call them, I want to get ahold of someone right away. Also, if it is too expensive, we are going to count them out.

Monitoring the application layer for the various application teams. In our organization, we have the centralized monitoring team, and we work with a whole bunch of other teams. The application is trying to help their products get to know their applications monitored to where they need to be.

We have some people that know how to use the product fairly well, but only the older functionalities. Then, we have a lot of newer people that are using different monitoring tools. Some are okay and some do not really know a lot of the functionality, so we have been trying to help get better traction with that.

In our organization, there is a bit of a learning curve of how to leverage the tool appropriately.

Some of the dynamic representation of the application layer. Some of the things that are starting to be interesting is being able to pull in and merge the infrastructure and application data. I am hopeful that it will work as intended.

In order for the tool to be successful, at least in our organization, it will need to have more self-serve features for implementation, instrumentation, and then modification of metric data from the APM. At least for us, that is what I am seeing in our neck of the woods, empowering developers to do what they want. If I can give the tools to the developer to self-serve, get them good documentation, and make it really easy for them to use, they will use it.

The tool is not where it needs to be. I do not think a lot of the newer-aged, new-school developers that are coming out of school really know about how to leverage these products. Think about it. You are a computer science major, you just graduated, and a lot of these folks have been playing with some of the new tools in school. So, I think there is a miss for some of these people. Not that the products themselves could stand side-by-side with some of the new ones. There are just more opportunities and I think it is more about trying to get some of the developers empowered and I think this is probably the biggest opportunity for CA and the APM space.

I am hopeful that our people in our organization will like the triage and dynamic mapping. 

APM has been good in the Java space, and less good in the everything else. So, Java has been like their bread and butter. .NET instrumentation of the browser timer, used to call it BRTM, I don't know what they call it now, but it is basically getting closer to what the experience is for using the website. It hasn't been that great for the .NET. It is good in Java. Now, I would like to see better stuff in the .NET layer, because that has been more important for our organization. Right now, I am playing with some of the node components, so I am hopeful that some of the newer, hotter, fancier languages that people are using will work right with the node stuff. 

The documentation is kind of so-so. We started playing with another product, which is New Relic, and their documentation is actually really good. It is very thoughtful, logically laid out. When you compare it to CA, I think there is an opportunity there.

We have had some issues with rendering the teamcenter views. It is dependent on a Postgres database. Or, the Postgres Oracle if you want to pay the billion dollars for an Oracle license, but performance is so-so. For the APM stuff, you have to be mindful of what you are instrumenting. How many metrics you are pulling per agents, etc. The team center views are dependent on that Postgres database, which can kind of suck sometimes, or it can be good. It just depends. Our environment gets sort of big, so it is harder.

Scalability is getting better. A lot better than it used to be. Back in the day, it used to be you could have only 10 collectors. Your limit, if you do the math, it is about a million or a million and a half metrics, which sounds like a lot, but it goes fast. They have gotten better about marrying some of those together.

Our instrumentation has changed a lot, so we still can't put together all of the silos that I would like to put together. However, it is better than it used to be.

Technical support is okay.

The thing with most of the CA solutions, there is just a lot of infrastructure required. I have done a lot of work for a number of different products and software, and there is always a bunch of servers that I need to set up. At one point, we had 80 servers just to monitor the application layer for the whole organization. That is a lot. Just because the footprints are big. It would be nice to have a smaller footprint, with less of a initial cost for infrastructure, but that is probably why they are investing in SaaS.

I have worked with a number of different business software suites for application monitoring, and APM kind of got left behind a long time ago. They have been catching up as far as some of the functionalities as their competitors. You have got AppDynamics, New Relic, and Dynatrace. Some of the things that would differentiate them is just history. They have lost their foothold in the market, at least from my perspective. It is more about empowering the developers to do what they want to do.

Depends on what they are implementing. If it is Java, I think it is a pretty good opportunity to use the product. If it is a .NET, it is not where it needs to be. At least, as far as my knowledge is. 

Make friends with your pre-sales guys. 

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: Transparency, honesty, being open, and being helpful. I have had a pretty good relationship with our CA support folks and our account managers, personally. I would say that is a big help. And then being able to be flexible on negotiations for contract stuff because that will kill a deal faster than anything.

Also, just being open about the limitations of the product, as well as the features.