Broadcom DX Application Performance Management Reviews

The CA Introscope dashboard of applications is the view our operations team uses to quickly identify any issues within the application space especially during peak trading season like Christmas/Easter. It is extensively used for quicker root cause analysis within the application area.

Introscope along with CA CEM and ADA is expected to further decrease the time taken for root cause analysis for critical customer facing incidents and also to identify bottlenecks before they impact our customers.

CA CEM's customer transaction view is valuable because it gives an insight into how our customers networks are performing. The ADA helps in isolating any response time issues on the network and hence, aid in root cause analysis (but we are yet to realise the benefit of it in production). Also, the transaction recording feature is valuable in understanding the paths our critical business transactions take within our IT environment.

The APM tools themselves work well within their respective silo's, but they need to work better in an integrated manner to give the end to end view of any business service.

CA Introscope has performance and data collection issues.

CA Introscope has had performance issues due to large number of metrics collected though it was scaled accordingly.

Customer Service:

Good.

Technical Support:

Average as they need more experts in APM technology.

For cloud monitoring, we had another tool and we had to switch because of the costs and features. Introscope has been running for a while.

• Too complex to get an integrated outcome
• ADA/CEM is complicated as it requires an understanding of networks
• CA Cloud monitoring is complex when creating customer journeys
• Introscope is complex when presenting and grouping metrics for dashboards
• The triage process is complex

It was through a vendor team whose expertise was above average.

Yes we did.

• You need strong architectural skills along with tool-set skills to implement such a tool
• You need to focus on integration as without this, the value might not be as expected
• Start it simple and then add more complex scenarios
• Document and design the system according to requirements
• It's easy to get carried away with all the features, so keep it simple to fit the business need
• Make sure what metrics are required to be monitored is clearly defined. Do not just collect data for all the metrics
• Make sure that RACI is clearly defined with various owners as this can easily slow down the implementation if it is not properly documented and agreed
• There is a lot of external team dependencies, like the application team, support team, network team, architects, an service owners, so make sure that this is documented along with RACI and efforts agreed
• A top down approach is always good, from the end users to actual technical metrics

• Policies
• Audit feature
• Warning mode policy
• APM

Application suite was installed to bring in compliance with international security standards like ISO 27001 and SAUX

Integration with other applications and easier log management via automated procedures. Also needs an easier way to be able to segregate app admin duties.

Integration of CA AC at first and then APM/ELM/PMDB was initiated in 2008 and finalized stage was in 2012 for a major telecom provider.

As I implemented the additional tools, I would rate ELM as 6/10, and PMDB 8/10.

In earlier versions like 8.5 and 12 we ran into many incompatibility problems while a lot of other problems existed with JBOSS and assigned certificates.

No. Application was stable enough after APM installation.

No. There was a 3 phase staged expansion of this application which did not need any additional planning other than installing new agents on computers and servers.

Good enough, although I would have expected a better way of dealing with cases than having to explain every time from the start when a ticket was paused or opened in relevance to another one.

7/10 - They need to leave the automated way of asking from a client all tech details from start when a ticket is opened under his account ID.

No. Telecom clients (more than 3) were not using a solution similar to this one.

Initial setup was very hard due to lack of proper phrasing and instructions in manuals. It became even harder when there was a need for transition from older versions to newer ones.

I certified by CA on installing/integrating/developing the application as an outsourcing consultant.

A client claims that they have had better management and administration along with advanced reporting capabilities to the Privacy Authorities of State.

Original cost of licenses and working labor was estimated at €500,000 - €600,000 for a 4 year period. Day to day cost is not known to me.

Need to build questionnaires to establish priorities in policies and resources which are going to be developed and applied to his company. CA has no template/questionnaire in place and this is additional custom job needed by vendor (plus additional cost in money and time)

My users are satisfied with this solution, most are financial institutions such as banks or card processors and telecom companies.

The primary use case is for the monitoring of business applications in production. Banks use it for monitoring Internet banking solutions, internal back-office applications that have high number of users distributed on many locations, monitoring back-office applications for card transaction processing, and also for front office applications monitoring. DX APM is also used in a test phase of apps life cycle especially during a performance testing. 

Business-wise very much. We have the best solution in the local market because we are the most experienced APM vendor in our region and have very satisfied customers. They said that UX is much improved and MTTR is significantly decreased.

The most valuable features are the low overhead, the ability to monitor production on 24/7 principle, the ability to decrease time to discover the point of failure in the IT infrastructure or the application environment in a short period of time, reporting for analyzing the performance of the application for improving the code optimizing process.

DX APM has a space for improvement in covering more technologies. I.e. monitoring of PHP should be solved in a more quality way. 

I have been familiar with this solution for 18 years.

This solution is stable. In the 15 years, we have not had any major issues. It's an excellent product.

We have a good approach and implementation. If we have any problems, we solve it in the testing phase before it's in production. I can't say that we have had serious problems in the last 10 to 12 years.

This solution is very scalable but we have not had the need to scale because our implementations not need more than one EM server. The new version of DX APM rely on microservices technology and scalability is automatized.

The technical support is good, we are satisfied. The transition period was a little bit problematic, but it only took a short time.

When Broadcom purchased CA they changed the support and the portal. We noticed but we had no real issues. They are responsible and responsive.

We are the first line of support the second line of support is done by Broadcom Support.

They have improved by making the documentation available publically, so it's not only available to partners anymore. The software documentation is really nice, approachable, readable, and searchable.

Positive

The installation is absolutely simple. The installation is quick.

You can install the system quickly and get results in monitoring.

The initial installation is not expensive for the customers.

Our company does the implementation for the customers. We have experts in our team to implement the solutions and for consulting the usage in the future.

We are there to support our clients, not only for the installation but also in exploring the solution.

Our customers are satisfied and there is no complaining about the price. All discounts are given case by case to accommodate the client's budgets. Setup is not expensive because projects are relatively short in man/days.

One of our customers has been using this solution for the last ten years since it was called Wily Introscope. They are really satisfied and they are buying more licenses, using the solution for the whole infrastructure.

All of my clients are using on-premises installation licenses. Most of our clients are at the enterprise level and they are some of the largest banks in the region. Broadcom DX APM is not only a tool, it's a solution. We have experts who are there to offer assistance in exploring the solution to give the customers the maximum value. In my opinion, it's the best product on the market.

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.

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.

• CEM helps us to deliver faster responses, and manage the end users’ response and reliability.
• Introscope helps our application team proactively identify and resolve problems fast. It helps reduce application downtime and improve application development based on the real-user experience.

It helps us to meet business transactions SLA for our critical end-user applications; proactively identify the issue and helps the application team make its diagnosis before it impacts the end-user experience.

CA APM currently only supports Java- and .NET-based applications. Pega application metrics should be included in CA APM. It should also support non-Java and non-.NET applications, such as SAP, etc.

I have used it for seven years.

We have not encountered any stability issues.

We have not encountered any scalability issues.

Technical support is 7/10. It needs to be more proactive. Sometimes, it takes a long time for them to provide solutions.

We previously used IBM Tivoli and BMC products.

Initial setup was straightforward.

Before choosing this product, we evaluated other vendors, e.g., HPE SiteScope, and SolarWinds WPM/TraceView.

I recommend adequate server sizing and capacity to avoid HTTP/HTTPS packet drops and performance issues.

The ability to deep dive into the root cause of any given issue has always been the most valuable feature. JAVA and .NET applications are black boxes without any sort of monitoring. Being able to determine which component is causing the issue helps to pinpoint the issue and allows the triage teams to focus on the actual component causing the issue. The feature that helps the most in the triage is the transaction trace component. The transaction trace feature allows us to look all the components that are called during a particular transaction.

When there is an outage or performance issue, the on-call teams are called to a conference line where we can triage the issue. Before APM was used, these calls would require all areas of support, which include network, server team, middleware, database and any other areas of expertise. Now, the Incident Management team has a set of APM dashboards that allow them to narrow down the issue and call the specific team(s) to the bridge call. One of the first questions that is asked now on the bridge calls is, “What does APM show?” For example, if it was a database issue, we can tell which query or stored procedure is having the issue.

One of the areas that I think needs improvement is the central management of the agents. I know that CA has started working toward this in its current releases with APM Command Center, but it still has a long way to go. One of the hardest things about the upgrades is upgrading all of the agents.

Another thing that is difficult is when you need to make a configuration change to a set of properties, it has to be done manually.

I believe all these things are on the future road map of the product, but right now they are a major hurdle for us.

I have used this product personally for over 15 years. I have used it at three different companies which include a utility company, banking institution and a healthcare insurance company. The current company that I work for has used it for over eight years, and we recently upgraded to v10.1.

There have been no issues with the deployment.

The overall stability of the product is very good. The only time I normally see issues is right after an upgrade. Sometimes a few tweaks are necessary to stabilize everything after an upgrade. It might require a small change to the EM configuration or an agent configuration change. This is normally because of a new feature that was introduced.

We have not had any issues with scalability. We have been able to add Collectors as needed to support the growing number of agents that we support. I think in comparison to some other APM users we have a pretty small footprint. We have a staging and production environment. Each environment has one MOM and seven collectors with about 400 agents.

The level of support has been like a rollercoaster ride. Early on when it was owned by Wily, the service was great, but right after the purchase by CA it when downhill. I generally try not to go to support unless I have to, but I must say over the past six months, it has improved greatly. My cases have been handled very well and escalated to higher-level engineers when necessary.

There was nothing in place previously.

The initial setup was very straightforward. We only had three collectors with only about 120 agents. When we first starting using the tool, we only used the Introscope component. Overtime, we added the CEM and Synthetic Monitoring tool. So it got more complex over time but at each step we had the right support from CA to help us through the difficult parts.

I personally don’t deal with the pricing and licensing, so I don’t have anything to offer here.

It is a great product but not quite perfect. My advice would to be make sure you have a champion on the user side. It is a hard sell in my opinion if you don’t have someone from the application support side that will help sell the tool. It doesn’t do anyone any good if you have a monitoring tool and no one uses it.

It's for application monitoring and it's extensively used for application performance management.

It works very well and we can get to know how the application really behaves internally, and based on that we will to know who the culprit is and figure it out.

We have just started looking at version 10.5 and it has a lot of built-in features for a cloud platform. That is what we are really impressed with.

In terms of stability of our application, that is key, it really helps, APM really drives that factor.

It helps prioritize application performance issues. Through the stress test environment we really evaluate it. We are able to determine what the application requires so that we will provide it and take it from there.

I think the new version of APM is going to a new dimension. It really covers the cloud platform. They covered up and they abstracted the layers of the infrastructure and they're giving it an analytics tool as well. Instead of just putting monitoring in place, they are coming up with an analytics solution as well.

If they can come up with a use case of machine learning and artificial intelligence it would be even more useful.

Stability is quite good.

In terms of scalability, because APM is tightly coupled, it doesn't have the scalability as a built-in feature. Starting from version 10.5 it has a different approach for the scalability, while it grows, it really captures that way.

We have, pretty much, good support from them.

I was using this product even before I started with my current organization. I feel it really helps in the application strength, from an analysis perspective.

In application performance, it's the best one in the market. Go for it.