Broadcom DX Application Performance Management Reviews

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.

• 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)

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. 

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.

It gives us insight into the functional health of the application, if we have any hot spots. For distributed applications we need those insights. We like the dashboards where we can consolidate different metrics into one view. Also, it tracks back-end service calls and it gives us insight into any issues with the services we are calling, as we use distributed application technology. Also, alerts and notifications.

The organization becomes quick in assessing hot spots and attacking any issues that are bringing down and application. It means meeting SLAs and reacting to issues quickly before they become problems when we see patterns, before the whole system becomes unusable.

It is a technology with a lot of things going on. We'd like some use cases to help us configure APM for dashboards and reporting.

Migrations from one version to the next are always a battle and we have to involve architects and other consultants to help us with upgrades, which is expensive.

It’s enabling technology, so we shouldn’t be spending so much time and resources managing the application.

We had some hiccups, and still are. When we implemented agents for one of our applications, the agents had a memory leak and halted the application, so it was unstable. We were told to upgrade to a new version of APM which mostly addressed the issue.

The issues are ongoing to an extent, and we’ve been working with CA for a while on a trial and error basis, which has been painful.

It is scalable, but we have to go through a lot of pain in configuring agents. Agent configuration has been something of a mystery because of poor documentation. We talk to CA and we get some guidance, which often doesn’t work. When you’re rolling out agents 4000 JVMs, it is a painful process, and that’s only one application.

We don’t have dedicated resources, but we open tickets and they come back. For example we’ve seen a lot of errors in our logs, and they’ve provided patches and configuration changes, but we’re still seeing those errors. It’s not bringing down the system but we don’t know what lurks, and we want to make sure that it’s stable. Sometimes we go to our account manager to escalate, which does get us an answer.

Still this has been a nagging pain overall, although the solution was more solid after upgrading to newer versions. We do seven to 10 billion dollars in revenue in those applications so we need to ensure those systems are as available as possible, and that hasn’t happened.

It was already in production when I joined.

It’s been a battle with upgrades, stability, and, to an extent, support. We also gain some from it – I will say it it’s been very helpful for us to identify issues but it could be better. The industry is evolving and there are pretty good cloud-based tools out there that offer me more than the current version of CA APM offers. Based on prior experience, we are dreading the upgrade to the next release. In a cloud environment, we don’t have to upgrade or manage servers.

• 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.

If you have a large web firm or a group of servers, it does a great job of aggregating performance metrics into single viewable graphs or dashboards.

We're primarily using it for production-system monitoring of application errors, slowness, things like that. I identify issues for our customers.

It's a very manual process, I believe, in the current version that we're using, which is 9.5. So you have to spend a lot of time analyzing the metrics to determine what thresholds you want alerts on. For example, you want response time for an application. You have to baseline that response time and then develop your systems around those. Sometimes the baselining is more difficult because you have an expectation of a response time to be slower during some periods of times than others, and you don't want to set off false alarms. So it would be great if that process did not have to be done manually.

There's a lot of improvements that could be made. I think the newer versions that are coming out go a long way towards that. Back to the baselining thing, there's a lot of automated baselines now, and they provide differential analysis of whether or not something's going wrong as compared to how it normally should be running.

Also, it could use better views into the system, of a transaction flowing through the system.

It takes a long time to get it set up and configured in your applications and running. And out of the box, what I have found is that when you take the system, if you just drop it on your application, the overhead of the agents and the monitoring and the collection of all the data is out-of-the-box, and it's too much and will impact your application. So, what we have done, in the most recent deployment, is gone to a very scaled-back version of the application and sort of added in until we were satisfied that we were collecting the data that we needed, and balancing that with not impacting the application to the customers.

For the most part, it's been stable. It's an agent product, so there's agents out on the servers. We've found that they run in services. There has been situations where the agent will disconnect or things like that, and then we're not getting metrics until someone notices it.

I'm using it primarily for our front-end websites and our mobile-banking sites. So we're probably running 250,000 clients through the system.

Technical support is really good. I'm very happy with them.

It wasn't my decision. When I joined the company, they already had it, but they weren't using it. So, some of the applications that I was responsible for, I saw that we could leverage it and so I began using it.