Broadcom DX Application Performance Management Reviews

The ability to monitor real time customer experience and to correlate the performance degradation back to system events. The ability to measure customer/user impact during outage and to assign a cost impact to the “outage”.

Prior to the product, we only measured user/customer experience when they actually reported the issue however now we have the ability to understand user/customer experience when it takes place or even predict it with appropriate metrics. This means we can respond proactively when service is impacted without disputing/denying user/customer complaints.

Linking the business transactions back to the backend systems, in other words properly following and mapping the business transaction through the entire backend environment (Webserver -> Application Server -> SOA -> Database -> User).

6 Years

No, however I have many years in this space. I do however know of other implementations that were not as smooth.

The CEM (Customer Experience Management) product is still immature and do have hiccups. Most of the time it is very stable with an occasional glitch.

Yes, but this was related to infrastructure capacity. We could not expand our infrastructure how ever we exploited the product beyond its original design (so self inflicted).

Professional and helpful however I got frustrated many times due to their level of expertise. When we experienced issues with the product or had questions, we rarely got quick and proper answers and had to figure it out ourselves (we found that we had more “working” experience)

Yes, we used open source utilities. We could not scale the open source utilities to manage our enterprise applications.

The product setup is straight forward, however then you need to understand the business transactions and expectations to align the requirement and expected results. You also have a very good understanding of APM else you would not be able to link the expectation and product capability. I have handed this solution over to individuals who knows the product very very well and they fail to deliver as they do not comprehend APM.

Interesting question as I was part of the 3rd party vendor who did the implementation at the time. So let me refer this back to my previous comment. If you do not have an implemented (vendor or in-house) who understands the concept of APM and who to derive business value out of it then you have a problem. Making the product work is one thing…..

Hmmmm… Huge J!

We had a strategy that we realised over a period of 10 years which means that we introduced certain elements piece by piece, we did not deploy all at one go. It is however a very expensive outlay and I am currently reviewing the strategy due to our annual maintenance that is becoming very expensive.

Yes, we also looked at Dynatrace

This is not a IT initiative alone but a IT/Business partnership. This is not a IT Operational deployment alone either but a joint venture with the application developers as well. If these three parties collectively approach this tool then you will have proper ROI, else you will not realise the true potential and then it becomes a very expensive monitoring tool (which it is not - if you think it is a “monitoring” tool then you are looking at the wrong tool).

Our primary use cases are for IT monitoring, alarms, and tracking the behavior of the IT system. We are customers of Broadcom.

The configuration and the manager tool are good features. It's very easy to deploy the parameters of the tool.

I'd like to see more integration between all the tools. You have APM, you have different management and other tools. Each tool works well by itself, but if we are talking about a suite, maybe those tools need to work well together.

I've been using this solution for a long time. 

I rate the solution eight out of 10. 

Application teams gained visibility into application performance. CA APM improved our ability to troubleshoot application issues and shorten resolution time.

The deep-process instrumentation gave us an opportunity to understand application process performance in detail.

We are using an old version of the product and I see a lot of improvements in the new release: better interface, and the ability to run predictive analytics.

The infrastructure is stable and scalable to the recommended capacity.

Customer service and technical support are very good.

We chose the CA APM solution several years ago for the set of features and the stability of the company behind the product.

The initial setup was straightforward.

We had a POC with the vendor before the implementation. That helped with better understanding of what to expect from the tool and the tool implementation.

It is difficult to measure ROI for the implementation. We has an ELA with unlimited licensing.

CA APM is a good product and I would recommend it. It might be specific to our company, but adoption by the application development community was not easy. I would recommend a dedicated team of APM SEMs to champion the APM implementation effort.

The usability and dashboarding. That's how our clients see the information. Also, deep trace analysis is valuable because that's how we figure out where our problems are.

It's helped us improve in terms of solutions by displaying key system data easily.

Data organization and creation of those dashboards. These seem to be getting better in the newer versions. Also, distribution and version control.

I’ve been using CA APM for between nine or 10 years.

The performance issues we have are on our end and we don't hold CA accountable for that.

The only problems we have are limited by our hardware.

We don't usually end up calling support because the other guy that works on it does a lot of high level development and he's out in Colorado. If there is an issue here I can't figure out, we usually end up having to go to engineers to get it solved. In the past when we've called them it's been really hit or miss. Like on a scale of one to 10, I'd give it a six.
Usually to get our questions answered because we consider ourselves pretty advanced users and we're kinda on the edge of what's going on. We usually have to get a couple of tiers in before we can get the questions that we have answered.

I personally haven't used other solutions. I was hired here specifically because I have experience with Intrascope at my previous job and we had actually deployed it there as our first APM solution.

I've set it up on new systems several times. It's pretty straightforward.

I don't remember back then because I actually wasn't involved in the decision making process. Since we've used it, we are constantly looking at other tools. We looked just to evaluate. We've evaluated a new solution at Dynamic and Dynatrace and a BMC solution or whatever they call it. We were impressed.

I would suggest that they don't underestimate the overwhelming amount of data that will come through and have their clients prepared for that. Because we end up spending a lot of time interpreting data for other people and really getting the users of the application involved is probably the most important thing in order to be successful. Then from a technical standpoint, just don't think for a second that you can skimp on some specifications because you will need all the resources you can get.

It's awesome. But I think CAPM is a little behind, at least up to this point with the versions we're on. On displaying data and making it easier to use for people that aren't in the tool eight hours a day.

CA APM is currently used in two areas of our business (SAP estate and SMART estate) but slowly we are delivering APM to a vast amount of people in the business. I think that is the biggest compliment I can give as more and more people are wanting to use APM.

I feel the ability to easily see a variety of metrics is great for us as a business, as we are able to view our systems in more depth. If there are any issues we are able to spot the exact problem very quickly. We are able to spot issues much quicker with the use of the out-of-the-box metrics given to us by CA. But we also develop that further with the use of the EPA Agent and expand what we can give and show the business by creating our own scripts. This has allowed us to develop our own self-monitoring and before anybody else sees the issue we are on hand to solve that as quickly as possible.

I don’t believe that there are many improvements from the product point of view, as the future upgrades which are coming will solve many of our issues.

No.

No.

The technical support is superb. They are always willing to help as well as give guidance as and when you need it. whether on a chat, face to face, or through the CA communities site where you can talk with other users.

Straightforward as we had a CA technician in with us to help us set up and tell us what was needed to be done and how we can do it.

Might seem quite expensive but definitely worth the money invested.

The CA APM product is great to show you how your business is doing and where improvements can be made. We are using this in our SAP estate and SMART estate and, as said above, we are exploring how we can deliver this product to more areas around the business helping our company grow!

It provides transparency into what's happening when there are problems that occur within applications.

It helps us identify and isolate issues when trouble arises; keep services up and running, basically.

I'd like to see the REST APIs, and specifically, refined. I believe that is one of the newer things that has been polished with the 10.5 release that's coming out. I look forward to that.

Other than that, I'd like to see more integration between nodes. For example, if there's a problem that arises in one server, I want to be able to drill down into it and have it automatically jump over to the next node and to see the continuation of the issue.

I have not rated it higher because I’d like more integration and more bells and whistles.

I'm pretty happy with how stable it is.

We have scaled it and we have not run into scalability issues yet; maybe we're close. We have a cluster of about five or six servers, I believe. So far, it's hanging in there.

Technical support has been pretty good. They respond pretty much in the same day. They've been very helpful. No issues to report.

We were not previously using a different solution.

I was not involved in the initial setup, but from what I heard, it looks pretty straightforward.

I have looked at other products. I've looked at AppDynamics. They have a pretty interesting looking product, but as far as for our organization, I think we're pretty happy with CA APM.

When selecting a vendor, support and the relationship are very important – we have a good one with CA – as is familiarity, as well. We have a lot of people who are familiar with CA's products, and they're fairly happy with them.

Do your homework. The tools pretty much open up a lot of possibility. You need the manpower to take advantage of that, so make sure you have the right skill sets in place to do so.

It gives us a lot more in-depth information that we previously didn't have for monitoring capabilities. Some of the new tools will allow us to get issues into the hands of the right support staff immediately.

We're using this solution to turn our support into being more of proactive approach than reactive to issues that are reported to us from the customers. We're actually trying to bring those issues to their attention before they bring it to our attention. With new features in version 10.5, it looks like we're taking more of an inside out approach to actually bringing the root cause immediately to our attention. This is instead of us having to start and dig down to identify what the root cause was. It brings it right to the forefront immediately without requiring additional triage. It's really changing the way that we're doing our business. This improvement is not only from a monitoring perspective where we're getting advanced notice of system issues that are occurring, but I'm actually using it as a tool to even identify where there are tuning opportunities based on our current configuration. We are also using it in working towards global standardization for our entire client base, which is something that's been lacking. It was very difficult to find all of that information in one place, readily available, and historical information like transaction activities and things of that nature. They're all now available at our fingertips, whereas before that just wasn't a possibility.

One of things that I've noticed is that in the desktop product there are some features that are really nice that are not available in APM WebView. I know that there's a concerted effort to make sure that everything will be included in the WebView portion of that, but it’s not there yet. I actually spend most of my time using Introscope, because of those features that are really useful to me personally.

I don't think we've been faced with too many challenges with stability. I know that very early on in adoption that we were having some crashes, but it's being relatively stable for the last number of weeks, even months.

We've rolled this out for a single one of our products and we're already exploring the potential of expanding that across the company to incorporate multiple products. It's something that we're definitely considering.

I have not used technical support, but the feedback that I've gotten from our system engineers is that it's been tremendous actually.

Previous to using this solution, we had a really large gap in our monitoring tools, and so it was just something that needed to be addressed, and CA APM was the right solution for us.

I was involved in the installation on more of the functional side of things. I wasn’t involved in configuration. I haven't done any of the engineering work. I was involved in setting up business transactions and a lot of those features. Initially, this setup was little bit overwhelming. I think it does take some time to get up to speed to understand how to navigate through the product, but once you get comfortable and familiar with it, it's pretty intuitive.

When selecting an APM product, I would suggest looking at the cost benefit. Find out if they are competitive with pricing, and if you are going to get return on your investment. I think I would just share some of the success that we've had already today, including, like I said, that shift of being reactive to proactive, and sharing some of the new advancements that are being made in the most recent releases that are going to make that experience even better.

• The detail it provides, allowing teams to perform root cause analysis effectively
• The proactive monitoring and automated alerting
• Dashboards tailored to specific roles/users
• The ability to integrate, allowing for more of a complete picture

MTTR has greatly improved. Teams are now better focused on the cause of application performance issues, much earlier into any event. Additionally, development teams now leverage the data gathered in lower environments to ensure that a better quality product reaches production.

I think CA is on the right track. They’ve listened to their customers. They are working on making the product so that the data is more effective, the interface is more intuitive, allowing users to use the product successfully with less need for training or for monitoring teams to be experts in their applications. Work is also underway to improve the tasks of administration and deploying/maintaining agents.

I've used it for four and a half years.

My experience with stability issues have been mostly “self-inflicted”; poor configuration, insufficient hardware etc.

Only in instances where recommended limits regarding agents/metrics were exceeded.

8/10

No other solution has been used.

A mixture of both. The installations are pretty straightforward. Determining sizing, agents, agent configuration, upgrading, migrations, etc. can be more complicated.

Determine what needs to instrument/monitored based on priority, then work with your sales contact to determine options.

The product was being utilized when I was first exposed to it.

Understanding your needs, and having a thorough plan and buy-in from stakeholders is essential. Additionally, utilize your CA partner, their knowledge and experience will fast-track being able to leverage your APM solution.