Broadcom DX Application Performance Management Reviews

The ability to quickly create alarms, actions, and dashboards is very valuable to us.

We have a key APM dashboard that is the primary dashboard utilized by IS Operations Center. We use it to evaluate the health of our primary customer and associated impacts on the application suite.

The documentation on customizing instrumentation of methods and classes (derivative files) could be improved, as well as some of the documentation interfacing into other APM products (ADA, CEM, ABA).

We've used it for three-and-a-half years.

Excessive errors in the application being monitored caused us to back off the level of monitoring due to the amount of traces being gathered.

The application has been very stable for us.

We've not had any issues with the scalability.

Customer service is excellent. Every time we have opened an issue, it is resolved quickly.

Technical support have a very high level of knowledge.

There was no previous solution in use.

The initial setup was straightforward. The biggest issues were getting internal people knowledgeable about the application to assist with defining methods and classes for instrumentation.

We used a CA team for implementation who were outstanding.

You should be aware when dealing with VM guests that you are required to license the entire VM host.

We also looked at Oracle Enterprise Manager.

Have your team who will operate be actively involved in the implementation. Get your application and infrastructure teams actively engaged in utilizing it for troubleshooting and analysis.

We are using the on-premise and cloud versions of Broadcom DX Application Performance Management.

Broadcom DX Application Performance Management could improve its supportability to the current technologies and the end-to-end correlation feature should be done automatically without custom configurations. Additionally, there should not be any configuration changes to the client-side when deploying the solution.

I have been using Broadcom DX Application Performance Management for approximately two years.

The scalability is very poor. When you expand your application, you have to do it manually on the deployment.

The support could improve because most of the support has no commitment to their SLAs.

The deployment could improve because it is complicated and not user-friendly on how to deploy the agents. You have to do many changes on the client-side. There are a lot of improvements needed.

The deployment for one client-server or one client target can take approximately 30 to 60 minutes. However, it does depend on the client.

We are implementors of Broadcom DX Application Performance Management. We do the implementation of this solution for clients.

When maintenance is required it can take one to two people up to two days to complete.

The license for Broadcom DX Application Performance Management is annual. The licensing model could improve because there is not any limit to deploying the agent, there should be some limits on it.

My advice to those wanting to implement this solution is to do many sanity tests before doing the deployment. It's very hard to find the issue and a high possibility of issues when doing the deployment.

I rate Broadcom DX Application Performance Management a six out of ten.

The solution is primarily used for monitoring such as network monitoring, application performance monitoring, infrastructure monitoring, et cetera. We also use it for the AI/ML to understand the kinds of effects that are coming from their different monitoring solutions. It can give a root cause analysis using multiple data points. It can monitor for and explain downtime and reduce the work of the ID operations team as it provides them with a root cause analysis for downtime events.

The different layers of monitoring helped to optimise the resource and reduce MTTR.If I found the issue in Infrastructure then team only focus in the infrastructure layer 

The solution has very good capacity and performance analytics. That is one section, which actually provides a lot of insights. I can see, for example, how my system is performing, and what kind of load is there in the systems. 

The dashboard is excellent and allows me to get quite granular, which I find quite helpful.

The initial setup is straightforward.

Technical support is good and the solution does offer pretty good documentation.

The AI/ML is still not quite giving the right results, the right root cause analysis. That needs to be improved. They claim that they give the root cause analysis in the exact right percentage, however, we find that usually whatever the root cause analysis it shows actually isn't the actual root cause. Therefore we've found that the AI/ML is actually not working properly. That needs to be improved a lot.

If I'm getting not the right root cause analysis, then definitively I have to go back and verify the different monitoring solutions to look for the root cause, which takes time.

The stability could be more reliable.

It would be ideal if correlations had their own dashboard. It would help to minimize the time gaps we create when we have to individually go back to check all the monitoring data points.

The pricing is high. We aren't getting the value we imagined out of the product.

I've used the solution for at least the last 12 months or so.

I don't find the reliability to be so good on the solution. The stability could be better. 

We have 50 users on the solution currently.

In terms of scalability, I would say it's good, however, it's definitely not perfect. If you aren't yet getting the right results, it doesn't make sense to scale it.

As of right now, we have no plans to increase usage.

We have found that both the documentation on offer and the technical support is quite good. there are no complaints in that regard. They are helpful and responsive and we're quite happy with the level of service we receive when we need it.

The real setup was straightforward, as all the monitoring solutions we were using were CA only. Due to that, there is a no-hassle login figure thing for the DX setup. Therefore, I wouldn't describe the process as overly complex or difficult. 

The solution uses a subscription-based model.

The pricing could be better. From the perspective of a value proposition, what I'm expecting from products that I'm not getting. That makes us assume that the pricing is high.

There aren't additional costs beyond the main licensing fee.

We are a customer and an end-users.

This solution does not have an on-premises deployment option. It is only available on the cloud.

I would advise a company looking for a solution such as this first start do a POC, and really look for the results on the raw data, your own broad data, rather than just going with a company that hasn't been tested. You should place your data into the system and see how the AI/ML is working. If the result is you can get 60, 70, 80% accuracy, you should go with it. 

I'd rate the solution at a four out of ten. There are many aspects of the solution that still need improvement.

We primarily use this product for monitoring our IBM WebSphere environment. It more generally monitors all of our JVMs for our web environments, used for all of our websites.

JVM memory monitoring and connection pool monitoring are valuable features.

It provides visibility into the performance of SQL statements, allowing for the identification of those that are performing poorly.

With respect to SQL monitoring, it would be nice to have a little more information because it doesn't provide the full statement all of the time. If it's really long then it only provides part of it.

It would be nice if the parameters that were used could be reported, as currently, it doesn't.

Having it monitor more of the environment would be helpful because we use applications such as Mule and Informatica, aside from the JVMs.

We began using this product between five and ten years ago when it was known as Wily Introscope.

This is a stable product.

In terms of stability, with our current setup, it is not so much. Unlike a situation where it was on the cloud, we'd have to be involved and it would be difficult to scale it up.

We have about a dozen people in the organization who use it.

We have had to call them and I find that they are not very supportive now.

The initial setup is complex.

We had assistance from either the vendor or somebody that they directed us to and are affiliated with.

The licensing costs are expensive.

We did not implement the latest release because they made some big changes to the framework. They probably have some of the stuff in their newest release that we would like. However, we didn't do that because they went to Kubernetes and some other technology that we weren't ready to adopt because it isn't in our environment yet.

Since Broadcom bought it, I would no longer recommend this product to other users. I think that they increased the price and the support isn't very good anymore.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

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.

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.

APM is a master in monitoring application performance. When we emphasize performance, it focuses on business transactions and helps provide a good amount of successful transactions. In order to enhance application availability, rigorous monitoring of its components’ performance is very important.

APM helps in monitoring performance of application with end-to-end application component visibility.

• Reduced troubleshooting time by identifying the exact point of failure
• Capacity planning of infra based on application performance

Out-of-the-box report templates need to be incorporated. Agent performance reports and transaction statistics report need to be incorporated. Agent performance reports will help us to monitor agent communication and availability. Transaction statistics will help us to monitor what are the transactions flowing into the system.

LDAP and EEM integration should be simplified like in other CA Solutions.

I have used it for one year.

Until now, I have not faced any stability issues.

Until now, I have not faced any scalability issues.

Technical support is mind-blowing. They are really a big helping hand with administrating the application.

This is the first time I am working with an APM solution.

Initial setup was very simple. We did our implementation in a day and were able to provide output to our management in a short amount of time.

Pricing and licensing are straightforward. It is very easy to plan the license requirement, as the license terms are clearly documented.

Before choosing this product, we did a proof of concept for Zenoss. We felt CA APM is agile and aptly engineered to meet our requirements.

It is the very best solution. It will surely enhance anyone’s application performance and resource utilization.