Broadcom DX Application Performance Management Reviews

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.

The feature that I have found the most valuable is its user interface.

They can make it easier to configure. 

I have been using this solution for about four months. We're doing a proof of concept. We've currently deployed it on-premises, but we've also been looking at a SaaS model.

I didn't contact their technical support.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward. It took a couple of days to deploy.

We have our own team for maintaining this solution.

Broadcom is a better and cheaper option from a financial perspective. It also depends on the DLP plug.

You should look at the Broadcom DX version 11, which will be available from early 2021. It is a lot better than version 10.7. There are a lot of big upgrades in version 11.

There are not a lot of differences between AppDynamics and Broadcom DX Application Performance Management version 11. The user interface of AppDynamics is better, and the configuration for AppDynamics is a little bit more straightforward.

Broadcom offers a wider range and a bigger suite of applications. The APM module is just a part of it, whereas AppDynamics is a specialist at APM. AppDynamics is a better solution at the moment. You need to weigh the extra functionality you might get with AppDynamics and see if it is worth it. Dynatrace is also a better solution.

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

We are a service and solution provider, and this is one of the monitoring products that we implement for our customers.

The primary use case is network monitoring.

The features that I find most valuable are related to network monitoring. One of my colleagues is more focused on the application performance management aspects and has a better appreciation for those features.

It is straightforward to use.

The feedback that I have received from some customers is that they want to see more information on one screen when it comes to IT management. For example, they would like to have IP management, where it detects and shows IP conflicts on the network.

Ideally, the vendor would be better helping vendors by pushing this solution. If they created webinars then it would be helpful in this regard because potential customers need to have an overview of the features and benefits that they can get from it.

Technical support needs to be more responsive and address support tickets more quickly.

We have been using this solution for more than eight years, before the acquisition of CA by Broadcom.

Stability-wise, I think that this is a superb solution and my customers have been rating it high.

Technical support has not been what it was since before the acquisition by Broadcom. However, it is improving. There are a lot of things that they need to fine-tune and get back on track. In particular, they need to respond to issues more quickly.

Sometimes the partners run into problems with implementation. It could be an issue with the environment, for example. When the support ticket is logged, I need them to respond immediately or come online to be able to help resolve it at the time.

Time can be used when they ask for more information, such as sending certain logs. However, I want a situation where when you raise a priority-one ticket, they should be able to log in, take over the system, and help resolve issues as quickly as possible.

The initial setup is straightforward.

We deploy this product for our customers and then we help them to manage it.

This is a product that I continue to recommend to my customers.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

It has improved our transaction monitoring significantly.

The most valuable features are the end-user experience and transaction monitoring.

The installation could be improved. Also, they need to concentrate more on the cloud for cloud monitoring.

I have not experienced any stability issues with the product.

Customer Service: 4 stars out of 5.

Technical Support: 3.5 stars out of 5

We used HPE Diagnostics earlier. But since the client already had an existing license of CA APM, he wanted to leverage the existing toolset rather than going for new tools.

The initial setup was slightly complex.

The implementation was done through the vendor. The vendor, of course, had implementation experience.

The ROI is good when you have more applications for testing.

We evaluated Dynatrace and HPE Diagnostics.

Definitely a good product, worth going for. Since I first reviewed the product here, about two years ago, I would currently not change my rating of eight out of ten. CA APM hasn't changed much in that time.

I use it to track performance on the production environment and QA environment.

The time it takes to track problems in applications is the most valuable return that we have from this solution. 

The transactions rate feature is the most valuable feature. It shows the deep histories of everything that's running on an even transaction. That's why it is so useful.

I would like for them to develop a feature that controls .net agents remotely. It would be very useful and we don't have this feature now.

They need to improve the crossing over of data from large files and they should use LUNIX heavily. There's room for improvement there. 

I have a good impression of the stability. 

I use technical support a lot. They've performed well. They always respond quickly and they are assertive. We have had a good experience with support.

The initial setup was straightforward.

The quality of software is one of the main criteria that we consider when evaluating a solution.

I would rate it an eight out of ten. The reason it's not a ten is because they don't focus enough on improving over time like other competitors do who have a more modern and complete tool. 

They should develop the user experience so that you don't need to put in other agents. Today you have to use another host to bring up your vision. If they would have a single agent with all this information, it would be perfect.

It's for monitoring application performance and end user experience.

It secures traffic through the HTTPS. There are a huge number of cipher suites which are enabled. Unfortunately, some of the cipher suites are not being recognized by the APM tools. However, we are able to manage with the other cipher suites in the market, apart from ones offered by CA APM.

We have had a tough time getting these topics monitored.

In terms of end user experience, it is very useful. We use it to organize our client requirements, for example:

• How many users utilize the vertical URL and what are their experiences? 
• How good is the response rate?
• How many errors are the users receiving?
• What errors do they get?
• What screens are being displayed? Are they receiving, "Page Not Found" or "Error 404"?

We receive good transactions from it with good graphs, as well, documenting the activities of total visitors on the site. We can pull the reports and provide them to the client, as required.

In terms of application performance, we are able to identify the memory leaks within applications. We have been able to identify how an application is behaving in terms of a custom method of classes and how well the response is being solved. We can find the KPIs of the application along with its performance indicators.

The custom classes, suchs as hybrid net performance, we are able to identify and fix, accordingly. The solution is proactive. We can monitor how the application is connecting to the database and what queries are being requested, then how well those are being respond to by the solution.

Users no longer need to depend upon the console for a compatible Java version. Now, users can directly learn the version, perform all their actions, and see all of those performance-related issues.

Our users lag how to identify the root cause with this solution. If they could come up with a more user-friendly version, that would be a good thing, since other vendors currently have better features and more user-friendly products than CA APM.

As applications move to the cloud, we need more cloud-based solutions from CA APM. This is currently unavailable. I know that this is something that they are looking to do in the future, but I am not sure how with the current solution.

The stability is very good. CA APM is far more stable than any of the other tools available, though we have seen memory leaks with the solution.

Scalability is good. We haven't faced any issues.

We have about 50 users in our organization, from directors to analysts. Around 60 to 70 percent of our organization is using the solution.

We monitor more than 400 applications, which is done with two people who are system engineers (myself included).

The technical support has performed very well. We receive good information in a very quick and polite manner. They have very good technical personnel and have been very happy with them. Sometimes. I contact them when CA APM introduces new things.

The initial setup is very straightforward; it is not complex. It is well-documented. I can follow the documentation to get the tool working.

For a simple install, the deployment can take about a day, then I can monitor any application.

A complex install will need requirements to be gathered for how things are done and how deep the data is to be implemented and instrumented. If they are a huge number of classes to be monitored, then we need to collect all that information from the application team or client. Afterwards, we have to instrument the system. This may take a week or ten days based on the requirements. 

I'm not involved in the pricing.

We evaluated CA APM vs AppDynamics and CA APM vs BMC.

Consider the compatibility first, then consider the resources required, finally consider the applications that you will be monitoring. Then, you can go deploy them.

We used the Five-Pack when onboarding services. We also used SiteMinder and introduced synthetic monitoring, integrating with CA Spectrum and CA Service Desk. We use several CA applications. Everything is interconnected to get triggered and tickets routed to a particular thing automatically.

We look at the load patterns and server health by looking at server health parameters. Heap memory is of prime importance as well as how the heap is behaving and how the memory is behaving under load, as well as the CPU utilization. These are generally the parameters we will check.

In a production environment we check all the parameters. We can detect any leakage, any problems, whether RAM is sufficient, and whether CPU is crossing a threshold. We can determine if we need to add new servers or RAM or adjust the heap settings.

It helps save resources for a company.

It also helps us look at business-critical transactions and how fast they are happening. It helps us pinpoint the methods or functions that are taking longer to operate and we can advise the development team to look into it and fine-tune those areas. They can make adjustments immediately.

For me, the most valuable feature is being able to check memory patterns. We check them when we do load testing or soak testing to see if there are any memory leaks.

A CA APM agent takes a lot of memory. That is one disadvantage. If you configure CA APM correctly it will still consume around 15 to 20 percent of memory.

We haven't had any issues with its scalability.

When you submit a support ticket it will take them two to three days to reply. They told us they would resolve issues within 24 hours, but so far that has not happened.

There have been times when we were doing performance testing, load testing, where it didn't capture the required information we were trying to monitor. We called the CA APM support team. They suggested we increase the RAM and restart the agents. That was the solution they gave us.

The setup is not straightforward. It is a bit complex. I have not configured CA APM myself, but I use it for performance testing. When we are doing performance testing, we configure CA APM for a pre-production environment which is similar to the production environment. We will do load testing and take all the parameters and observations and send them, along with our recommendations and conclusions, to development. But I have not really configured CA APM.

Dynatrace is the most expensive of these tools followed by AppDynamics which is "medium-expensive." Both CA APM vs Dynatrace and CA APM vs AppDynamics are a bit lower in price. Because of this, our clients insist on using CA APM.

In my opinion, if you can afford it, go for AppDynamics instead of CA APM. But if our customers don't have the budget, we'll go with CA APM.

We have a comparison chart showing the license costs for AppDynamics, Dynatrace, and CA APM and other monitoring tools as well. We provide that information to our clients along with the advantages and disadvantages of a particular tool. We provide our opinion on which it is best to go with but we also listen to our clients' opinions. We discuss this at length to finally come up with a decision on which tool to go with.

I use many tools, such as LoadRunner, Silk Performer, and IBM. I also use AppDynamics and Dynatrace. The last two are actually the best for me at the moment because they support even the database level. CA APM does not support that much. It will only give me minimal information about the DB.

It reduces the downtime of applications, and has, in fact, minimized it to approximately 5 percent, and possibly even less than that.

1. Root Cause Analysis. For example, I have an application in my environment and it suddenly it goes down. I then need to find out which team to consult and whose fault it is: coding, database, network, or something else. No one is ready to accept that it is their fault, leading to the blame game. As a result, it takes me a lot of time to identify the right person, assuming I can find the right team. Then, identifying the root cause of the issue and resolving it will take more time, leading to loss of business. CA APM, however, easily updates the exact location of the error, which not only saves time but effort as well.
2. CA APM not only does root cause analysis, but it is smart enough to proactively identify an issue that could happen and advise me to do something to prevent it.
3. Over time there have been positive changes. For example, it now has automatic investigation, through the use of AI. CA APM has the advantage that we can create plug-ins. We can do whatever we want to do. It's like a Linux machine. Whatever you want to do you can, by scripting. That kind of customization is not available in Dynatrace or AppDynamics.

Automatic report generation needs work.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

Customer Service:

9/10

Technical Support:

9/10

I used logs to study applications' behaviour, but that requires a separate team to properly handle it. There was dependency on their workflow. Now, we don't require a separate team. Additionally, the CIO can see the reports on his mobile.

The initial setup requires some understanding of your applications. For example, you need to know how much response time is fair for a function in that program or the response time of a given page or the application overall.

Implementation should be done by an expert as an average implementer would only be able to provide 60 to 80 percent usage of the tool.

It varies depending on the environment.

You should only use a preferred partner of CA.

Over the couple of years, since I first reviewed the product here, my rating of it hasn't changed. I still rate it at eight out of ten. I rated it eight because it is a good CEM experience but there is room for improvement with CA APM. It is it's quite tricky to implement because you need to have traffic monitoring, etc. in place.

I have been using Dynatrace for the last nine months or so and I would rate it at nine out of ten.

We are using CA APM for Layer 7 applications, like SQL, as well as application debugging.

Compared to other tools, it's not good. 

First, there is no auto flow diagram. Second, the alert mechanism is not as good when compared to other tools. Third, there are many different folders, such as front end, back end, and BB queries, but it's very critical to centralize all the business connections. Fourth, there is an issue relative to the build all view. 

It's a very stable product.

There aren't issues related to CA APM's scalability.

Compared to other tools, the technical support is not good. Other tools give support in real time, whereas CA will only reply 48 hours after I log a call.

We have multiple solutions, like CA APM, and Pinpoint. 

For implementation, it's just straightforward. There is no challenge to correlation, continuation or estimation, and there is no complexity in our environment.

Java-based enterprise application servers monitoring: for example, WebSphere Application Server, JBoss EAP, WebLogic.

• User-defined transaction profiling
• Application topology discovery and visualization
• Application component deep dive.
  

It should enable you to see the usage and performance of all application dependencies like databases, web services, caching, etc.

• Root cause detection
• Easy installation and configuration
• It should facilitate real user monitoring to see what your users are experiencing in real time.

Easily find bottleneck of our applications. We have a BSR (Business Services Reliability dashboard), so we can find out how our business is behaving, how we are getting the orders and how many errors we are getting. We find out how reliable our application is.

It's performed very well.

We can find out the bottlenecks before the customer encounters them. That's the major benefit.

It helps prioritize application performance issues because we can prioritize them in a test phase, or the development phase. We can find out that which queries are slow, what is the behavior of our application, and what we can tune our application to make it more reliable and faster.

Triage Map, Differential Analysis, Transaction Trace, error handling, cell counts. We have a complete dashboard, which tells us what's going on with our application, end to end.

It could be faster. For example, when we are upgrading the product, it takes a lot of time and there are a lot of things we have to do manually. If it is automated it would be really helpfull.

The stability is very good. We haven't had any lagging or downtime. 

We have already tuned it. It's very reliable. We have used suggestions from the CA communities and others. I already have experience with it so I have stabilized our environment.

It's very scalable.

I generally only use tech support when the issue is beyond my knowledge. Otherwise, I use the communities. 

When I have used their support I've been satisfied; not 100 percent, but a lot. The problem is it takes time. I prefer to use a community because lots of experienced people are using the communities and they reply faster than CA support.

It's straightforward.

The important things for us when selecting a vendor are 

• how good is their product and 
• the reviews of that product.

I would say try CA APM and tune it the way it is  recommended by CA Admins and from configuration guide. You'll find a lot of people complain about it because they do not tune the APM Cluster as recommended, and the agent as well.

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.

It is a first line of defense for application performance monitoring and management to understand the customer usage patterns. When we get any major incident or a production issue, we can isolate the area where there is a probable problem. 

Adding a layer with built-in some service level guarantees between the operations, development, and support, give us one of the key disciplines that this product has pushed us to evolve into. Previously, it was bunch of loosely built operations metric infrastructure applications. I would get a call (someone I know), you know me and let's start working together, because there is a problem. Now, having this alerting in place and metrics showing themselves for what is in store and what we should work on, there is a service level that is being built across these teams so they exactly know how to work. That is a very good thing to bring as a discipline.

It is very hard, especially for banks working from the Canadian space, because we are traditional in nature. So, it is very hard to bring about change. A product like this has broken the ice in two years in good amount of time in Canadian market and Canadian technical space. It has been able to establish itself. There has been a little push for certain disciplinary changes and behavioral changes within the teams that work in the bank.

The first line of defense; we know we have a problem. We never knew we had a problem until we got calls into the call center saying, we have this coming up from the customers. Before, the customers would pick up the phone and give a call to our call centers. Now, we know we have a problem, because there is a primary layer of alerting or metrics monitoring put in place, that is the good part.

Its profiling. The uniqueness instead of me looking at sampling data, I need to know the m-1 event that actually triggered my scenario where that m event caused a catastrophic event, like a ripple effect; I need to know that m-1. What triggered my major event means I need to understand the event that triggered it and before the cause of that event itself. If I don't know that, and if I look at it from 10,000 feet, it's going to look like a blimp, but actually if I get into it, it's so nasty there. Without understanding that gap, no APM product can claim itself to be an APM product.

The only drawback of this product that CA has, actually it was Wiley product they purchased and they started adding patches on top of the Wiley product to make it an APM dimensional product, but it is a sampling product. Essentially it means it samples one every 15 seconds. A lot of things happen in that 15 seconds especially when its financial transactions. If you miss one spike within that 15 seconds, that means you are looking data from a 1000 mile height, which might not look like a problem until you go and take closer look.

The way the product itself is it allows you to identify a problem area but not exactly tell what the problem is. It is like you have a problem good. 15 years ago it would better to know that I have a problem and I have a problem in a specific area it works better. Now, the speed at which the technology and the customers are moving on, I need to exactly know what my problem is right then and there. That is a huge gap with CA APM.

No predictability and pattern analysis is hugely dependent on the sampling. In today's financial world, your individual attention is your success path for your business growth. That means, the more I get a product that suits me exactly, that means I am unique. Even if I transfer two dollars, I am unique in my own nature as a customer. If I get mixed up with a bunch of other boats, folks who are doing one dollar $10 and I get my product customized to them, that means I'm not being individually identified as a market. The same goes with your application dynamics as well.

If you are not able to do that individual identification of spikes and surges use cases, you are not looking at it very closely the way the market is actually driving you to look at it. Other than, that it is a huge relief. We had nothing before, so something is better than nothing.

It is a very stable platform, I can vouch for that. That first line of defense is not going to fail. It is a fairly stable product because it has been there for a while and all the knicks and knacks have been worked out. I can call it a matured product in what it does, but what is being sold is a different topic altogether.

Amazing. It is very nice for what it does.

Every customer is unique. Again to this market, it is that unique need, unique feature, unique necessity, or unique technology that brings forward your need to adopt your technologies or adopt your lifecycle to meet that need. With CA, if I throw out a solution, one pill does not work for everything, so you need to make that customization. You need to draw a line on what customization is, then what support is. Everything cannot be customization. 

I have a product that is unique to me, but I did really tinker it out, so you need to talk to me and understand what the tinkering is. It cannot be a customization request, it is a support. Drawing lines between customization and support, there are a few dialogues, a few dialogue lines that really need to happen along those lines. Otherwise, it is fairly good when we actually escalate. We have heard some nays back and forth, but it has been good.

The initial setup is complex. Size made it complex, and understanding the complex nature of our application landscape itself. It is very diverse. 

We acquired a bunch of banks and a bunch of wealth management companies which were put together as one bank. This means each of them have their own technical landscapes. You need to understand each of them and they also talk to each other. It is complex in nature from how we are as a bank from a technological front. This makes a complex nature to deploy a tool to work across the board.

CA was engaged for implementation

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. 

Monitoring application performance.

As such, no improvement after using CA APM.

Regarding how we utilize CA APM for container monitoring, our implementation team is not able to this information. Our implementation team was not able to understand and share information regarding the impact CA APM has when attempting to triage complex application issues; and similarly regarding the visibility CA APM provides across complex application environments. We are not aware of how the solution allows you to monitor and gain performance insights into the various technologies across the application environment, like docker monitoring and the ability to see into the database. The same is true of how the solution helps monitor system changes, topological changes or code updates. We would like to receive documentation to understand the above features.

CEM - We have to produce reports of defective URLs by selecting the client site IP group, which helps us to identify status code of IIS. This gives an idea regarding obtaining the defect and finally understanding the issue.

Tool is so complex to understand.

No issues with stability.

No issues with scalability.

It's average.

This is our application monitoring solution.

Complex.

A few 24/7 Web monitoring solutions were evaluated for comparison.

Its complex to understand.

Monitoring of our internal business applications completely, through all business processes.

As all of our applications are monitored by CA APM, it's now easy to analyze unusual behavior in a normalized way.

In terms of container monitoring, we are currently in the rollout phase. In the end, all containers will be instrumented by CA APM agents in order to have a complete view of the current operative status of the dynamic and volatile container world.

All application servers are instrumented to provide a standardized monitoring baseline for the given technology. We defined sets of base monitors in order to normalize analytics capabilities from a technology perspective. On top of this we monitor application specific classes.

As we are currently in rollout phase we can't yet report on the visibility CA APM provides across application environments, yet.

Regarding monitoring and performance insights into the various technologies across our application environment, it identifies the "worst" application in terms of which app has the highest number of errors, slowest SQL queries, etc.

System changes, topological changes, or code updates that are introduced into our environment are analyzed by our architecture team using CA APM.

1. Cross-VM transaction traces provide a complete "what happened where".
2. Proactive snapshots of transactions and all details of a transaction are saved in case of an error.
3. Attribute decoration is a unique and very powerful feature. We can add meaningful meta information based on our internal demand.

1. Integration of third-party content into app maps (e.g. data coming from beats/elastic platform).
2. Support of new application server technologies, time to adopt new versions of them.
3. Dashboarding capabilities (as with all other vendors).
4. Application architecture of the central Enterprise Manager should be developed into a cloud native architecture.
5. Mitigation of SPOF – PostgreSQL database, behind Team Center.

Yes, we enountered stability issues. They were mitigated by performance tuning within infrastructure.

Yes, we encountered issues with scalability inside Team Center, a massive amount of universes, perspectives, applications.

Good.

No previous solution.

Straightforward.

Back in 2009/2010: HPE Diagnostics, Dynatrace; 2016: AppDynamics.

• System incident analysis 
• Performance monitoring

We run a very large OLTP system: Six IBM AIX 780 high-end applications and DB servers. Daily transaction amount 100,000,000 per day.

WAS GC monitoring enhanced our application performance and DB SQL performance.

It is very useful and helpful with the analysis of historical performance data.

• E2E monitoring
• DB web WAS monitoring
• App crash report
• User customizing report
• DB connection usage from WAS

• System incident analysis
• Performance monitoring

Currently, we are building a visibility dashboard which allows our level-1 and level-2 engineering teams to actually look at the events, and be able to designate which ones are critical, which are important. It alerts them. They are able to simply look at a dashboard to be able to predict and resolve issues.

The CA tools allow to me to get into detailed transactions for custom ranking, and be able to make predictions. It also gathers data. Some other tools may be good at one area, but not good overall, including the mainframe.

CA has been very famous for the mainframe. I think that's actually the edge, by the way, for CA products, as there are many, many dotcom products that don't touch mainframes. I think that CA should still keep that. 

The area where CA is changing is, I'll give you an example. The fresh technology should have been out a long time ago. But it appears to be we're catching up on the UIM, because Microsoft basically says they are not going to support the fresh, starting next year. That means they are a little bit behind on the waves in the architecture, etc. I think that can be improved.

Another thinking is, if the developer can get to the level-1 engineer level, they will develop a better product. I suggest the developers at CA really work as a level-1 engineer, because then you have a different sort.

Very good. The CA UIM is a very solid product. We love the simplicity of the robots and the agent installation and upgrading, because you can just do it right at your central station without rebooting the remote workstations or servers. The APM allows us to have inside-application  analytics, and very seldom do we need to reboot, etc.

The scalability side for the UIM is pretty solid. As long as you set up your database right, you should be able to handle, for example, $150,000 transactions.

APM, currently, our organization is moving to the cloud, so we have lots more APM analytics, etc., so we're going to see how that's going to scale up.

I like the old dashboard - I'm just going to be very open. The old dashboard allow me to create a case and be able to get my products, without going through some of the current things that are going on. 

I still like the old, for example, CA UIM support, where you can download directly through the UIM portal without going through extra steps. So I think that can be simplified.

When selecting a vendor, the reputation is important. One of the things that we have been thinking is, how many of these dotcom vendors will exist three years from today? You see AppDynamics are acquired by Cisco, you've got other vendors. Almost every week, some of these companies disappear. CA has been here for a long time, and we think that's the reputation. We definitely want CA to exist, definitely three years from today, and think that's helped.

The second area is the support. I think CA, has great people. 

On pricing, CA is very competitive. I think that's going to help in the long run. 

It covers from mainframe, all the way to dotcom, for example. CA currently covers Amazon, Microsoft Azure, Office 365 monitoring. They're getting to that. We notice it, we immediately install these probes as they become available from CA.

We think the stability of this product needs to be a little stronger on these newer products. We do suggest that CA keep it up in their area, because CA has mainframe to handle already. Now they want to expand into these other horizons. The addition of these products is going to help CA to sustain. The overall coverage of the product, not just in one area. Open source is very important, and we're looking to open source on all these too.

CA tools are great. The technical people I work with are great, on each product. On a one to 10 scale I will give it about eight. Now, there's a reason why I say eight, because I really like to work with the technical folks. So when CA approaches me, I hope they approach me from the helping us perspective, not trying to sell me another product. I think this is so important. 

That natural evolution comes when you, yourself, are technical. When you are technical, you are able to talk the sales language, and then it will come to the sale. Sales come very naturally as part of technical. I think that should be your overall coverage, not just one person knowing one area. It should be, you should have a master architect, master chief, who knows about every single product, and deal with it.

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. 

Monitoring of customer applications. 

It has performed well. I won't necessarily say better than other solutions, but there's more focus because of the customer applications. 

A good example for us is Hurricane Irma. We have service territory that was impacted and our executive dashboard for APM was up and everybody under the sun was watching that, and keying off of that, for issues that were popping up, because we were performing storm restoration.

The executive dashboard we created gives a lot of visibility out there, so from that standpoint if somebody sees something go red and they say, "Hey, what's going on?" we have to be on our toes. There's no working on something for a little bit before someone knows.

But having said that, there's a lot of flexibility in being able to see stuff in those customer systems, which is vital for us.

The ability to have anything we want scripted feeding in there, and to add to it fairly quickly. So if we do see something that we need to change or monitor, we need to add something, we're able to get those in pretty quickly. 

For example, finding something that's not performing well on one of our applications. We had one not too long ago where we simply didn't have a threshold on something, something we hadn't seen before. We found it, and then were able to get in and put something in pretty quickly. So now we're prepared for that situation in the future. 

The APM SQL feature doesn't perform like we would like it to, and we actually have some open cases that are working through that. I know that's a new feature with 10.5, so it may be one of those things that gets a little better. But I would like to see that improved because, although it's not a major problem, we feel like it should run faster.

The stability is very good. We recently upgraded to 10.5, and the performance has been fantastic, especially since the upgrade. We had a few minor things before the upgrade, but once we've upgraded it's run like a champ.

No issues with scalability. We're able to add stuff to it without any issue. We've got a decent license count so there are no issues there, it's been easy.

We have used tech support. I would evaluate it as so-so. Part of the issue is, I've got some seasoned guys. Tech support is always saying, "Hey, what's with these log files," and the like, and we feel that we waste some time upfront because we've already checked A, B, and C. It's like if you called tech support, and they say ,"Well have you turned your computer on and off?" "Yes, I've done all that!" It's like that. We go through some stuff that we feel if we skip that we might get to some resolution faster.

With version 10.5, we went to it fairly early and we discovered some things that broke some things in the past. We did get through those. But I would say the bigger issue is, if we're at point A and we want to get to D, we want to skip B and C.

We do get the right person when we call, there's not really any run around.

And we have, I don't know what her title is, a service manager, and we meet every couple of weeks to review all the cases, and I feel that if something's not getting addressed she'll help us escalate that or push it forward. It's just some of the upfront stuff that gets a little frustrating at times.

My most important criteria when selecting a vendor have to do with the issue that vendors say, "Yeah we can do this, yeah we can do that." I want to see examples of where you did that. And I want to understand how hard it is to get to that point. Because a lot of times, sure, they can do that, but it entails all of this work, or all of this customization and maintenance and, at the end of the day, it may be a huge issue to get to that point. I want more transparency. 

And if it is that that additional work, that may be okay, but we want to know about it ahead of time so we can plan for it.

Brand may be important, but sometimes companies get lazy, saying, "We're so and so," and they don't feel they have to work as hard. I know there's a vendor that we had - not CA - but it was just, whatever you're doing, you know that you're going to have problems. They are a big brand name and they just do a poor job. So that's why I say the brand doesn't always make that big of a difference because it's more about your ability to come through and deliver on your commitments. And deliver on your commitments, meet deadlines, without us having to do a fire drill every day.

I give CA APM a nine out of 10. It does a really good job for us, the infrastructure seems pretty easy to maintain. We had to do an upgrade so that obviously threw a bunch of work in there but, outside of that, it seems to run pretty smoothly so we're not spending a bunch of time dealing with that. We're able to work with the monitoring functions of it and set some things up. 

The Team Center piece seems to be working really well now, we're starting to implement some of that so it's taking advantage of some functionality that was already there but didn't really work that well. We're starting to use that and add some more value to our customers.

Based on those things I'd give it a little bump up. It works well for us, gives a lot of visibility.

I would recommend it to a friend. I would just say make sure you understand your environment, and compare your environment to somebody that's already implemented, to understand some of that work. Get the right reference call.

The use case is for crash analytics. We want to know what went wrong, and what is the area in my code that I can improve on.

In terms of performance, we are still evaluating it, but so far so good.

The time to deliver, time to market, is the greatest improvement.

The crash analytics, and that it goes down to the level of code where it shows, "Hey, this is an area you need to check."

Custom dashboards.

It's pretty stable. I'm not the one who configures it but I'm the one who drills down to the reports and checks what went wrong. It's good.

I'm not sure because I'm not the one who configures it.

No support tickets so far. That means the product is stable.

We had a presentation from CA and everybody from the product management side was impressed by it. We are still evaluating it.

When my company is investing in a vendor the criteria are

• brand
• reliability
• scalability.

I give it an eight out of 10 overall because I don't see custom dashboards. Plus, some of the stat analysis features that were explained are not that easy to use. 

Otherwise, it does what it's supposed to do.

I would say go ahead and at least give it a try.

We are using multiple functions like monitoring applications, files, storage, and DBs.

Performance is very good.

It helps us change from being being reactive to proactive.

We're working in a huge environment. It enables me to cover all functionalities and monitor all selected elements over multiple servers, multiple applications, multiple IT resources, and to cover multiple users.

There are some issues, including required additional features. But we're not prepared to list them here.

It's stable, it's good enough.

It needs more features, more performance, especially in a huge environment.

We get support from Future Systems, a CA partner. The support is good. Sometimes the response is quick. We are working in a bank, a huge bank, with multiple branches related to the main center. When there is trouble, when there are problems, a business interruption, we need fast support, immediate support, strong support. Future Systems, in our opinion, covers this, but only somewhat. We would rate them "good" to "very good."

Our CA partner suggested we use this product.

Somewhat easy, but some steps were more difficult. It's easy if you install using the default settings. When customizing the installation, you need multiple scales and more knowledge.

When choosing a new vendor the important things for us are the product and the company's reputation.

It's not a 10 out of 10 because the list of features we need. We're always looking forward. But it does cover most of what we need.

We recommended this product to two other banks and both purchased it. We have also recommended it to several other banks.

Primarily the product is used for monitoring the Business critical banking applications of my Organisation like Internet Banking etc.

In our organization, the critical applications are being monitored with thresholds set for any malfunctioning through APM. Also, we have configured Dashboards which display any deviation of the application from normal. Further, the Tool is integrated with CA SOI, which displays the alerts at the Service level. Overall the Tools helps to detect any issue emerging with indepth analysis available for the resolution through APM components.

Presently we are making maximum use of this product for IBM Websphere monitoring with agents monitoring the MQ's. We are also using the java and .net agents for monitoring the respective applications. Introscope Reports and Dashboards provide business users a customized option to view data that is most important from their perspective. Along with Introscope, the CEM is being used for the monitoring of the Business transactions for defects and incidents.

Based on my experience with the product, I found two areas which can be improved on in future. Firstly, the APM upgrade procedure is a bit complicated with compatibility issues which can emerge like between agents and EM/Collectors. Secondly, the CA documentation/Knowledge Articles on the product can be improved.

The product is quite stable once the deployment is finished. Overall, the product properly deployed is quite stable.

Scalibility is quite well defined for the product with proper Sizing sheet available for the pre deployment scenario and finalizing accurately based on the same.

On a scale of 1-5, I would rate the level of technical support a 3.5. The reason being as per my experience, CA is lacking in resources having in-depth knowledge of the product, but it is being improved over time.

The initial setup is not that complex. But eventually the complexity can grow, but not to unmanageable levels since the variety of monitoring it can perform is vast. The organization can go for as much in-depth monitoring as they require.

It was a vendor team implementation. The level of their expertise was good.

My domain experience is with CA Service Assurance Tools. I have worked with other CA products like CA Spectrum, eHealth, NetQoS, CA UIM (Ca Nimsoft). Hence this was my 1st preference and it stood by CA standards.

It's a detailed product which suits maximum client requirements.

We are using it for application performance management (APM).

For example, before each upgrade of critical mission application, we have the APM set for prep, and all administrators can do a stretch test, and they see how applications are working under the load. It is great, because they see which part of the code, network, or any programs on the database are slow. We are using it, not for productions, for the testing in pre-production.

We are using the web view for the displaying the data and interpreting the dashboarding for the customer.

The product fits its functions. The presentation layer is nice for me. However, what I would like to improve is its integrations with the dashboarding of other CA products.

It is very stable. We have not experienced any crashes. If we have any performance issues, we just edit some manager and we can continue.

The scalability is really fast. Though maybe it should be faster. Maybe it is still some point for improvement for the APM if CA would provide some docker installation, this would make it even faster. 

Because the docker container is a coached service, and if it will have a some performance issue, we will automatically deploy the new docker installation and a new docker agent to the endpoint and do everything possible without installation. 

When I catch the right Level 2 engineer on the APM site, everything is fine, and I would give them an eight out of 10. They are great. 

If you will ask me about the general Level 1 support of the CA, and I would give them a two or three out of 10 because it takes a long time to get to them to focus on the program. Also, it takes a long time to redirect to the right Level 2 engineer. 

The setup is complex. It is a little bit difficult to explain to our customers what APM is because we have problems to find the right people on the customer site. CA could provide a simple explanation for the technical customers.

AppDynamics.

Anybody can work with the APM, because this solution is so flexible.

Right now, it is the standard product for the application performance management RAR. There a lot concurrent solutions from different vendors. It is a really good, stable, flexible product, but there are no special features when I compare it with with the other solutions from the other vendors. 

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.

We are using it for application performance monitoring. We have about 2000 applications and mobile applications. We are even using it for applications in the cloud now. So, we are pretty happy with the product.

It is the easiest way to obtain metrics in order to understand the behavior of the application, and also, if the application and the users are working well. 

1. We are receiving feedback from the DevOps teams in order to improve the way they are building new applications. 
2. We are discovering how the user uses the applications and what their performance is with them.

It does not help prioritize application performance issues at the moment, but the application and the product are working well. 

I would like to see a mobile application for the dashboard or the performance.

It is very stable.

The scalability is very good, because we used to have only the latest applications and we are now moving to containers and the newest technologies. 

The technical support is responsive.

At the beginning, it was very easy. However, the fine tuning was complex. At the very start, we used a basic metrics. Once we used more complex metrics, it was hard to fine tune. In the end, it is easy to use. 

It is very useful for us. We are using a lot of their metrics and their features.

It is a monitoring tool used for business intelligence.

It is highly-customizable.

It alerts to application performance dips.

It has been used extensively in KPN's environment since 2013.

It is very stable.

Scalability is very good, because you can choose different amounts of agents.

When we were trying to restore historical data, we have reached certain limitations, which have restricted our historical view from being resized. Also, it change the data from one year into 200 days, historically. 

Technical support is excellent. If you opened a support ticket, you would get a reply within a few business hours. They call back and make themselves available.

Yes, I used a different company before, Dynatrace, who is a major APM player. I also used a bit of AppDynamics.

We switched because of efficiency and cost. I think CA APM is a very effective solution. 

It was complicated to build up an agent version that housed all the data needed. There are many varieties of agents for different environments. That is the hardest part, selecting the correct one. However if you have selected the proper agent that collects the data that you are interested in, after that, it is fairly simple.

This product was referred to me.

I have tested Applicare on Java Applications and it performed exceptionally well.

Root cause analysis in real time and user experience management, which is turning out to be one of the most important feature as user experience is one of the major driving forces in the IT industry.

It largely reduces turnaround time from application failure, and has reduced man hours in managing availability, performance, and scaling applications.

Applicare should open diagnostic features for PHP, Rails, and .Net-based applications.

Around six months.

None. Very simple deployment.

No.

Not yet.

Excellent.

Yes, Nagios open source software.

It was quite simple and straightforward.

In-house.

It could be instant as it can justify performance metrics against infrastructure cost and can save on many software licensing costs.

It is good. Give a try. It comes with a one-month trial pack. Nearly all the features are active.

No.

There are a number of valuable features for us:

• Dashboard
• Implementation of tool
• CEM
• TIM
• Alerts
• Actions
• Reports
• Triage maps
• Transaction tracers
• Team center
• EP Agent
• Management modules
• PostgreSQL backup

It has helped us to showcase business use cases better to our clients during demos or PoCs.

Application performance in terms of transactions is a bit slow and could be quicker.

I have been using it for a year.

There have been no issues with our deployments.

We have had no issues with the stability.

We have been able to scale it to our needs.

Technical support has been a 10 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.

Easily map between transaction and method recall

Useful automatics alerts

Easily understand graphics

The way these tools show the information is very useful. this is a tool that records information from Java and .NET applications, and obtain information about how many times an method has been call in a period of time (usually 30 sec), how many times respond in this span of time or is delayed or stall.

Usually you can map the java / .NET method to some type of transaction, so the graphic shows how the transaction is working (or not working) then you can establish a base line and alerts when the behavior is not that is expected.

The graphic display that shows the variables in the time is very intuitive and almost everyone is able to obtain useful information.

You can add other standard monitors like SNMP or even personalized monitors that are integrated with the platform. the platform itself is easily integrated whit the manager of manager (CA Spectrum or others) or even you can access the database with affect the tool behavior. We have been integrating the tool with splunk in a way to obtain deep correlation.

Release new features, but in an intelligent way. We need more capabilities to analyze the information that tools collects; for example, using artificial intelligence, or something like that. There is a lot of artificial intelligence, for example, in cars, and other things. These technological advances has not been translated to the monitoring tool yet. We would like something like AI in monitoring tools. There is a lot of information to correlate and useful information to obtain about what is happening in the company's systems.

Some few times the agents lost connection whit the manager, but usually for changes made in the java / . net server.

The solution is technically scalable, but it is very expensive for our business especially it the way that CA calculates the price, that is based on the number of processors. If we use it too much, it will be too expensive.

Customer Service:

It is fairly good.

Technical Support:

We have the solution in a SaaS schema with a local partner, they give us the first and second level support then the partner used the CA support. I have not worked directly with the CA service or with technical support but I fell it is not the best.

Nope similar, there was a tool from IBM but was not as good as this one.

Initial setup was very fast. It was very easy to deploy.

We need to be able to obtain new solutions for full feet new necessities . When there is a new technology, if the application is not able to monitoring it, we must research new technologies to enable monitoring these new technologies. Now we are looking for a news solutions.

This was the model we used when we made the change a five years ago. We also considered IBM and HPE. We chose CA APM. They do the most for us.

Ensure use the tools to develop good instrumentation and to make the best use of its capabilities; for example, to define correlations and setting the levels when alarms must be sent.

• Transaction traces
• Team Center
• Dashboards
• Alerts

Dashboards need to be improved in order to make them self-explanatory.

Technical support is very helpful and supportive.

We did not use other solutions, but we have some ideas about other solutions.

Other solutions are very much self0explanatory and easy to understand.

Others have on-premises as well as SaaS solutions.

The setup was straightforward and simple.

The implementation was done in-house.

Pricing and licensing are not issues.

I was not aware of any evaluation of other products.

They need to come up with a SaaS solution. The current requirements are full of SaaS solutions.

• View the smallest component and how it's performing
• See how all the components are connected
• Have a predictive alert
• To customize alerts and reports
• To use attributes to 'mark' and group components

We're CA partners and we work with their product and we deploy the solution to our customers. Working with CA APM is effective, simple, and the customers are satisfied with the solution.

The new experience center needs some improvement to works with all the attributes, but it offers great potential.

We have been using this solution for about six years.

There have been no issues with stability. Sometimes there is something to fine-tune, but you have the help of the CA communities and eventually, the help of support.

There were no scalability issues. We performed large installations without any problems.

Technical support is good and they are quick to respond. It would be better if they can create a different, more technical approach. Maybe they could go directly to second level support for partners.

We did not use another solution, although I know of other one. I think Introscope is a more complete solution.

The initial installation was easy. The fine-tuning of the environment can be tricky, especially for big environments.

I'm not the right person to ask about pricing, as I am in pre-sales.

I know the competitor's solutions, but CA APM is more complete and they have an interesting and challenging roadmap.

CA APM is based on a solid solution that could be helpful for everybody. It has a technical view where you can check every single bit of information and a map view with all the components. On top of that, Experience View can help you to look at the health of your environment and quickly identify problems or performance issues.

Detailed alert settings give more control on when they should or should not appear.

The tree-structure tracing shows where we are spending the most time in a call-by-call sequence. But the tracing capabilities of other APM tools are more advanced than CA.

APM tools are essential for finding performance bottlenecks and pervasive issues. It gives a high level point of view on where there is a problem. This tool, in particular, is not as good at deep dive analysis. Newer versions, like 10.5 with AXA, Dynatrace, and AppDynamics may be better at going deeper into root-cause analysis.

Deep dive analysis and performance need improvement. Introscope scalability performance lags behind for our team, which looks after 3,000 JVMs and millions of metrics.

I have used this product for a half a year.

The product is stable most of the time. However, like any software out there, there are bugs. Few crashes have been experienced, but incorrect metrics and improper collector behaviours have been observed.

We have had scalability issues. Performance slows down with the number of JVMs our team supports.

I would give technical support a rating of 7/10. Few people are available to support the product. However, good, proper attention is given to urgent matters.

We didn’t have a previous solution.

I was not involved in the initial setup.

This is out of my scope.

Other alternatives are being actively considered.

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.

The most valuable feature is the flexibility and how you can get any data pretty much anywhere. They have a lot of out-of-the-box solutions for applications, servers and web servers, but you can also use their APIs and their EPA to get additional data, building and correlating it altogether.

We have some applications from which we can't get data with out-of-the-box tools from CA or even AppDynamics, so we need the EPA agent to get that data and then compare them to those that are captured with out-of-the-box tools. We really appreciate that that's a strength and a flexibility of APM.

It's critical that we're able to find actual problems or issues with applications on our network. We use APM to do that, as well as to troubleshoot the causes or triage them so that we know where to look for the problem.

It's got a steep learning curve, although some parts of it are easy to use.

I also know that CA is doing a big push to play catch-up to get the UI to be a little more streamlined, easier, and intuitive to use. Hopefully when they do that, they'll have an advantage over other solutions out there, like AppDynamics.

I haven't had issues with deployment.

In the previous releases, that was an issue for both my current and former companies. There was a conflict between the Java agent and our app servers. It was conflicting with some of the web services and so it crashed our servers. In the current release, however, I'm not aware of any such stability issues.

So far, scalability has not been an issue. There's a limit on the number of enterprise managers where the data goes to be reviewed. The solution, however, is that if you reach the single-cluster limits, then you can federate other clusters, so that way you can view up.

The main issue with scalability is, however, that there's a lot of overhead required to keep it expanding. With AppDynamics, on the other hand, you at least only need one server in order to accommodate a lot more agents. With CA APM, you need a lot of central servers and enterprise managers to have that same load. It is scalable, but the maintenance or the overhead to maintain it is a lot higher than other products.

They've been slow at times to get us answers and solutions, such as a few years back when we had the issue of the agent pressuring our servers. I haven't had to submit many support tickets, though, as I have co-workers who do that primarily. The feedback I've heard from them is that AppDynamics has done a better job than CA with support.

We also use AppDynamics.

It was all set up before I joined.

Both CA APM and AppDynamics have their place, but just do your research. CA, I think, has demonstrated their commitment to the product and improving it and playing catch-up in areas where they need to.

It gives us the overall capacity measurement for our current environment.

We're able to determine where there are bottlenecks in our system. To some extent, we're also able to see what might be causing some of these issues.

We are also using the tool for determining performance bottlenecks in our Java-based applications. It provides us with performance metrics.

It provides access to problems, but not to the problem analysis. You cannot track the problem to the root cause. For example, you can see that the applications have a performance bottleneck, but you can't perform a drill-down analysis into the actual code of the problem.

Also, it doesn't provide dynamic analysis. This may be OK for mainframe customers, but for those with distributed systems, DynaTrace may be the better solution. 

I have to test it from version to version first before we implement to make sure it can perform for us.

Setup for a limited scope is easy, but it's difficult for a wider scope, in which case you need a longer deployment time. We have a mainframe-oriented system, so we can scope the old activity to the mainframe. but if we were fully distributed, it's a little bit complicated because we'd have more than 100 servers.

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.

The CEM end-to-end transaction feature is the most valuable.

I like APM because it is a complete solution that helps the production environment to identify the root cause of problems before affecting the application or services.

QA and production.

I have been using CA APM for three years.

The QA environment helps us to identify and fix stability issues and release it to production.

We have not had scalability issues. You can scale up to 10 collectors.

I would give technical support a rating of 10/10. The technical support is always really amazing.

I tried different solutions, but CA APM is the most complete solution on the market.

It was complex configuring the service transactions from CEM.

I have no information about pricing.

We did look at alternatives and all customers made bids.

Being a leader in the market for more than 14 years is one reason it is the best choice.

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!

The Webview because I can obtain more detail and CEM because I can quantify the business.

It helps us find the cause and the errors in our application quickly.

Team center can give more information.

5 months.

When we made the upgrade to 10.3 we have some problems with the new version.

No.

Is really good but sometimes the answer time is really slow.

The setup is easy. The problem begins when you need an specific installation.

When the installation begins, read the documentation because sometimes important configurations are not configured by default.

In our organization, it was very common to create crisis rooms where we gathered experts from all areas to investigate an application problem by allegations of users about problems of slowness and errors. After we started using APM in our environment, we managed to reduce the creation of these rooms by 90%.

• Detection of errors that occur to users
• Measurement of response time
• Transaction traces

Currently, we have in our park 600 servers monitored with the APM, and we have on average 2000 applications still to be included in the monitoring. As our environment is very large and we support all of them with a team of about 20 people, we cannot verify all the logs looking for these errors. So, we set up rules in APM to warn us when the application starts to present errors, and we already interact directly with the development team to handle these errors. This is also true for the average response time. The tracers use the same ones when a more in-depth investigation of the problem is necessary to discover the exact point of the problems that we are investigating.

The creation of a report is an area with room for improvement.

The reports are a key part of APM in my vision because it is through them that we manage to generate the evidence to direct the development team and operational support to address. However, we can not extract the information of the tool through reports. We have needed several times to use screen print screen, CTRL + C and CTRL + V. I cannot change the font, color, size, bold or any text I put in the report, I cannot change the page size among other things.

We have vital information in the tool that we cannot extract as topology changes, application topology design, type-separated error relationship, and so on.

We did have stability problems in versions 10.1 and 9.7.

We had many problems of instability, but when we upgraded to version 10.5, these problems reduced drastically.

At this moment, we have not encountered any scalability issues.

Technical support is excellent. Whenever I needed support, I had an excellent service.

We did not previously use a different solution. We just did a PoC.

All settings have always been pretty simple.

Negotiate a lot, but do not forget to buy the product because it is worth it.

We evaluated AppDynamics and HPE Diagnostics.

APM only worked here in the company because CA's after sales is very present here and acted as a true partner for us. I strongly recommend having someone from CA “together forever”, because at the beginning it was very difficult to understand what the tool was reporting.

My organization can find the correct solution to an alert the first time around. This shortens the resolution time.

I found the solution's end-to-end analysis and flexibility most valuable.

Java Console uses too much memory.

I have not encountered any issues with stability.

I have not encountered any issues with scalability.

I would rate the level of technical support as "Good."

We used a different solution in the past. We switched because of this solution's end-to-end analysis feature.

We did not evaluate other options, since there were no other solutions that we knew about with the capacity for end-to-end analysis.

In the newer versions of the application, they had something called a Triage Map. That basically breaks it down from a service perspective. You actually see it from a service perspective and then you see what components make up that service.

It really helps the business. They are not seeing individual servers or individual devices, they're seeing it from a service level, which is what everybody wants to see. It works the logic, the mapping, and how the application sticks to the database or the web server. It automatically creates that map for you.

• Acts as a troubleshooting-like application
• Deals with performance issues
• Helps in trending, like the data mine, the load which is running on the application servers
• Helps the development team to fine-tune and proactively manage the application.

Some of the reporting features. we are running maybe two versions behind, so we haven't explored the reporting functionality.

I believe the latest version of APM 105, there is a reporting capability, which we would like to leverage when we do the upgrade.

But I think that was something which was missing. Right now, if I need to run some reports, I need to run some manual queries, which is very time consuming.

Hopefully in the later releases, which is out there, we can explore the reporting functionality. There are some features that I would have like to see, which are not there in the current version.

I haven't had any prior stability issues. The only issues I have usually, is more like a question. In other words, if this can be done or it cannot be done. But I don't have that many issues pertaining to performance or the system going down or anything. I really love the product.

There were no real issues with scalability. If you have proper scaling, it depends on how you implement the product. You need to make sure it's a scalable solution, depending on the number of agents that reporting to the manager. In terms of providing scalability, it should be fine. I haven't seen any issues.

I would give technical support a rating of 8/10.

I have been here since 2010 and they have been using APM since. I really didn't have a APM solution, so this is the first time we've used an APM.

They use a database called Postgres, which is an open source database. When setting that up, we always run into issues. The application itself is not that complicated. You'll need to get it installed and then configure it. But when installing the database, we've seen a bit a lot of it, and there are issues with it.

We didn't really evaluate other options, but right now, we are in the process of doing it. Right now, we're trying to compare with AppDynamics. That's something we are working on.

They can surely give this try, but there are some other tools out there. When we implemented this back in 2009, there weren't that many competitors or vendors for APM. There were less nine years ago. There have been quite a few, like we have AppDynamics, you have Dynatrace, and they're pretty good tools too.

I would suggest that they can do a proof of concept depending on what the requirements are. Some features are good in one product, but the other product has something else to offer. It's still a good product, but then they can always look at some other solutions too, before making the final decision.

• Real-time information
• Historical info
• Smart instrumentation
• Customizable

• Centralized point to start studying a problem
• Fast analyses
• Getting quick solutions on most cases, but sadly, not for the hardest ones

• User interface customizable components
• Being able to establish relations with source code
• Being able to add some custom add-ons, such as graphical add-ons and/or computes
• 1.- To solve the lacks of nice graphical components i think that this area could be opened to parterns and community. If you develop some mechanism to add graphical
  components, with angular,etc, giving a template in some way that we can add your own html,css and javascript, community will generate his own widgets and share via marketplace, so they will improve your software and make it more visually appealing (same for java to workstation application). I attack some examples i have done to clarify objective.
• 2.- javascripts can be done now and added to introscope but it will better if you can add it and appear as an option same as sum, max, etc. I mean now you can create a javascript and select the metrics affected by one regex, but it will be nice to have the option to make a calculator that simply adds itself to the options and be applied on metric grupings just like sum, etc. And also share with all ppl.
• I will like to comment to you one more point. I think that introscope has to be more application focused, first question always is what applications are afectted/working,not servlets o jsp, so it will be nice that introscope has a mechanims to asociate a JSP, servlets, backend (DB schema), etc to 1 or more application or context, althoug it be manualy .

We have been using this solution for about four years.

Sometimes the workstation hangs or becomes unresponsive. However, the web application works worse, is ugly, and we prefer to use the workstation.

There were scalability issues. With a high amount of data, we found that there is some loss of information when asking for the CLW. We have an issue open on this and CA its working to solve it.

I would give technical support a rating of 7/10. They gave us fast answers when we asked for information, but there were delays to get a solution, even when the issue was clearly a bug.

The setup was easy. It was self-learning in my case.

I don't deal with pricing or licensing, but I think it is a bit expensive. However, the product is really good.

It is a very good product, but it has to fit their needs because it is mainly focused on JAVA/.NET applications, although it has agents for PHP and Node.js.

Before CEM, we didn't know when the users were having issues. We always learned about issues when the users called management and the managers informed us about the problems. That was an embarrassment.

With CEM, we call the users, help desk, and application support before a situation becomes problematic. Therefore, problems are deflected and embarrassments of not knowing what is happening are avoided.

The CEM (Customer Experience Manager) allows us to see user errors and proactively react to issues before they become problems.

Presentation and reporting should be improved. Very often, we use tools such as Kibana or Jaspersoft for dashboards and reporting on CA APM data because CA APM’s old interfaces do not reflect well in modern displays, compared to those new tools.

However, we are seeing an improvement with the introduction of Team Center. We would like to see the same type of graphics in the old reporting facility.

We have not had stability issues. The product is very stable and corrective maintenance is provided regularly.

We have not had scalability issues.

Support is average, but there is a great community that provides solutions almost instantly to any query.

We previously used IBM ITCAM.

It was a straightforward initial implementation. We started small and grew bigger.

Negotiate, negotiate, and negotiate.

We also evaluated IBM ITCAM.

Have a dedicated monitoring team.

Having implemented into production, we found that initially the application had quite a few incidents, alerts, and problems as we used monitoring to unearth some technical debt.

However, after implementing “smoke detectors” and resolving the technical debt, the applications have become much more stable, with fewer production incidents, fewer defects, higher reliability and quality of service.

Cross-platform business transaction tracing, custom triggers, thresholds and alerting, and deep dive root cause analysis are the most valuable features.

Cross-platform business transaction tracing supports the ability to monitor end-to-end performance across the stack, providing granular insight into customer experience KPIs, which are a critical success factor for organizations. Business transaction tracing also allows identification and drill down into problems within the stack, reducing the mean time to detect and resolve problems.

Developing custom triggers and thresholds for problem management allow the introduction of “smoke alarms”, which can prevent severity 1 system failures, improve productivity (fewer war rooms), and increase application stability, reliability, and performance.

I would like them provide more guidance on specific tuning of monitoring options to avoid unacceptable overhead. This has proven to be a little bit of a challenge, particularly in the cross enterprise CICS monitoring overhead, which we are currently working through with CA. They have been very helpful in advising us with this.

We have had stability issues. Not all applications are equal, and what works well for one app may not be applicable to another.

“Chatty” apps, excessive monitoring, or sampling can cause memory issues and server crashes resulting in a little bit of trial and error to determine monitoring levels that have minimal impact on performance and stability of environments.

We have not had any scalability issues.

Technical support is excellent.

Other parts of the organization are using Dynatrace, but both products are very capable.

The initial setup was relatively straightforward, with good documentation and technical support, both via email and on-site.

There is some research needed to determine licensing costs, based on the number of DataPower instances for the Nastel agent, for example.

We didn’t evaluate other options as this was pre-determined via our group administration.

• Make sure you sign up for the appropriate training
• Ensure you have dedicated on-site resources to implement, build, and maintain the tooling
• Make sure you extend training to the production support, developers, and business stakeholders
• Develop a monitoring and alerting strategy, with a supporting roadmap and pipeline for deployment across business-critical systems.

While out-of-the-box monitoring is relatively straightforward, the value comes from custom implementation of alerts and dashboards that focus on specific application functionality.

Agent metrics and customization are valuable features for us because we can set the "resting" metrics to shutdown to prevent overhead.

The product has given us better visibility of the agent and communication of the WAS application to the MQ server.

It should be more user-friendly, especially the CEM part and the agent instrumentation. They should be easier for the customer experience. This is one of the key areas where other competitors, like AppDynamics, beat CA.

I have been using this solution for four years.

We did not encounter any issues with stability, but you should understand how it works and build accordingly.

We did not encounter any issues with scalability.

I would give technical support a rating of 10/10.

We did not use any other solution previously.

The setup was straightforward.

Pricing is a key element that needs to be noted in terms of the market for the solution.

We did not evaluate other solutions. We selected this five years ago as there were no other such options.

I have no specific advice except that it is a wise choice. Go for it.

The traditional Introscope portion of the product is the most valuable. It provides good visibility to the JVM and Java application.

We use CA APM for monitoring and alerting of our Java applications.

CA has very recently upgraded its “Browser Response Time Monitoring”, as it was previously known. CA has been listening to its customer requirements, and the Digital Experience Collector is a positive step forward.

Unfortunately, my application is Java version 6, and CA has removed support for Java 6 starting with CA APM, Version 10.5, where the Digital Experience Collector is available.

I have used this solution since 2008.

Because my application is running on IBM WebSphere and Java 6, there were ‘workarounds’ I needed to apply. CA would provide a distinct copy of the Java agent and the associated configuration files to avoid the trouble spots. Unfortunately, these workarounds also disabled important functionality, such as deep tracing.

I have not had any scalability issues.

Technical support is good. They work with urgency.

We did not have any previous solutions.

The support documentation has gotten much better over the last few years. Installation is not difficult, once you understand the different components of the APM solution.

Consider the needs of your application and compare a few vendors.

I recognize Dynatrace and AppDynamics as leaders for e-commerce application APM.

Do a thorough proof of concept.

If your application is not current and can’t be upgraded, you are at risk because CA is moving very fast to catch up with Dynatrace and AppDynamics on functionality. But in the process, they will leave behind older technology, such as support for Java 6.

I run an IBM WebSphere Commerce application, which uses Java 6, and I bumped up against several limitations. As my application is public facing and has a large breadth of URLs, it is difficult to configure for very specific URLs. Rather, I needed to implement “URL groups”, which are generalized URL buckets. In an e-commerce application, that might be “product pages”, “category pages”, or “checkout pages”. Implementing the URL grouping is not easy, and if you get it wrong, you’ll have what is termed a “metric explosion”.

A metric explosion means too many distinct metrics are collected, which can put stress on the Java agent and/or the Enterprise Collector. Cleaning up a metric explosion is complicated, unless you are willing to delete all your historically collected metrics.

Again, I experienced these limitations with version 10.3 of APM and lower. The 10.5 version has made improvements, but my Java 6 application is not supported for version 10.5, so I cannot effectively provide feedback on it.

• Experience View: Provides a business-focused view. It answers the key question as to what is the customer experience, with a minimal amount of work required.
• Assisted Triage and Analysis Notebook: Answers the question as to why the experience is poor, without having to do all the manual digging around.

With Experience View, our operation team has all the required information in regards to the health and quality of transactions and applications. Thus, in turn, it improves collaboration and reduces the MTTR. It doesn’t require an expert to identify the RCA.

It needs to work on the mobility and the digital aspects, as they are currently getting merged in today’s scenario.

I have been using this solution for the past five years.

There were no stability issues, i.e., not with its current features.

We did experience some scalability issues, i.e., only at the mobility experience monitoring end.

I would give technical support a rating of 9/10.

AppDynamics and Dynatrace are equally good solutions.

The initial setup is straightforward. With the default dashboard and differential analysis, there is no need to configure static threshold. It starts to deliver the greater value to the customer from day one.

We are MSP partners, so we have been delivering the best licensing options for our own customers.

We looked at other solutions, namely AppDynamics and Dynatrace.

• Delivers an easy, proactive, intelligent, and collaborative (EPIC) solution
• Helps to deliver a flawless user experience
• Has end-to-end application monitoring coverage, i.e., from mobile to mainframe
• Available in the SaaS version

APM integration is the most valuable feature because of the possibility of mapped links breaking for web services with internal components.

We can review recorded sessions of UXE.

Mobile and virtual banking: The app transaction layer is mapped with the UX.

I have used this for three months during a PoC.

We did have stability problems.

We did have scalability problems.

As of right now, I have not used technical support.

We previously used a different solution, and we switched because of APM integration.

Setup was easy and simple.

We did not evaluate other options.

Use the correct application instrumentation.

Every component has its own value. Investigator is the most valuable feature for me because we have deep visibility for application performance via all agents. We can capture the in-depth transaction trace and error trace which helps us to provide RCA to the customer.

We have deployed APM agents on multiple applications for our customers who had the worst performance. The application team was unable to pinpoint the problem and that was the main pain area of the business. We have collected and shared RCA for some problems with the business and application folks. Now, the application team has more visibility in regards to their application performance and they can easily pinpoint to the problematic area by transaction traces.

There are various areas which have room for improvement:

• First of all, the product team has to design something with which we can showcase the complete call graph of any transaction and overall health of the application.
• There is a need to improve the Team Center functionalities and performance, as it doesn’t work properly in a vital environment.

• There is a need to develop any utility to auto-schedule the Investigator report.

• There is a need to design a function with which we can export the transaction trace in PDF or in any other format.
• There is a need to increase the traffic-handling capacity of TIM and discover another way to monitor business transaction via CEM instead of port mirroring (SPAN). Hence, some clients don’t allow mirroring traffic that has confidential data from the business perspective.

• The product team needs to work on the product’s architecture because the number of server requirements is very high compared to the other competitors. For example, if we need to monitor a large number of agents, then we require 4-5 machines for the APM solution installation. On the other hand, the competitor can handle the same number of agents by using only 1-2 servers. (I am aware that the APM capacity planning and hardware sizing depends on the number of metrics that will be monitored.)

It has been almost three years that I am using this solution. I am working as a services consultant with an organization since December 2013.

I have faced scalability and stability issues. When we needed to monitor a large number of data metrics, then these kind of issues occur.

The customer support is very good and active. I would like to rate it a 9 out of 10.

Professionally, I have worked only with CA solutions but I have tried different solutions in test environments.

The CA APM installation is very straightforward. It is as simple as stated in the CA documents.

I don’t deal in pricing and licensing so I don’t have any idea about this aspect much. However, the best thing about APM licensing is that it is a trust-based licensing, so monitoring will never have any impact due to licenses.

I would like to advise everyone to try this solution. It is best APM solution in the market, as per my knowledge.

The alert, action, and dashboards features are the most valuable to us. The alert capability of the CA APM solution is helping us to identify and react to issues before they happen and affect our services. The dashboard features allow us to see the health status of our applications visually; thus, it helps us to identify issues faster and easier.

Using CA APM has allowed us to know about the performance of our applications and servers and also to identify issues before they happen.

It helped us be proactive and resolve problems before they become system-wide issues.

The dashboards should be easier to build.

I have used this product for four years.

Sometimes, we had stability issues.

We did not encounter any scalability issues.

I would give the technical support a 10 out of 10. CA has excellent technical support.

Previously, we were using a different solution. The reason we switched was because CA APM fits better to our monitoring needs.

I think initial setup is a little complex.

Pricing and licensing is reasonable.

We did not evaluate any other solution.

It is a good product and comes with great features.

• 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.

I think the most valuable feature is the deep dive feature. It has the ability to provide in-depth knowledge on the application code. It's invaluable.

For us, it's given us completely brand new visibility that we never had before. Application owners are able to completely understand the application better now on the back end, as well as on the front end. It’s pretty much an eye opener for them.
A lot of it, we try to do it through alerts and dashboarding. You want customers to spend a lot less time poking around and we want the dashboards to be a tell-tale sign of what is going on in their environment.

I think my biggest feedback from a negative perspective would be the presentation layer, which I think they're already working towards. The user interface, that presentation layer, I think that's already coming in the next few iterations, so I'm looking forward to that. That has been a big challenge for them.

Then also there's a lot of integration right now from within, which will be very helpful also. Mainly, on the customer experience manager side, it would be great if they could integrate that into the existing user interface.

It's pretty robust and scalable, so I haven't had any issues. I've been using these products for the last seven years, so stability-wise, it's one of the better, scalable products I have worked with.

The tech support is great. Yeah, actually, I know most of them by name since I've been there. They're very helpful, very intelligent, very professional; great customer service.

My experience has been mainly that an existing solution did not work as well, or doesn't scale as well, and so this one, CA APM, was looked at, evaluated, and decided. Some of them were above my pay grade. Once the decision was made, that's when I was involved.

I was involved with the CA professional services from the start of the deployment. We did the whole architecture and deployment. Once we were in ops mode, I also did an upgrade earlier this year. It's been pretty smooth.

There are competitors out there. When selecting CA APM, a lot of it is also the fact that, I think, it's scalability, usability, and the amount of data that it provides for the application from end to end. I don't think there are a lot of products out there that can do that.

I would definitely encourage others to evaluate it first, see what works for them. It's not for everyone. It all depends on the size and what you're trying to accomplish. I would definitely encourage them to evaluate the product as much as they can and decide from there.

It does a lot of good things. There are a few challenges. Mainly, I think it's the amount of knowledge that it provides to the application team; it's vast. I worked with two or three other products and I don't see them providing that much metric tools and information about that application the way APM does.

It show us a clearer view of our business and we can take proactive decisions using data collected by CA CEM.

With the CA Customer Experience we take Marketing actions, for example, we know how many transactions ocurred in our internet banking.

With the CA CEM value settings we can measure the size of ours earnings and even more of our losses caused by defects.

CA CEM show us a business vision from the transaction hierarchy. It provides easily understandable information to users with little or any knowledge. Assigning a monetary value to transactions is very useful for understanding the amount of money being lost by an organization because of a problem or even the total gain for a specific transaction.

The icing on the cake is the troubleshooting tab that helps us see possibilities for the continuous improvement of the business.

With the new feature CA Team Center is much easier to view the information of my user experience, with this unified vision, it was even practical for lay users to use the tool

The CA APM workstation (console) connection is too slow with some metrics.

The integration with CA Spectrum is quite difficult to create, and it is also only one way, only being used to view alarms coming from CA APM. It would be interesting to visualize APM metrics in CA Spectrum OneClick. I see a need to improve this integration.

The CA APM Comand Center is very good, on paper, but in pract does not work in the best way, this promises to be a and indispensable feature of the product, but has much to evolve.

I have not encountered any stability issues, in the newest version Workstation Works fine

I have not encountered any scalability issues.

Customer Service:

Customer service is excellent.

Technical Support:

Technical support is high quality, but little quantity... I'd like to have more APM support.

No.

If you have a Postgres DB, is annoying to Update CA APM, i have some difficults to update this, but if you can simply forget the previous base withou need to save previous data, it is much easier to install directly.

I implemented the solution in my enviroment, but following the advice of a Support team of the manufacturer.

I neve calculated my ROI, but i have date on how my transaction improved, in a more Technical way, I hada a 25% rection in defects and 37% redection in transactions response time, as well as a nearly 100% increase in the number of transactins ocurring on a daily basis.

Althougth it is a bit expensive, it is really worth it

Yes, Dynatracer and AppDynamics, but i prefer CA APM because of the Customer Experience feature, we are a financial institution, we use the CA CEM to Marketing actions, financial and etc. I think the Customer Experience of the CA CEM is the best in the Market.

During the implemetation, you must understand "where you are today". From that, you should think about "where you want to be" in a certain period of time, and what you have to do to get there. CA APM will help you get there, but you must first draw up your goal. This tool requires a certain maturity to deliver the expected results, so start with a less-complex enviroment, mature the use of the solution use and from there, add the more complex structures.

I like the Transaction Trace Viewer and stalls feature on the front end/back end within the investigator.

It has helped to stabilize the environments and also quickly identify issues some while they are occurring and some proactively.

The extensive monitoring alert gave the ability to act quickly before an outage happens.

We haven't implemented the latest released version yet but I do believe there's a lot of improvement needed.

There's a lot of room for improvement in administration which I believe CA APM is slowly getting there, with their Agent Command Center. However, the interface and management of the entire APM infrastructure should exist via GUI.

I have used this solution for five years.

We have scaled CA APM a lot over the last few years. As time goes by, there is an increased demand for monitoring leads to underperforming enterprise managers and/or other memory issues. We are running on VM. However, CA recommends to run on a physical machine with lot of compute resources, which wouldn't be applicable to all companies with their standard environments and also in terms of the budget/funding that it requires.

The customer service is good but not excellent. I would rate it a 7 out of 10.

I personally didn't use any other solution, but my company did use the IBM APM tool.

The setup is complex. It takes some reading and understanding of the architecture along with some prior skills.

We have implemented it in-house. My advice is to install a PoC environment and familiarize yourself with all the components.

Compared to other competitors, this product is a little flexible with its pricing/licensing and is somewhat less than the other APMs in the market, with negotiations.

My advice is to implement the product and leverage all of the add-on free components. You should also compare it to other APMs in the market.