CA Digital Operational Intelligence [EOL] Reviews

We have a lot of monitoring solutions from different people. Some are external providers, like Hewlett-Packard, who provide monitoring metrics. With DOI, like the higher up solutions, we have an aggregator for all the monitoring solutions. It correlates all of the information. You can bypass every step, N 1, N 2, and N 3. You just find the good events and you code the good operator. It saves time. It saves money.

The features that I have found most valuable are the machine learning and the algorithm. We tried seven solutions. The good points of DOI are performance and efficiency under machine learning systems. 

Cisco is very expensive. Cisco is a good product when you have a lot of work that is in IPI with a mobile device or an optimized device. It makes a lot of devices connected and more stable. 

AppDynamics is a very good solution but it's very expensive and oriented for specific usage. It's not exactly what we needed. DOI from Broadcom is project-oriented to aggregate all of the Broadcom software and the network monitoring.

DOI is really oriented towards the monitoring side. They have a lot of experience with monitoring products using AI technology. If you go with Cisco, it's very specific and you may have less balance on network monitoring because Cisco has a network of their own. 

For a Cloud configuration, solutions like Datadog, are very good.

When you choose a solution, you compare the bad points and the good points with the requirements that are needed. DOI does have some bad points. The real bad part is that it's impossible to be integrated on-premise. Broadcom chose to build only on the Cloud. In the beginning, I first started to check on-premise solutions to integrate in the future with Cloud models.

So when we chose DOI, we knew the bad point was its obligation to use the Cloud or the SaaS model. But it's not a bad point now because Cloud and SaaS computing is the future of IT. But it's too early to really know about the security and what the other companies are seeing and changing.

Monitoring information is critical for a company - information about the IPs, names that we keep, and some technical information. Also critical is the security of the monitoring itself. Broadcom manages the security of the data well. 

If you have securable monitoring and your team is already using Century or other products, DOI is not a good choice because DOI is not open-source. DOI is a static solution so you will not have access to the code.

It is difficult with Sharepoint, too. If you are not in the habit of managing your static Broadcom relationship, it's not easy. The support is in India and it's already closed by the midday shift. The Broadcom support is very bad.

I had a previous integration of Broadcom and their static software. But I was able to manage the support. But for new customers, it's quite difficult to create this relationship. Please keep in mind, Broadcom is a very huge company and when you're small or medium, about 1,000 or so employees, if you don't have the team, monitoring will be difficult.

If you start a new company or are a startup, don't use Broadcom software. You don't have the weight to negotiate with Broadcom.

It's not a bad point with DOI, just a bad point with the Broadcom relationship. But if you only choose DOI, keep in mind that the product is not only its technical capabilities, but also it's support relationship with the enterprise. 

We already plan to integrate automatic recognition in future releases. Now we don't use a major part of the automatic recognition. The plan is to create or automatically correct some command execution or re-run of the image and to integrate the VPN. The next step is to use the automatic recognition and to bypass the human intervention and to have automatic intervention of the critical system.

We began to integrate these solutions about one month ago. We are in the training stage to learn how to operate this solution.

We chose DOI because during the proof of concept, the integration of all of our asset management and monitoring payments took three days. That is very short, very quick, and very efficient compared to other solutions where we spent around three or four weeks on integration.

There are around 100 people on the technical team that work on it, like infrastructures and the volume monitoring team. But for dashboard and the end users information profile, it's around 2000 people. But that is 2000 people in total over the course of a day. We do not provide a lot of dashboard IT when we create a new dashboard and we integrate the software on the team.

Again, the support is in India and it's already closed by the midday shift. The Broadcom support is very bad.

Initial setup is very simple for me because you alter the flow of your firewall to allow it to externalize to the Broadcom providers. Very simple.

After this part of the integration you open the flow to the different RPI's of the monitoring software. Sometimes the connector uses RPI's. We do the integration of pack modeling as a monitoring solution. You integrate the probe and install the components into the product to allow all of the features of DOI. So it now can be completely accessed. It's now in the monitoring process.

The integration of DOI on all my parameters and technical terminators took three days. About three days of integration.

The integrators that integrated the solution and fixed the meter controls had some difficulties. But it was deployed in three days. I can't say for a specific reason because we did pay for the integration. We paid for the tech solution but Broadcom integrates the delivery. And the integration process is the price model. So Broadcom said to us that this will take about one day, three days, ten days, twenty days... We've setup and the network comes with it on the Broadcom side.

So we switched on the DOI. But with the support contract we have with Broadcom, all of my team takes all their free time together to provide insurance monitoring and doesn't waste time on the connector implementing or the installation. All of it was on-premise conferencing with help when you integrate the product. The integration and initial setup were very simple. And they provide the help.

We used the help of the vendors to implement. Not during the proof of concept because this product is sufficiently simple to be integrated by my team. We have the support of the vendor. It's not about technical difficulty, it's just about having a good relationship with Broadcom. 

The Broadcom team is never slack. Those guys on the team are connected. When you have a little defect, we directly call the engineers and they have it fixed in about one hour. But if you integrate the connector and the product yourself and you have a defect, you have to open the ticket on the support website, wait for WebEx to send you the network tool of the third party, then they elevate to another support team to send the information to the engineer in India and you wait one or two days to have an answer whenever the engineer team in India investigates. So it's about two or three days of time lost. So it can be a difficulty.

I can't provide information around the price because it's very specific. Euro Access Group is very huge. I'm part of Access Group. So to talk about the price is very difficult for me. I think we have a good price, a very good price.

AppDynamics is two or times more expensive compared to DOI. SolarWind and DOI are approximately the same price.

When I arrived about two years ago, all of the monitoring software was not correlated. So one of my goals when I entered as access manager was to correct this. When I arrived, there were a lot of contracts, and every contract was with a different monitoring solution. It was very independent and not open for end users of the technical system. So my mission was to re-appropriate the monitoring, which I did with the IT team. During my investigation to correct this correlation, I arrived at the big chance to integrate an I/O solution. I tried seven solutions on the market with about six months of project testing and proof of concept. My hope is to have DOI in all of the monitoring solutions.

My recommendation is to have the strength of knowledge from the higher team before you try to negotiate and establish a relationship with the company. You need to have multiple external or internal mode review ports. Be sure of what solution is needed. You need someone with technical knowledge around the monitoring before you establish an I/O solution. This is my main recommendation.

On a scale of one to ten, I would give DOI an eight.