Broadcom DX Application Performance Management Reviews

The most valuable feature for us with APM is the depth to which you can go into the actual instances that are occurring. So, whether it's SQL or the Java agent, you're able to get really deep information.

We're just now adopting APM, but we anticipate that it'll be very helpful with level-3 and level-4 triage.

I'd like to see more source code at the exceptions level. I'd like to be able to get down to the actual code-class file and know what the issues are there. With APM, we stop at just a hair above that, but to be able to get down to that specific level would be nice. I'd like to be able to get that granular.

We've had no issues with deployment.

We've had some challenges in the integration with the agent. It's had some conflicts from a Java-server perspective, but outside of that it's been very stable.

No scalability issues so far. That's been fine.

I don't use tech support for anything. We have our own internal team.

I wasn't involved in the setup.

Take a look at what you're using it for because it's not for every application.

The thing that is most valuable to us is the desktop console application CA Introscope Workstation. It is very easy to use. We tried other tools before (IBM Tivoli, for example), but the console was very difficult to use. CA Introscope Workstation is the first tool that was quickly embraced by our developers and became one of the tools they use on a daily basis. This is very important because, in reality, only developers can really interpret the metrics collected by the tool.

CA APM is mostly used during production post-rollout week. This is when our developers can quickly pinpoint any performance issues we might be having in production. Since the tool gives us near-real-time information, we lag only 15 seconds, we can quickly see bad trends and respond to them. Before APM, we were more reactive then proactive.

We are constantly adding new technologies to our stack and monitoring those is sometimes a pain because CA APM does not support some of these out of the box. For example, we have recently added things like MongoDB, Elasticsearch, memcached, etc. All of these tools come with excellent monitoring APIs accessed using REST, but CA APM doesn't come with support for collecting metrics via a REST endpoint. This really should be addressed – too many services come with a simple REST API utilizing JSON which should be very simple to collect.

We have been using CA APM for over five years to provide real-time monitoring of our IBM WebSphere-based production systems. We're currently in the process of upgrading to v10.

No issues.

CA APM performs really well and I cannot remember the last time it crashed. Granted, we are not an enormous deployment!

No issues encountered with scalability.

Over all these years we really only contacted customer support once. The issue was resolved quickly and professionally.

This tool quickly becomes very important to your organization. It is ok to use a local partner or vendor to help you out, but use that for some knowledge transfer. In the end you will need an in-house expert or two. As your applications change, so will the tool's configuration and it is best if you can do that yourself.

The good thing about licensing is that you only pay for the application serving machines you monitor. That means that all other backend servers come for free – stuff like your RDBMS, NoSQL databases, search servers (lucene, solr, elasticsearch), cache servers (memcached), etc.

We tested IBM Tivoli based solutions – it was a logical choice since we use IBM WebSphere. However, the tools were difficult to use and the whole user experience was just awful. We then piloted CA APM (CA Wily back then) and everybody fell in love with the console and the information it provided.

Plan for the involvement of your developers. This tool monitors your production applications, but only the developers know exactly what to monitor. Sure, the tool can give you metrics for method call, but somebody needs to give you a list of methods to monitor – you cannot monitor every single method! You will need input from the people who created the applications you want to monitor.

The transition to APM Team Center as the primary console in APM 10 will definitely be the most valuable feature.

The ATC shows a lot of potential on how we view performance metrics on the front-end and back-end connections in a single view.

An APM tool should have the capability to provide a high-level view of the monitored application and APM 10 is heading in the right direction by just doing that. A single-window view of performance metrics, timeline, applications, alerts and heat maps (DA) throw a lot of data to an engineer in a quick glance.

Another new feature may just have to be Entry Point Discovery. The capability of the agent to detect the application entry point and create custom pbd for this. Interesting concept of automatic discovery and prescriptive change.

CA APM strength is the Custom Instrumentation - just having the capability to capture performance metrics for classes and methods in the application makes this tool a elite candidate.

CA APM is the go-to tool for any performance-related issues. It is always there monitoring the non-production and production environment. It is becoming part of the DevOps stack and becoming a key support tool for Performance testing.

The tool has supported many times in identifying slow transactions and the bottlenecks in applications.

APM 10 has jumped leaps in feature improvement over the last few releases which in itself is an achievement.

The UI still feels a little outdated (though there is change) especially for Dashboards. New widgets and dynamic actions needs to be in place for this part of CA APM.

Integration with other DevOps toolsets. CA APM needs to provide easy integration capability with CI/CD and ALM tools which will provide strong value to all stages in an SDLC.

The CA APM Introscope part is a must. We use is it as well in pre-production for deep dive diagnostics and in production to get a good follow up of application performances.

We had for several applications performance issues. With Introscope we were in many cases able to pin-point the bottleneck(s) and debrief it to the dev organization to improve their applications.

Faster deployments, in the form of a SAAS solution to support better POC’s.

1.5 years

Yes. Our first project was to get more visibility of our ‘Intranet solution’ based on WebSphere Portal. We tried to use CA APM CEM to get an understanding of the application performance around the globe. We needed extra code enrichments as CEM was not able to cope with dynamic URL’s.

No issues encountered.

CEM needs good follow up as it collects big amounts of data. Close follow up is needed for critical parameters. But you can easy scale up.

Very high. We were able to work with a very high skilled service force.

Medium level. Issue were so complex that first line couldn’t help.

Yes. Part of the organization uses HP BAC Insight. We switched to CA APM as HP support was not TOP and a new direction was chosen at the corporate level.

Setup of the solution was straight forward, but our first application was to complex and therefor the first initiative failed.

We did the implementation together with the vendor team. It was very useful to work together.

I was not involved in the selection process, but I know they also looked into the Compuware solution.

If you are new to the domain then I propose to start with a simple application in a SAAS approach.

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.

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 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.