Broadcom DX Application Performance Management Reviews

The most valuable feature of this product is the CA Customer Experience Manager, as it shows the real impact on the customers.

We are constantly looking at the customer experience. Thus, in this aspect, it has helped us to improve the execution time and get real access to the problems.

I would appreciate an easier way to record transactions, i.e., in the CA Customer Experience Manager (CA CEM). One difficulty I have is to identify the fields that make the transactions unique, so that APM can identify them in the probe. If they look at other transaction recording software, they can take some ideas from there as to how to simplify the process. I have a lot of arguments from the HTTP packets and also matching the fields requires a deep knowledge of the app that is being monitored.

The other thing that can be improved is that the dashboard edition in the CA APM is very limited and basic. It is almost impossible to create a dashboard with some graphic complexity and the diversity of the tools is also limited.

I have used this solution for two years.

We did encounter stability issues in regards to the DB access and the time it takes to navigate through the application.

Despite the complexity, we did not encounter any scalability issues.

The technical support is very good.

Previously, I have used another solution but in a different institution.

I did not do the initial setup. It was hard to catch up with the setup process when we were presented with the solution.

You should create a user manual according to your system.

The solution gives us the flexibility to create new metrics and measure whatever we need. It makes it possible to monitor the full range of applications from the most complex to the most simple ones.

When the SAP requests start to become slow, I can proactively warn our internal customers to stay alert for any impact.

The customer experience management can be improved by making it possible to track down the user actions on a single page. I would like the tool to give me the exact path taken by my customer on my website, making it easy to understand his needs and the context of any problem that occurred during his visit. Then I wouldn’t need to ask him to run the same scenario again.

We have had this solution for three years.

We have not had any issues with stability.

We have not had any issues with scalability.

Technical support has been great.

I was involved in the installation and it was complex. Every APM environment takes time to make it trustworthy enough to create useful alarms and metrics.

Decide what you want to monitor. Improve the DevOps culture in your company. You need to know your applications before monitoring them.

• Business transaction defects from CEM.
• ADA helps find response time issues in the network.
• Team Center gives an overview of whole system.

• It helps in proactive monitoring.
• We can assess a risk in a test environment if application is going live.
• We can do OS, application and EUM with some part of network monitoring on single dashboard.

• Documentation is not straight forward and it could be easier to understand and implement.
• Integration with other tools.
• Dashboard look needs to be more attractive and dynamic.

I have used it for seven years.

I have not encountered any deployment issues.

Stability will be an issue if you install and configure it wrong. Otherwise, it's good and stable.

We encountered a stability issue. A customer wants to see more metrics but performance will degrade if you disable Data limited to 100 matching metrics.

Customer service is 6/10.

Technical support is 6/10.

I did not previously use a different solution.

Initial setup was complex because we implemented it for the first time in 2010 and everyone was learning about it. :-)

A vendor team implemented it and I rate their level of expertise 8/10.

EPA provides more flexibility for meeting customer requirements. CEM and Investigator provide realistic data by which user feels more dependent on them.

The pricing and licensing costs are too high.

Before choosing this product, I did not evaluate other options.

It helps us to monitor our infrastructure by providing us insight into issues and giving us metrics for various data points.

It helps us to troubleshoot issues or to isolate issues faster, and we can then take the appropriate actions to resolve those issues.

Mainly, what we are seeing are problems with our ability to manage all the agents across the board. That's just one of the problems we are seeing with this solution.

I wasn't involved with deployment.

We've had no issues with APM and it has, in fact, been quite stable for us.

We had no problems scaling it.

I haven't yet had to use technical support for APM.

I wasn't involved in the setup.

APM is quite nice, especially with the new features in version 10. It's quite an impressive solution, and you should give it a shot.

As a support engineer, the most valuable component was Customer Experience Manager (CEM). Being able to detect end user defects based HTTP response code and slow time, while differentiating between geographical locations or individual users was the biggest advantage to proactively managing root-cause analysis. And once integrated with the APM agents on those same applications, transaction tracing from end user to middleware/backend systems really did give that end-to-end view that organisations always get pitched when there is an open tender on any APM solution. From a Consulting aspect, this would have to be the new ABA (Application Behaviour Analytics) engine that is now available. It makes my job both easier and more efficient as well as clients. Being able to easily identify the end user transactions to low level internal java methods in the same screen automatically with bare minimal configuration is impressive.

Back in the support days, we were able to provide Business Service availability and performance statistics rather than just the number of P1 / P2 Incidents rose within the service desk each month. With the change of mentality to a Service Offering approach through CA APM, we first used the SLA numbers for each day to then determine which incidents where of most criticality to the business and technical support team. This meant that support resources where used more efficiently to resolve bottlenecks in load and performance during peak periods of the day.

The one thing that needs improving is the uplift of dashboards capabilities to HTML5 and flash based widgets. Some new vendors coming into the market have dashboarding capabilities that are flashier and shiny which can sometimes be a deterrent to CA APM’s proven track record to diagnostic triage.

I initially spent 2 years as a Web Application Support Analyst focused solely on using and administering the toolset for a large Victorian government department. Over the last 3 years, I have been working for a Professional Services Company implementing the CA APM solution for a number of different large companies.

Deployment of CA APM infrastructure and agents is quite easy and pain free. Issues do start to arise when you have a large enterprise environment comprising of multiple Pre-production environments and Production. The administration and configuration tasks involved to changing the configuration on agents and uplifting versions can be a long process without the use of a centralized management console for agent configuration purposes.

One of the biggest strengths with CA APM is that it is incredibly stable. In the 5 years I have used the toolset, I raised 2 support tickets about stability of which were resolved by configuration changes to suit the environment it was hosted in. The main deterrent of stability is whether it is designed to scale.

Scalability will only become a problem if your initial scope of deployment doesn't allow for the adopting of the solution in the wider business. Most solutions like CA APM are implemented in large commercial organisations that stem from siloed projects, which have an initial role of configuring, installing and providing a business benefits realization. Once this occurs and when done well, the solution needs to be able to grow and grow fast. The standalone or clustered architecture that CA APM adopts allows you to upscale and downscale your solution with minimal impact to the business, allowing for a solution that will fit all organisations deployment plans.

My experience with CA Customer Service, from Sales and Pre-Sales teams, has been of the highest standard. The team always frequently drops by to just say high and follow up any enquirers.

While working at different organisations I have overheard people talking about the lack of urgency and turnaround time when it comes to support. The CA Support team are very good at ensuring you know the progress of any given issues with constant updates.

At the end of the day, you should be selecting an APM tool that best suits your organisations requirements when it comes to Performance and Availability Management. I would recommend CA APM because I have used it both for Support and as a Consultant and seen that when done well, you can get instant quick wins straight out of the box.

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.