Share your experience using Broadcom DX Application Performance Management

My users are satisfied with this solution, most are financial institutions such as banks or card processors and telecom companies.

The primary use case is for the monitoring of business applications in production. Banks use it for monitoring Internet banking solutions, internal back-office applications that have high number of users distributed on many locations, monitoring back-office applications for card transaction processing, and also for front office applications monitoring. DX APM is also used in a test phase of apps life cycle especially during a performance testing. 

Business-wise very much. We have the best solution in the local market because we are the most experienced APM vendor in our region and have very satisfied customers. They said that UX is much improved and MTTR is significantly decreased.

The most valuable features are the low overhead, the ability to monitor production on 24/7 principle, the ability to decrease time to discover the point of failure in the IT infrastructure or the application environment in a short period of time, reporting for analyzing the performance of the application for improving the code optimizing process.

DX APM has a space for improvement in covering more technologies. I.e. monitoring of PHP should be solved in a more quality way. 

I have been familiar with this solution for 18 years.

This solution is stable. In the 15 years, we have not had any major issues. It's an excellent product.

We have a good approach and implementation. If we have any problems, we solve it in the testing phase before it's in production. I can't say that we have had serious problems in the last 10 to 12 years.

This solution is very scalable but we have not had the need to scale because our implementations not need more than one EM server. The new version of DX APM rely on microservices technology and scalability is automatized.

The technical support is good, we are satisfied. The transition period was a little bit problematic, but it only took a short time.

When Broadcom purchased CA they changed the support and the portal. We noticed but we had no real issues. They are responsible and responsive.

We are the first line of support the second line of support is done by Broadcom Support.

They have improved by making the documentation available publically, so it's not only available to partners anymore. The software documentation is really nice, approachable, readable, and searchable.

Positive

The installation is absolutely simple. The installation is quick.

You can install the system quickly and get results in monitoring.

The initial installation is not expensive for the customers.

Our company does the implementation for the customers. We have experts in our team to implement the solutions and for consulting the usage in the future.

We are there to support our clients, not only for the installation but also in exploring the solution.

Our customers are satisfied and there is no complaining about the price. All discounts are given case by case to accommodate the client's budgets. Setup is not expensive because projects are relatively short in man/days.

One of our customers has been using this solution for the last ten years since it was called Wily Introscope. They are really satisfied and they are buying more licenses, using the solution for the whole infrastructure.

All of my clients are using on-premises installation licenses. Most of our clients are at the enterprise level and they are some of the largest banks in the region. Broadcom DX APM is not only a tool, it's a solution. We have experts who are there to offer assistance in exploring the solution to give the customers the maximum value. In my opinion, it's the best product on the market.

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.

There are multiple users related to Broadcom DX Application Performance Management. During any severity or incident, our company's customers have dealt with their applications with the help of the tool, and they also use it for daily alerts, team management, and reporting.

On a daily basis, our company's customers use the tool for dashboard creation and reporting. The tool is also useful for managing any incidents, or when any high utilization happens, as it triggers the alert, and after the users get the alert, they take care of the necessary steps on the applications. Basically, there are three types of use cases when it comes to Broadcom DX Application Performance Management. The tool is used to manage in case any drill down on severity is required, to take care of reporting, and to monitor the dashboards.

In the future release of the product, I would like to see the tool have better capabilities in terms of dashboard creation and reporting. Dashboards and the reporting part are related to Broadcom DX Application Performance Management. The dashboards need to be auto-populated as they happen in any generic kind of APM tool. There is a need to build an easy way to generate the report related to application utilization.

The tool's most valuable feature stems from the product's main use cases, which are related to application drill down, so if any issue happens with any code or any other problem occurs, the tool serves as a pinpoint. Users can find help for any issues with the help of the tool. The aforementioned features of the product are valuable, in my opinion, since before any incident happens in an environment, the proactive use of the application helps reduce the severity and downtime.

The area of improvement is related to the areas of application onboarding and instrumentation, where the product has certain shortcomings. Broadcom needs to work on application instrumentation and the onboarding-related part. With the tool, there is a very lengthy process to do the onboarding of an application.

I don't know which version of the tool is currently running in the market. I use a very old version of the product, and I don't know what kind of features Broadcom has made available in the current release of the tool.

If technical support related to the product is improved, considering what kind of product has been provided to users to ensure that the product is supported in an environment, then it would be great. Suppose there is a Java application in an environment, and it may be related to Java 5, Java 6, Java 7, or Java 8, and a user receives no technical specification related to what kind of version the application supports, including Java JDK 11 and Java JDK 17, it poses a challenge. The product does not provide details about which version of Java is supported, meaning such information related to the product is unavailable. The product's technical support is an area with certain shortcomings, where improvements are required. The technical support of the product is an area with certain shortcomings, where improvements are required. The aforementioned scenario is not just related to Java but also to all the application languages.

The tool is required to build correct documentation related to its product and versions, explaining what kind of version is supported related to their onboarded applications, and it is not just related to Java but also to Python, .NET, Python.js, and PHP.

I have been using Broadcom DX Application Performance Management for over eight years. I am a technical solution provider. I use an old version of the tool, Broadcom DX Application Performance Management 10.5.

Stability-wise, I rate the solution an eight out of ten. There are no bugs or issues related to the tool. Once you install the application, correctly configure it, and get the correct configuration details according to your utilization, then there are no issues you would face with the application. It is a robust application without any issues, even when users work with it for more time.

Scalability-wise, I rate the solution a nine out of ten. Suppose our company requires additional controllers to take care of the application's scalability feature, then there is a very easy way to deal with it by adding more servers to the application.

In our company, we have onboarded more than 2,000 applications.

My company caters to the needs of enterprise-sized businesses.

The technical support for the product is very poor. As there is no technical support for the solution in particular, I rate the technical support a two out of ten.

The last ticket that I had reached out for support with the technical team was related to end-user monitoring, but our company did not get a correct solution from Broadcom's end, after which we have not traced any tickets with the support team for the last three years.

Negative

I rate the product's initial setup phase a five on a scale of one to ten, where one is a difficult setup process, and ten is an easy setup process. The main issues with the setup phase stem from the fact that there are a lot of requirements related to the application installation of Broadcom products, and such requirements are not well-documented. No documents are available from Broadcom, including any pre-defined and pre-requisite documents.

For the product's deployment phase, I go to the document provided by Broadcom. According to Broadcom's document, our company decides to take care of the profile sizing by considering how many applications are onboarded or installed in an environment, after which we finalize hardware configuration, and once it is available, then we start to build the OS, following which we configure the application.

The solution is deployed on an on-premises model.

The solution can be deployed in a week, starting from hardware configuration to application deployment.

Our internal team carried out the installation within our company premises.

There are multiple applications that are onboarded on the desktop, and there are limitations related to applications. There is a huge application infrastructure in our company's environment. To help our company's customers who deal with Cisco and TIBCO applications needing exposure to an APM tool, my company helps onboard the applications in both the products on Broadcom DX Application Performance Management.

I provide suggestions about the tool after considering the business requirements of the user. The application is not supported in just some specific environments, so I urge and support the use of Broadcom DX Application Performance Management.

Technically, it is a very good product, but from a layman's end, it is very difficult to understand the output of the product.

I rate the overall tool an eight out of ten.