I recommend the solution because it is, by far, the fast product in terms of data loading and capturing. No other performance management tool comes close to the solution's speed. 

The speed is important for loading graphs easily. For end user satisfaction, this is the best solution available in the market. 

I rate the solution an eight out of ten. 

I'm an end-user.

We do have the latest version of the solution. 

I'd recommend the solution. While the top "takers" may not be as granular as you'd like, it provides pretty good visibility.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten. 

I give the solution an eight out of ten.

The maintenance is easy.

DX Performance Management is an excellent solution, highly beneficial for end users due to its simplicity, allowing for a wide range of activities without requiring extensive knowledge of the solution.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: For Wells Fargo, it is being able to handle the size and scalability. Most vendors out there cannot for large enterprises, because we are pretty much a small Telco in our size. Therefore, being able to scale up to 40,000 to 50,000 network devices is extremely important for horizontal scalability and the layout. 

It is a good product that will meet their needs.

In terms of criteria when selecting a vendor, for us, one of the most important is our partnership and their strategic outlook. A tool's a tool. You can buy a hammer that looks like a little different from the other one, but they all effectively do the same thing. Which is not to say that this tool doesn't have its benefits. There was a reason we selected it. But I think having a strategic partnership with a vendor, over the long term, has an interest in making your business successful. We have long-standing relationships, and that was a positive when it came time to make a decision.

I would say it's a solid eight out of 10 right now.

Given our success in our presentation and our being able to use it right away, I think that the capabilities that it brought to our business - we were able to replicate the capabilities that we had in our old environment, almost immediately. And then we were able to realize the additional features, the native reporting, the additional baselining in our environment. We started to be able to use enhancements over our previous tool set right away. 

For any tool to come in and be able to do what the business needs and what it has been using, foundationally, is the requirement for it to be considered successful. For us, it was a little bit more than just successful, because not only did we replicate the capabilities that we had, but we were also able to realize some of those additional features.

My tenure with the tool probably doesn't give me enough time yet to say it's a 10 out of 10. I do have more expectations for the tool. As it continues to scale, to meet our requirements, as we're able to bring in additional legacy technologies to baseline, with time maybe it could be a 10. But I think today it's very successful and we're getting a lot of use out of it.

As we continue to bring the new operation technologies that are out there, as we see how long this manager is able to incorporate these new technologies, in addition to the legacy stuff that has been around, then...

One of the things I mentioned in our discussion earlier, the discussion of certification transparency, I don't want to have to go build a model so that the tool can discover and give me relevant information and then I can take action. The ability for this tool to be able to discover and communicate with those new technologies that are coming is going to be one of the areas we're going to be watching.

This solution is definitely worth an evaluation, whatever portfolio - whether it's data networks, or telecommunication, wireless - I think that my coaching or recommendation would be: Don't overlook this tool just because it's incumbent, it's a big name, it's a tier-one brand. There is a cost when you try to cut costs. Nothing is free, you get what you pay for, and I think this solution has paid us full dividends. 

I would definitely take advantage of the training that CA offers. Certainly take that training, just prior to, or just after you've done the installation. That will put you in a position to really exploit the features of the product.

There's so much you can do with the product and not just the dashboard and the reports that users can generate.

There is more customization that you can do to the product and tweak it to your site's needs.

Get CA involved up front. Let them help you. CA has done this for years. Let them help you with the things that you might not even realize that you don't know. Let them help implement it with you because they're going to know some of the bumps and hassles and pitfalls that are out there. That's what my partner did before I came onboard; and he said it was as smooth as pie. So, that would be my advice.

Overall the solution is good.

I rate DX Performance Management a seven out of ten.

At this point I would give it an eight out of 10, but that's only because I know of a lot of really cool new stuff that's coming down the line, that's not available yet. So that number is subject to change.

Kick the tires and get under the hood. Provide your use cases upfront, and tell them exactly what you need. Once you do that, it is fine.

They will provide you with what you want, and meet your criteria. Lay out everything that you need. Look at the sales person that you are dealing with (the sales engineer). See how knowledgeable they are about their product, and see if it does what they say it will do, and that it is available right now. Do not tell me something is here, then, "Oh, that will be available six months from now." That does me no good. Unless you tell me up front, "We're gonna have this in the future," then I will know.

We are still learning it, because there are still features that we need to implement. It is a slow learning process. Right away when you get a tool, you want it to be implemented to actually address the issue that you have at that time. Now, we are looking at it to see what else it can do for us. 

From when we first got the tool, it was there just to look and discover devices, and tell us if they were just available or not. Now, we are looking at it to say, "Well, we can trend on certain things." 

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: 

1. Be able to meet my requirements.
2. Stability
3. Price. That makes a difference.

You have to think about what you want to capture. You can capture a lot of things, but you have to make sure you capture only the things you need. We have had situations where a customer has said, "We need this, this, and this," - hundreds of parameters. But that would mean their infrastructure needs are growing massively. You have to think about the metrics you really want to capture. You can capture everything, but it doesn't make sense because then you pay a lot for hardware.

For our customer with 10,000 devices, there are more than 700 registered users. That doesn't mean 700 users at the same time, but we see 700 registered users using the tool regularly. On the other systems, there are around 200 users, including networking guys, first-line guys, second-line guys, etc.

The maintenance for Performance Management is quite easy. You have to do one to two releases a year. Testing it on a test environment takes one to two days. And then we'd need about five to ten days a year for maintenance.

We aren't using it as extensively as we could. It could be used more. It's a process to bring it to customers and show them the improvements, especially in the last versions.

I would rate the solution a nine out of ten. It could be a little bit easier in the administration or in the creating of new metrics. The really deep-dive administration could be a little bit easier.

Have an open mind. Look at what it can do for your folks. How fast and how easy it is for them to learn to navigate through the dashboards, and what you can do with the dashboards.

On the positive, if you can rely on the out-of-the-box reports, it should be a fairly straightforward deployment. If you're looking at instrumenting your own views and stuff, it gets more complex the more views you want, the more complex your views, and the more you want to instrument the tool for your environment, versus using the out-of-the-box solution. My advice would be to understand how you're going to implement this and what you're expecting from it.

You're going to go one of a couple different ways. You're either going to instrument it to satisfy some specific needs that you have, or you're going to depend heavily on the out-of-the-box reports that only do instrumentation in a few examples that you find you need. When they demonstrate it to you, you should ask those questions about the differences.

In follow-up to my rating it an eight out of 10 overall, I've used a few other products. There aren't a whole lot of other products I could even give a five to, to be honest. I've used SolarWinds, I've been exposed to NetCool. I've heard horror stories about HPE OpenView. I would give it an eight, which isn't perfect but it's high on my scale.

Instrumentation could take some time, depending how much reporting customization you plan to employ.

Take advantage of the professional services and leverage your solution experts from CA. They will help you define the right solution keeping in mind current utilization and future growth.

I rate the product an eight out of ten. 

If I were to talk to others who are considering this product, I would explain the features, that it's easy to use, and its scalability, stability, and about the capacity it has.

I would also tell them that CA is upgrading the versions to stay current in the market, that is done very frequently. Whenever there are changes made - take the example of a Cisco router - if there is a new series of router, CA will include that in the next release.

Also, there is a good amount of vendor certification which comes with the product. That's all factory-loaded, no need to load any custom-made files. Most of the metrics are calibrated and captured from the devices based on the defaults available from vendor certification. 

Considering all these factors, it's really a good and easy product for analyzing your network performance, health status, and the quality of services.

I rate it a nine out of 10, only because I still need time to explore it more. It has a lot of good features, but I am still in the learning phase.

This is coming along; great progress. The "3 series" looks promising.

Not too many companies would implement this. If you're a large organization, make sure you staff correctly. It’s a large application and you need a group of people who know Linux and NetFlow. Have the right skill sets.

I would give Performance Management an eight out of 10, and I might even move that to a nine after I've had a chance to upgrade it to the two or more years' worth of features that have probably been added.

It's quite usable. It's quite good to see something graphically, it's a very graphical application.

CA Performance Management is a solution with different models but the requirements for the basics that you need to install it, are huge. This is not a good solution for small or medium-sized customers. I rate this product a six out of ten.

I rate DX Performance Management a nine out of ten, and would recommend it to others. 

My advice would be start today. The tool is great and is pretty flexible, also for integration in other tools using OpenAPI.

I rate it at nine out of 10. It's pretty good in doing the things needed, but there are some small pitfalls which are not necessary.

I would say a seven to eight out of 10, because it needs role-based administration. They ceased integrations. That is why I say a seven to eight.

I think the product has matured a lot, and I’m impressed with CA when I hear about new features. The product continues to improve and the future is looking bright.

It's a solution which is highly recommended. It will meet and exceed your expectations.

It is important to know what you need.

You need to have a CA support representative on the call during implementation and upgrade to eliminate issues.