Compuware Strobe (discontinued) vs. DX Application Performance Management vs. SolarWinds Pingdom

Compuware Strobe is very essential if you are working in a multi-system environment to constantly measure the activity of your applications. My setup involves deploying bots to perform repetitive tasks. With Compuware Strobe, I'm able to conduct early tests on codes that reduce by great margins performance issues on the development cycle; It's why I'm making a good recommendation for it.

Incentivized

CA Wily is well suited for monitoring the load balanced application nodes and determine their main performance bottlenecks like if problem exists in heap or in some connection issues. But I think when it comes to providing the entire report of the application, it is less appropriate as there is no way to create the entire report of the test for all the counters monitored. Also there is no way to detect some issues based on the system configuration.

Incentivized

I believe the scenarios we used it for were quite well covered, from the executive perspective. The downtime alarms worked very well and were easy to setup, uptime monitoring tools were clear and easy to use, even for non-technical people (C-level) and the SLA management tools allowed us to spend less time, and have less friction, with our clients

Incentivized

• Runs detailed analysis on captured data to aid in tuning applications.
• It's possible to run early tests on the bots' codes to detect early performance issues.

Incentivized

• Alerting which can be customized by the end user.
• Visualization of the metrics and data presented to provide a unique and attractive interface.
• Flexibility to manage actions and commands that we deem important for each application. The ability to define these and customize the metrics reported for each individual application is huge for us.

Incentivized

• The alerts are very responsive offering quite detailed timing information
• The UI for reports is very clear and set up of reports is very intuitive
• Customer service was good when there were problems - e.g. lapsing billing causing reporting to go down

Incentivized

• Does not collect all performance indicators(toolchain measurements) in early CI pipelines.

Incentivized

• We are facing challenges to meet RFP requirements in few areas where I would recommend CA to improve.
• We are facing challenges for non (java and dotnet application) which CA APM does not support. SAP is another solution where CA APM is not able to address our business requirement.

Incentivized

• The PagerDuty integration could be a lot better. When you use the PagerDuty integration, it doesn't send any information about which check failed! It just sends a message like "Timeout (> 30s)" -- this isn't very helpful when we have hundreds of checks. We've worked around this by using both the PagerDuty and Slack integrations and having them both post to the same Slack channel. But this means that when an engineer is paged from PagerDuty, they have to go to Slack (or Pingdom) to find the details about the page; it's not available on the page itself.

Incentivized

Recently added features have made Pingdom less intuitive for our requirements. While Pingdom has a broad offering and remains a good value, it is becoming more than we need. Our customer base is becoming more and more global and Pingdom still lacks Asia-Pacific monitoring, which we will need within a year.

Pingdom is easy to use, very intuitive and has a very short learning curve. From the onset, we've been able to jump in and leverage the tool to accomplish our goals for page speed performance and discover the insights we need to make improvements. Its a well-designed tool and makes for a good user experience.

Incentivized

Interface is unnecessarily complicated and frequently responds slowly.

We have never received any support from CA on this product

Incentivized

Support responded the same day to my query, as I was setting the product up but couldn't find the setting I needed. This was successfully resolved in a short time frame, so I was pleased with how quickly we were able to get this resolved. I haven't needed to contact support since.

Incentivized

We only have 1 application using DX APM, while most of other applications are instrumented using Dynatrace. Dynatrace provides a better monitoring and instrumentation for applications. The required effort to setup monitoring capability using DX APM is way more work compared to Dynatrace, also the amount of KPIs offered from Dynatrace is more than DX APM.

Incentivized

1. PRTG Network Monitor was a far more complicated tool to use and set up albeit it does both Internal and External monitoring. The setup wasn't intuitive and there are too many configuration options to complete to form an alert
2. Amazon CloudWatch is specific to AWS resources and cannot be easily use outside of the AWS Ecosystem

Incentivized

• It has helped us identify issues affecting our and our clients' applications' performance.
• Smoothened robots deployment.

Incentivized

• Introscope is deeply utilized within the organization. However, CEM and Team Center not as much. Those that use one piece don't generally use the others. Partially because of the curve in learning how to use the consoles effectively.
• reporting is pretty well configured and easy to setup if you know how to use the tools. So this can be easy to use and takes less time to configure for the different groups within the organization.

Incentivized

• Honestly, we have 4 other products that overlap this functionality whose organizations provide far superior support. At this point it is an unnecessary expense.
• In my opinion, their lack of support responsiveness and commitment has impacted our IT agility.
• Its time to explore other alternatives.