DX Application Performance Management vs. SolarWinds Virtualization Manager (VMAN)

Any other APM product is vastly superior. This product's interface, lack of automated instrumentation, and just ridiculous false parity with other APM products is the laughing stock of the industry. In our use case, we have no other APM tools so we attempt to use and in 1 case out of 10 did we actually find a reported metric that was actually related to the root cause. We spent four hours parsing metric output graphs and hierarchy trees to find it. If CA is your preferred vendor and you like washing your clothes by hand instead of using an automated appliance then this tool is for you

Incentivized

[It is well suited for] full integration with the virtual environment (VMware vcenter in our case). [It is also useful] when updating [the] host to a new version, including [a] new version of VM Tools. Messages are automatically created in SolarWinds VMAN to notice which VM's still need to be updated with [the] newer version of VM tools. This [makes] management [easy].

Incentivized

• CA APM supports .Net and Java applications which are the strong areas of CA APM. It does very well in banking solutions where we are able to meet our business requirements.

Incentivized

• I created custom dashboards, to view the different elements of the virtual environment. For example, you can view the number of online VMs and those off, or disconnected. You can also choose to see the status of every virtual cluster, the storage disk usage on every VM, the RAM usage, CPU usage.
• I used this application to see the growth of virtual memory in each cluster and accordingly do forecasting for future growth. A capacity planner included in this application would help in doing accurate estimations and setting a future upgrade budget.
• Another powerful tool was the customized reports, where i could generate reports on any element of the VM or cluster. Reports can be exported to Excel or PDF and are very useful for sharing information with colleagues and management.
• Alerts can be customized. For example, you can set a rule to get an email alert if any virtual server RAM usage exceeds 85% and send a text message if RAM usage exceeds 90% for more than 10 minutes.

Incentivized

• There is a steep learning curve with the tool which can make it at times daunting to use.
• APM can at times be fickle with what it can and cannot track as far as performance metrics go.
• Other than Team Center, the rest of the pieces of the tool aren't as intuitive and require more time to instrument.

Incentivized

• Server trending could be stronger. A server which sits at the same resource usage day in and day out can be normal operation while Virtualization manager may report it as an issue.
• Orion in general can be painful to change a node page with the desired screens and widgets

Incentivized

Critical component for companies ability to maintain services both customer facing as well as internal systems. Without insight into our VM estate provided by VMAN outage duration as well as frequency would increase to unacceptable levels. VMAN has allowed us to consolidate multiple monitoring mechanisms into one, as part of the Orion suite providing us with 1 solution. This has the added benefit of enabling our engineers to focus on learning 1 solution oppose to multiple solutions, meaning we're able to handle administration and support of our monitoring across the whole company alot more efficiently from a time spent resource as well as savings on costings.

Incentivized

SolarWinds VMAN is easy to use for everyone. When I say everyone which literally means anyone e.g. Virtualization Environment SME, Consultant, Support Team, Management Officers etc. Anyone who have worked on IT technologies could easily deploy SolarWinds by reading videos, Thwack posts or Virtual Classrooms (Custom Success Centers) - this makes this application easy to operation and for maintenance support is always there.

Incentivized

We have yet to enconter any issues in terms of availability. We have a highly available SQL cluster running Orion.

Incentivized

We find page load times to be quite slow at times. Flipping between tabs can also be very slow.

Incentivized

We have never received any support from CA on this product

Incentivized

SolarWinds gives good support. I have never had a time when i was working through a support case where I did not get the support I needed for the required issues to be resolved. I have always had resolutions from SolarWinds support. They are top notch. Issues once had are no more.

Incentivized

Pretty straighforward, as long as you check Solarwinds site for recommended installation path. KEY ITEM - be sure that you know which versions of all SolarWinds products you are using, because there are incompatability issues between versions for many products. It took me about 2 hours with a spreadsheet to figure out an upgrade path. Don't assume that the version you downloaded is the right/most current version without checking first!

Incentivized

CA Application Performance Management (APM) is the solution global brands trust to proactively identify and resolve performance and availability issues across physical, virtual, cloud, and mobile applications. CA APM is easy, proactive, intelligent and collaborative, so every user transaction becomes a loyalty-building interaction. CA Application Performance Management is an application lifecycle management solution for businesses of all sizes while we tried to use Dynatrace but as we get more familiar with CA Wily by the time we analyzed Dynatrace, we were interested to use it and see the results how it goes.

Incentivized

To be honest we never looked into any other products. We already made use of SolarWinds SAN, and once we found out SolarWinds was also able to monitor our virtual environment, we immediately had a trial of the software. We were very happy with what the VMAN component had to offer as well as having it integrate into our already existing SolarWinds SAM environment.

Incentivized

Purchasing the correct license allows the platform to scale with your environment.

Incentivized

• APM has allowed us to customize a dashboard view for each specific application. This allows for unique monitoring of top functions and unique alerts. It is awesome for this use.
• APM allows us better data and faster alerting compared to previous products. We moved away from another product because it was not reporting on problems accurately.
• Once set up, APM requires little management and overhead time. The setup can be somewhat time consuming, but once setup we see no issues

Incentivized

• VMAN has been used for reports provided to executive-level meetings. These reports showed our growth patterns, allowing for easier decisions on purchasing additional hardware.
• VMAN has provided a positive impact on allowing for near real-time monitoring of resources, able to pinpoint when services are using more memory than expected, not running at all, or other options as defined.
• VMAN was purchased to help monitor our VMware platform, the added abilities for AWS allowed us to migrate clients from on-prem to cloud-based with the same views.

Incentivized