This is not Your Father’s APM

By on June 17, 2013 in CA Technologies on APM

I recently responded to a post on LinkedIn asking about “Must have functionality” in Application Performance Management (APM) tools.  As I was writing the brief response it occurred to me that today more than ever APM means different things to different people.  In a conversation with a European colleague he told me about a seminar billed as APM but in fact was about what most would probably consider Application Performance Engineering than APM. Those of us working in the Application Performance Management space for years have seen significant change.

Here’s how I see APM today:

I would dare to suggest that entry stakes for a comprehensive APM solution today include End-user Experience Management (EUE), root cause and deep-dive diagnostic capability, application aware infrastructure management, visibility into the mainframe, cloud monitoring capability, and actionable metrics. That same list would have been very different even only a few years ago when apps were largely developed and delivered inside the enterprise IT infrastructure and organization. That’s how fast the space is evolving. Remember this list is my table stakes list for today. Anyone coming to the table with less is going to have a weak hand.

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CA World 2013 Global User Community reception

Are You a Member of The CA APM Global User Community? Join Today

By on June 12, 2013 in CA Technologies on APM

Have you heard of our flourishing global user community dedicated to CA Application Performance Management? The CA APM Global User Community, formerly CA Wily APM User Community, has been in existence through regional user group communities since 2006 and online, hosted by MyCA, since 2010. It is one of the fastest growing User Communities of CA Technologies users, a truly global community reaching nearly 3,000 members from all over the world.

What happens in the community? Activities include monthly webcasts where experienced users and consultants share best practices on their use of CA APM and related products. For instance, we have a Webcast on June 20, 2013 to discuss the new release of CA APM 9.5. The message board is very active with APM user members sharing daily questions, tips, opportunities, or other news they find of interest. CA APM community members attending CA World conferences also get together during the conference, as we did this past April in Las Vegas. CA Technologies is very supportive of the user community and CA APM Product Management regularly updates the members on new releases and features available in CA APM and related products.

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Webcast: 5 Things you need to know about DCIM for Capacity, Power, Space and Cooling

By on June 10, 2013 in Ask the Service Assurance Expert, DCIM

Managing today’s data centers requires a myriad of management tools and techniques that span a wide array of activities and systems: Power and cooling, asset management, capacity planning, facilities and IT convergence, and more.  The challenge for data center and facility professionals is to understand what’s real today and what can DCIM technology deliver tomorrow?

In a recent survey, IDC found that 84% of datacenters had issues with power, space and cooling capacity, assets and uptime that negatively impacted business operations.  This study also found that 92% of data center managers preferred an integrated DCIM approach. But, how do you make the business case to justify the investment in a DCIM solution?

CA Technologies, along with IDC and Dell, are hosting a 1-hour webcast on Thursday, June 27, 2013 at 1p ET to discuss the benefits of DCIM.

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App Performance, Executive Dashboards, and … Beekeeping?

By on June 6, 2013 in Ask the Service Assurance Expert, CA Technologies on APM

We’re all well versed in the New Normal of IT dealing with more user demand with fewer resources (budget and people). This is particularly true of non-profit organizations like Intermountain Healthcare in Salt Lake City, where every dollar that comes in or goes out is watched carefully. But, with 22 hospitals, 185 clinics, 800 health care providers, and 500,000 members in its insurance division, Intermountain’s IT group must deliver services and applications that run well and support the organizations mission to provide cost-effective healthcare to its customers. If doctors can’t get access to medical records and x-rays because the system is down, care can suffer.

I caught up with Lin Richardson, senior middle-tier admin at Intermountain, to discuss his role, the applications his team supports and how CA Service Assurance solutions – particularly CA Application Performance Management and CA Executive Insight for Service Assurance – help ensure problems are found and fixed quickly as well as how executives can keep tabs on how IT performance impacts business performance. You can hear our wide-ranging discussion here.

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Integra Goes the Distance for its Customers

By on May 31, 2013 in CA Infrastructure Management

Over the last 15 years, Integra has grown from a company providing essential telecomm services to primarily single site, small businesses to a managed service provider (MSP) scaled to support enterprise-grade telecomm and cloud services. What hasn’t changed, though, is their commitment to exceptional customer experience.

In February, Integra announced its new brand, new logo and a vision that states it will measure its value through the eyes of its customers. With its selection of CA Performance Management to monitor, analyze and report the real-time status and trends of its enterprise-class network – a 5,000-mile long-haul fiber-optic network, a nationwide IP/MPLS network and 3,000 miles of metropolitan fiber – we wanted Integra’s view of how CA Performance Management will help it create an exceptional customer experience.

What infrastructure management challenges were you facing that led you to looking at CA Performance Management?

Integra manages a large, diverse network with multiple vendors and access methods. With state-of-the-art and legacy network equipment, we have recently expanded our product offerings to include a robust portfolio that includes MPLS, Ethernet Services, multi-service deployments, hosted service and Cloud services. However, Integra’s legacy fault-monitoring solution and home-grown performance management tools were inadequate to address the complexity of the new environment.

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Verizon, Cisco, CA Technologies and EMA Join Forces on “Convergence Reality Check” Webcast

By on May 24, 2013 in CA Infrastructure Management

Every new technology goes through an adoption cycle (a.k.a., hype cycle) — a huge burst of marketing fluff about new disruptive technology that will rock your world.  The cycle goes like this:

  1. new technology is introduced to market (often immature and over-promised)
  2. a few early adopters deploy it
  3. within 12 to 18 months it loses its cache, and the press, analysts and, of course, the vendors get fixated on another shiny new toy
  4. months (or even years) later, the early bugs are worked out and more sophisticated and meaningful features are added
  5. mainstream adoption is in full force

The latest hype cycle: Convergence,  which comes in three delicious flavors:  Data Center Transformation; Voice and Video for collaboration services over the same network as Data; and WAN optimization to support remote access to centralized and virtualized application.

To short-circuit further hype, a few industries notables are getting together on a June 29 webcast to make this all very concrete and grounded in reality

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The Imperative of Integrated Monitoring of Virtual Desktop and Application Delivery Infrastructures

By on May 22, 2013 in CA Infrastructure Management

The release of Citrix XenDesktop 7 signals a new dawn for end-user computing in terms of mobility, simplicity and security.  CA Technologies is assisting Citrix by addressing requirements for enterprise monitoring and manageability that ensure both the infrastructure and XenDesktop experience can be managed together, with a single solution set, leading to faster problem resolution and optimized service delivery.

CA Technologies has been working closely with Citrix to incorporate key capabilities into our CA Infrastructure Management and CA Nimsoft Monitor offerings to help joint customers gain the visibility into performance, activities, events, metrics, configurations, etc. that affect end-user experience.  (See Citrix’s extensive comments about CA in this IT Canada article.) CA Technologies’ expertise in end-to-end infrastructure management across networks, storage, applications and virtualization layers has successfully unified management silos for our customers.  We are proud to enable our customers to bring virtual applications and desktops into this unification – avoiding their need to use separate islands of management tools.

Citrix XenDesktop 7 unifies virtual applications and desktops and we expect that, together with mobility enhancements, these features are going to drive fast adoption of this new release. We are pleased to inform our joint customers that we have deployed the beta version of Citrix XenDesktop 7 in our own enterprise IT labs.

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Getting Energy Tough

By on May 21, 2013 in CA Infrastructure Management, DCIM

We love data centres. There is something special about them – the pristine racks, the modern servers, colourful cables and all that raw processing power. The steady hum of thousands of servers, CRAC units and battery packs is intoxicating. They are great, but the problem is that they are expensive, power hungry and we need more of them. In 2007, data centres in Western Europe consumed a whopping 56 TWh of power, but as automation and online adoption continues to rise, this is estimated to climb up to 104 TWh by 2020. Dwindling oil supplies and tougher environmental legislation mean that generating that extra energy will become more and more expensive. In the current competitive climate, the vision of skyrocketing energy cost – or even energy crisis – is enough to cause sleepless nights for many European CEOs, particularly if they have seen their recent energy bills.

Due to the nature of the beast, data centres are prime targets for energy savings. They are power hungry yet well metered and therefore, great places to start flexing those cost-saving muscles. Most data centre operators have existing monitoring systems in place. At a minimum, these systems can produce totals for utility and IT load, so baselines are there. Savings are easy to estimate, and therefore, the great machine is often asked to do more with less. This is by no means the only challenge data centre operators face today.

These are no idle thoughts. As concerns about our energy reserves grow, everyone should make it a norm to be as energy-efficient as possible. The European Commission Institute for Energy and Transport acknowledged this fact in 2008 by creating a voluntary EU Datacentre Code of Conduct, which, like all similar schemes, will involve submitting annual reports. The submission process will involve energy baselines, initiatives and action plans. Getting baseline data out of a traditional data centre should be easy, but identifying initiatives and formulating action plans could be a headache if the monitoring systems are not capable of producing detailed live reports on how the data centre actually runs. The action plans will most likely include things like virtualization and optimal resource utilization, but without proper monitoring systems it is very difficult to make the right move.

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Virtual Desktops Are Coming: Are Your Management Tools Ready?

By on May 16, 2013 in CA Infrastructure Management

Virtual desktops are increasingly becoming common in the large enterprise customer environments. The adoption is expected to accelerate as IT departments seek to support remote workers, BYOD and mobility initiatives. Based on several industry estimates the hosted virtual desktop technology market is projected to grow more than 20% (CAGR) for the next 5 years.

The benefits of virtual desktop technology are significant. It simplifies maintenance of user desktops (operating system patches, updates and upgrades of OS versions etc.) that is a major portion of IT Infrastructure management costs. It also improves security of desktops as well as intellectual property since the company data is now stored within secure walls of data-center. Lastly, it improves the user experience and efficiency by providing remote access to the personalized desktops from anywhere and any device.

From the IT Operations perspective, virtual desktop management is expected to follow a similar trajectory as that of server virtualization. In most cases, once the technology has been tested in the lab with test applications and ready for production workloads, the ownership of managing the delivery infrastructure shifts to IT Operations. This ensures proper management and escalations procedures can be established similar to other critical IT infrastructure.

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Chatting About APM, Analytics and End-User Experience

By on May 14, 2013 in CA Technologies on APM

In a perfect world, everyone’s IT infrastructure and the applications it supports would work flawlessly. Unfortunately, we don’t live in a perfect world and systems are bound to – at a minimum – perform poorly from time to time or even fail.

That’s why we’re hosting a Twitter Chat on application performance management (APM) trends, challenges and best practices on Monday, June 4, 2013 at 10:30a EST using the hashtag #APMchat. During the hour-long discussion, we’ll be asking and discussing these five questions:

  1. What are the biggest application performance challenges organizations face?
  2. Is IT maximizing its investment in APM tools? If not, what’s holding them back?
  3. How do APM analytics provide better quality services and end-user experience?
  4. Are all APM analytics the same? #APMchat
  5. Do multivariate APM analytics mean more work for the IT ops team?
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Service Assurance Weekly Reading List

By on May 11, 2013 in Uncategorized

Here are five stories you may have missed while out shopping for the perfect Mother’s Day gift:

  1. Big Data Gold Isn’t Always Where You Would Expect It
    Many companies are focusing their big data initiatives in areas like sales, marketing, customer service and R&D, but other functions like logistics or finance may offer even greater ROI.
  2. Most data isn’t “big,” and businesses are wasting money pretending it is
    Big data! If you don’t have it, you better get yourself some. Your competition has it, after all. Bottom line: If your data is little, your rivals are going to kick sand in your face and steal your girlfriend.
  3. Invest in people, not resources
    There is a supply-and-demand paradox brewing in the software business, and it’s getting worse by the day. Companies are searching for rock-star talent, while at the exact same moment talented people are searching for great work. People on both sides of this issue are frustrated — companies can’t find the right workers, or enough of them and talented workers feel stifled, bored, and in many cases exhausted, and even oppressed, by the work they do find.
  4. 11 signs your IT project is doomed
    No senior buy-in, minimum spec targets, a ‘nothing can go wrong’ mentality — here’s how to sense demise before your IT project meets its ignominious end.
  5. The illusion of simplicity: photographer Peter Belanger on shooting for Apple
    You’ve almost certainly never heard of Peter Belanger, but you’ve definitely seen his photographs. In fact, you may even see his work every day, and it’s likely that you own some of his most famous subjects. Belanger is the man behind some of Apple’s most iconic product images, a San Francisco-based product photographer at the top of his field. Apple is but one of his clients — he’s done work for everyone from eBay and Nike to Pixar and Square — and we sat down with Peter to talk about his work, his background, and some very, very expensive gear.

What’s on your reading list? Tweet us @CAsvcAssur.

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Surveys: BYOD Popular, But Official Policies Still Lacking

By on May 8, 2013 in Ask the Service Assurance Expert

In not-so-shocking news, the bring your own device (BYOD) to work trend, which in turn allows for easier workshifting where employees can pretty much work from anywhere, is helping drive employee satisfaction. As a work-from-home employee, I can relate as it is a great perk to not have to commute every day.

According to this CloudTweaks article, “With this convenience, organizations are reporting an average of 25% reduction in employee attrition simply because BYOD and work shifting are able to bring more employee satisfaction compared to any other motivational strategies that companies have traditionally implemented.”

While BYOD is hot, IT organizations still seem to be lagging when it comes to having an official BYOD policy. According to a survey conducted by Network Instruments at the ongoing Interop conference in Las Vegas, only a third of respondents said their company has an official policy in place, leaving a two thirds sticking with an ad hoc approach. This approach may have to do with the numbers of people actually using their own devices to access network resources, which seems to be relatively low, according to the survey.

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