Archive | CA Technologies on APM RSS feed for this section

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.

Read full story • Comments { 0 }
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.

Read full story • Comments { 0 }

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.

Read full story • Comments { 0 }

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?
Read full story • Comments { 0 }

Webcast: A Look at CA Application Performance Management 9.5

By on April 23, 2013 in CA Technologies on APM, CA World

Miss our CA Application Performance Management (CA APM) 9.5 announcement yesterday at CA World 2013? You can get all the details on our new Application Behavior Analytics and Browser Response Time Monitor features as well as the new Web-based user interface in this on-demand Webcast.

Read full story • Comments { 0 }
Application Behavior Analytics

Faster Application Performance Troubleshooting with Advanced Automated Analytics

By on April 22, 2013 in CA Technologies on APM, CA World

In sports, wins and losses might be the ultimate metric for success or failure, but they may not always provide great insight to how well as team is performing over a given stretch of a season.

Take Major League Baseball and its 162-game season. A team might be on a bit of a roll in the middle of the season, winning more games than it loses in a given stretch, but there could be signs that things are starting to slow despite the wins piling up. Maybe the starting rotation’s earned-run average is creeping up while the offense’s on-base percentage is falling. At an individual level, a pitcher may be losing velocity on his fastball and is throwing more pitches per inning, while the left fielder is putting less balls in play and striking out in a greater percentage of at-bats. These smaller nuances are a sign of possible failure to come.

How does this relate to IT? Critical revenue-generating and productivity systems may be exhibiting a winning streak with good uptime, end-user experience and overall service delivery health, but there may be cracks forming that are hard to see.

Announcing CA Application Performance Management 9.5

That’s why we’re thrilled to be introducing Application Behavior Analytics, a new feature available as part of CA Application Performance Management (CA APM) 9.5, which we announced here in Las Vegas at CA World 2013. With CA APM 9.5, we’re looking to make it even easier for customer with large, complex applications to find problems more quickly, resolve them before end-users are impacted and deliver an exceptional end-user experience.

Read full story • Comments { 3 }
CA World 2013

At CA World: How CA APM Paid For Itself

By on April 15, 2013 in CA Technologies on APM, CA World

Editor’s note: This is the next post in a continuing series of short Q&As featuring speakers scheduled to talk at the upcoming CA World 2013 conference, April 21 – 24 in Las Vegas.

This is the ultimate example of return on investment. This major content distributor was having performance problems with its customer ordering systems, which was costing the company upwards of $200,000 per hour. In the session “How CA Application Performance Management Paid for Itself Before We Ever Made a Purchase”, Michael Miller, a staff analyst and developer, will explain how CA Application Performance Management helped solve the problem and directly impact the company’s bottom line. As we get ready for CA World, we asked Michael four questions about her session and goals for the show:

Tell us about your upcoming session at CA World 2013.

This session will tell the story of how my organization was able to use CA APM to resolve major production issues during our proof of concept.  The sessions will also share how we lost more money being blind to performance issues while waiting to purchase CA APM, than the product actually cost us to purchase.

Read full story • Comments { 1 }

Getting the Best Performance from your WAN

By on March 27, 2013 in CA Technologies on APM

Understanding application response times between infrastructure components is critical to managing end-user experience. As the bridge between infrastructure and application performance management, CA Application Delivery Analysis (CA ADA) provides unified end-user experience monitoring — a single source of truth on how network behavior impacts the overall end user experience.  It enables quick identification, diagnosis and resolution of transaction problems caused by the network.

As those of you in the IT trenches already know, WAN optimization efforts can make it difficult to maintain visibility before and after optimization. Previously, CA Technologies worked with Riverbed to introduce Riverbed Services Platform-based monitoring with the release of CA ADA 9.1. However, in order to address Riverbed’s decommissioning of RSP last year, CA ADA takes on a new approach with SPAN based monitoring. While maintaining the necessary visibility to ensure application performance, it also provides new compression reports comparing data sent from the servers and how much actually crossed the WAN.

Read full story • Comments { 0 }

When It Comes to DevOps, Don’t Forget the Business Side

By on February 28, 2013 in CA Technologies on APM

In the enterprise technology space, is there anything more hyped then DevOps? Everyone seems to be talking about DevOps through media articles and press releases about products geared toward DevOps. But are IT organizations actually doing DevOps?

It depends how you define it. In a Webcast hosted by CA Technologies today, Julie Craig, research director at Enterprise Management Associates, said only about 30 percent of IT professionals surveyed by her organization are seriously considering DevOps. That seems low given such hype. Even our own unscientific poll revealed that 62 percent respondents weren’t implementing DevOps or thought it was hype.

However, if you phrase the question a little differently and ask if companies are using cross-functional teams to develop and deploy critical applications, 90 percent give a resounding yes, according to Craig. So, while some might be hazy about DevOps’ definition and benefits, they are putting it into practice. These cross-functional teams are made up of “seasoned professionals with hands on experience in multiple technologies, not just representatives of separate groups with either development or operational skills,” Craig says.

Read full story • Comments { 0 }

New Real Browser Monitor Add-Ons for CA APM Cloud Monitor

By on February 21, 2013 in CA Technologies on APM

On February 15, CA Technologies announced a new add-on for CA Application Performance Management (CA APM) Cloud Monitor, called Real Browser Monitor (RBM). RBM makes it easy for users to record real-user interactions, save them as a script, send the script to the Cloud Monitor dashboard and have it run to monitor their website.

Now you can download the Real Browser Monitor recorder, navigate to your website, select a button to start recording, then record a transaction script by simply browsing as you normally would on the website, going through the actions you want to monitor. When the browsing session is completed, a push of a button stops recording, saves the session as a transaction script and sends the script to the CA APM Cloud Monitor dashboard.

Read full story • Comments { 0 }
Ryan Smith

Video: How Intermountain Healthcare Gets the Most Out of its IT Organization

By on February 7, 2013 in CA Technologies on APM

In the world of not-for-profit healthcare, the chief drivers behind IT programs are to keep costs in check and deliver a great patient experience. With those two goals in mind, Intermountain Healthcare, based in Salt Lake City, has undertaken a number of organizational transformations designed to control costs and continue to improve on the patient experience.

In this Innovation Luminary video, Ryan Smith, Assistant VP of Information Systems at Intermountain Healthcare, talks about a few of the initiatives his group is undertaking and role CA Application Performance Management and other CA Technologies tools plays:

Read full story • Comments { 0 }

The Impact of Application Performance on the Business and Customer

By on February 1, 2013 in CA Technologies on APM

We all know the stories of infamous outages to popular online services and the outrage they cause among customers, particularly on social media. But what is the true cost of those outages? What about the cost of slow performance? This Webcast looks at research from Enterprise Management Associates that uncovers the true impact of poorly performing applications both on the business and the customer.  Also, Julie Craig, research director at EMA, discuss how these issues are currently being addressed and what IT organizations can do in the future to improve performance, positively impact the bottom line and help ensure a great customer experience.

Read full story • Comments { 0 }