Tag Archives | APM

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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Video: How Lexmark is Transforming IT

By on May 7, 2013 in Ask the Service Assurance Expert, CA World

One of the best customer sessions at CA World 2013 was Lance Neal’s session (How Proactively Managing the End-User Experience Is Helping Transform IT at Lexmark) on how Lexmark is transforming the way it handles IT and the role CA Service Assurance tools play in that transformation. My colleague Denise Dubie caught up with Neal at the show for quick interview about why and how Lexmark is undertaking its transformation:



You can download Lance’s presentation from the show here.

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Lexmark's use of CA Service Assurance

5 Observations from CA World 2013

By on May 1, 2013 in Ask the Service Assurance Expert, CA World

The whirl-wind that was CA World 2013 ended a week ago, providing plenty of time to digest the torrent of great information presented at the show. For those that attended and those that weren’t able to make it, we’ve posted a majority of the presentations in the CA World 2013 session database. Since that covers some 100 sessions or so, here are five things I found interesting at the show.

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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.

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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.

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CA World 2013

Must-See at CA World 2013: CA Application Performance Management Sessions

By on April 18, 2013 in CA World

Can you believe CA World 2013 is next week? If you’re going to the show and assuring application performance and end-user experience is your bailiwick, then we’ve got a number of customer and CA Technologies-led sessions that should be on your list of things to see.

While there are over 100 Service Assurance-related sessions, we’ve condensed those sessions related to our CA Application Performance Management solution into a single handy guide. Among the highlights:

That’s just a sample of what we have planned for those of you attending the show next week. There are more best-practice tutorials, hands-on test-drive labs, product roadmaps and free pre-conference education courses than previous years.

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At CA World 2013: How to Restructure IT to Meet Increasing Business Demands

By on April 16, 2013 in 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.

Telefonica, Chile’s largest telecommunication provider, recently restructured its IT service offerings and created a Business Operations Center (BOC) to better suit the corporate market and drive new sources of revenue. In the “New Service Models for the New Era of IT Management” session at CA World, Luis Urza, the CIO of Telefonica, will discuss the transition and the CA Service Assurance tools that helped the organization shift its approach to IT. As we get ready for CA World, we asked Luis four questions about her session and goals for the show:

Tell us about your upcoming session at CA World 2013.

To share our experience to accelerate and transform part of our business, moving from a traditional approach do a different way of thinking and developing the processes and how CA helped us in this.

What are the top 3 things you want attendees to learn from your session?

Just try to show that there are different ways of seeing the IT issues and challenges that can generate tremendous positive impacts and help us to meet the demands of the business and the market.

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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.

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Predictive Reliability

Capacity Planning: Say Goodbye to Guesswork

By on April 12, 2013 in Ask the Service Assurance Expert

Some of us may agree that the phrase, “The New Normal” may be running it’s course, but the fact of the matter is that while budgets remain flat or even in decline, the business still expects IT to deliver services at a growing rate.  This means IT has to get the most value and performance out of their hardware and infrastructure investments while simultaneously delivering an exceptional end-user experience.  Sound easy?  Not really. Most times this means a lot of guesswork around current and future capacity needs to support service delivery.

Now you can say goodbye to guesswork with this week’s announcement of our new CA Capacity Management release that integrates with CA Application Performance Management (CA APM) to help enterprises and service providers ensure an exceptional end-user experience without over-provisioning IT infrastructure. By leveraging real production data to improve capacity planning models, the integrated solution enables IT to deliver a right-sized infrastructure to support business-critical application delivery.

The predictive analytics of Capacity Management allows users to simulate changes to infrastructure to optimize IT operations or new workloads. Combining CA APM’s deep visibility into end-user transactions, both internal and external, across physical, virtual and mainframe with CA Capacity Management’s known scalability of the infrastructure can mitigate risks, help ensure quality of service and right-size application delivery environments while optimizing costs.

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CA World 2013

At CA World: Driving Customer Satisfaction with CA APM

By on April 10, 2013 in 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.

TIVIT provides development, implementation, management and operation of IT systems and data processing for 300 of the top 500 Brazilian companies. During the “Ensuring Flawless Service Delivers Business Results” session, Leonardo Gibrail, a senior IT executive at TIVIT, will show how the company’s use of CA Application Performance Management is helping it meet lofty customer expectations.  To prepare for CA World, we ask Leonardo four questions about his session and goals for the show:

Tell us about your upcoming session at CA World 2013.

In this session, learn how CA APM ensures that critical business services are delivered flawlessly, aligned to our customers’ expectations. This is a story of how CA APM’s technical capabilities drive business results.

What are the top 3 things you want attendees to learn from your session?

  1. How CA APM could implement business transaction performance management, not “just” application performance management.
  2. How CA APM could be the bridge between IT Infrastructure, Application and the Business.
  3. How to use CA APM more efficiently and some important implementation tips based on our experience.
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CA World 2013

At CA World 2013: How to Implement an Internal Service Provider Strategy

By on April 9, 2013 in 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.

There’s been a lot of talk about IT organizations shifting to an internal service provider model. At SONAE, a European-wide retailer and Portugal’s largest private employer, the IT department did just that, moving to an ITIL-oriented internal service provider model within a year. In the “Case Study: How an Enterprise is Implementing an Internal Service Provider Strategy” session, you’ll learn how the company made this transition and what role CA Service Assurance solutions played in the transformation. With CA World less than two weeks away, we asked SONAE’s Vitor Silva, ITSM manager, four questions about his session and what he hopes to get out of the show:

Tell us about your upcoming session at CA World 2013.

Share with the attendees our journey, passing from a centric-model IT departmental to a shared model, where our organization acts as a service provider.

What are the top 3 things you want attendees to learn from your session?

  1. The work to achieve our Vision need to be executed in several steps.
  2. The execution of our vision need to be follow with a learning path
  3. We start with IT Services, Business services will came more clear during this learning journey
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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.

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