CA Technologies adds analytics capabilities to Service Assurance portfolio

Similar to other Service Assurance solutions such as CA Capacity Management, CA Infrastructure Management, and CA Service Operations Insight, CA APM 9.5 is now able to use its performance metrics to automatically identify complex emerging performance issues, enabling triage and diagnosis teams to solve problems faster and understand their environments better.

“In today’s business environment of empowered consumers, commoditized products and intense competition, organizations must establish a unique competitive advantage. The ability to deliver superior customer experience is rapidly becoming that source of differentiation,” said Mike Sargent, general manager, Service Assurance, CA Technologies. “Advanced technology in our Service Assurance portfolio, such as analytics, drives the innovation needed to transform IT operations in some of the world’s largest and most complicated application delivery environments. CA APM’s ability to mine huge amounts of performance data to identify potential issues before they become major problems is one of the many ways we can help deliver reliable business services that provide the best possible end-user experience — while helping our customers free up IT resources, budget, and capacity.”

CA APM provides customers a 360-degree view of the end-user experience by linking transactions to the underlying infrastructure across physical, virtual, cloud and mainframe environments. The solution contains three major new features, each designed to make it easier for customers to discover application performance problems before end-users are impacted and help reduce the frequency and duration of service outages:
· Application Behavior Analytics - helps eliminate problem resolution guesswork by automatically and algorithmically turning application performance metrics into proactive anomaly detection, making it faster and easier to proactively identify, diagnose and resolve critical application performance problems as they begin to emerge. The Application Behavior Analytics engine, which does not require a separate license, employs advanced multivariate techniques to find anomalous application behavior across multiple application components and even across multiple applications. It runs without user configuration of thresholds or rules and it proactively alerts IT operators of potential problems that could disrupt performance. The engine automatically mines the vast repository of rich performance data created by CA APM and, within hours of setup, can start determining both simple and complex anomalous behaviors in components and applications, providing insights, even on issues IT wasn’t looking for. This capability frees IT resources from day-to-day management to increase capacity for innovation as well as improve service quality and end-user experience by reducing mean time to repair.
· New Web-based User Interface - provides a modern, intuitive user experience via cross-browser HTML5 and JavaScript-based user interfaces, making it easier to monitor, triage and diagnose application performance problems from many popular Web browsers. Featuring new layouts, the improved user interface makes it easier to bubble up alerts to IT operators, allowing them to see at-a-glance potential trouble spots across the entire application environment.
· Browser Response Time Monitor (BRTM) - gives visibility into how a browser renders Web pages and how much time it takes, helping IT identify slow-running components to improve the end-user experience. BRTM provides customers visibility into the end-user experience that starts from the browser, providing a view into the client side activity of the transaction as well as the quality of service provided by a content delivery network (CDN). For Web-based applications, this gives IT deeper visibility into the true end-user experience by showing the entire user transaction, allowing for improved triage of performance issues to the browser, network or application.
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“The new Application Behavior Analytics feature of CA APM advances APM Analytics in important ways,” said Michael Ell, Director of Engineering – IT Management, Empowered, a specialized Systems Integrator that designs, deploys and manages technical solutions for networks, labs and data centers. “The auto-configuration of data alleviates a key limitation associated with the implementation of analytics while the fully-embedded interface makes it easy to use. The complex anomalies it finds after learning the relationships between transactions and their application components are a helpful complement to the information we already get from CA APM. We’re glad to see the new emphasis on intelligent APM.”

Social Sentiment Indexes to Add External Insight into Application Performance
CA Executive Insight for Service Assurance will soon help IT leverage a variety of analytics sources to enhance service performance. Designed for the mobile platform, the product connects executives and decision-makers to real-time views of how the health and performance of key IT services impact business outcomes. A new Web services query tool will gather information from Big Data sources such as General Sentiment, a social analytics company that delivers insights that change the way brands make product and marketing decisions. In addition, customers will be able to use CA Executive Insight to connect application developers with mobile and Web analytics systems, exposing valuable data with Internet accessible APIs.

Providing access to social sentiment indexes will allow Line of Business Owners and IT executives to see not only application performance, but also the general feeling end-users have about the application. For example, if an e-commerce site is running slow, the business will see both key performance metrics as well as the reaction of customers via social channels. This will enable IT to prioritize fixes if customers are complaining about a service’s performance.

“CA Technologies new operational analytics help speed problem resolution by automatically mining massive volumes of metrics for nuggets that help identify developing issues and their cause,” said Julie Craig, Research Director, Application Management, Enterprise Management Associates. “By incorporating analytics into Service Assurance solutions such as CA APM, CA Technologies is providing customers with powerful tools to proactively identify, diagnose and resolve critical problems before they affect business service reliability and ultimately the customer experience.”