Application performance and capacity management

The CA Technologies APM (Application Performance Management) approach is end-to-end, ranging from the most modern cloud environments, through distributed systems, to the mainframe applications that often still support enterprises’ business and support customer-facing web front-ends. It uses analytics to manage the complexity of many application environments with proactive performance alerts and the identification of root causes.

It claims to back this up with better capacity planning models – running out of storage or processing capacity is, in effect, the ultimate performance issue.

Application Performance Management is an important part of the overall feedback loop that drives DevOps at scale, which is based on the analysis of the business user experience as an input to a continuous design, build and delivery pipeline. If one sees IT Governance as the oversight of a company’s investment in business automation technology, in the interests of achieving better business outcomes without waste, performance  management and reporting is an enabler for better governance.

CA Technologies sells its products largely through its global direct channel, although it has strengthened its partner programs in recent times.

CA Technologies targets large enterprise customers, often companies managing infrastructure used to deliver products that the customers of CA Technologies themselves sell on. For example:

Inormation services: DATEV is one of the leading information service providers in Germany, supporting more than 40,000 members and customers globally. It uses APM from CA Technologies to safeguard QoS from some 700-plus online applications monitored on multiple platforms.

Networking: Alvaka Networks uses CA Nimsoft Monitor to cut its administrative and maintenance costs and, through proactive troubleshooting and real-time monitoring and alerts, help its customers to achieve highly reliable delivery.

Telecommunications: Arcor, part of the Vodaphone Group, uses CA Spectrum Infrastructure Manager and CA eHealth Performance Manager to  speed up fault resolution through centralised alerting and the capture of performance metrics. It claims to have reduced its IT networking overhead by 20 percent, with a unified systems management approach.

Cloud services: Ativas provides hybrid managed services through both traditional and cloud-based platforms, delivered from a world-class European data centre. It uses a number of  CA Technologies’ products to support high reliability service delivery through best practice processes and good governance of managed IT services.

APM from CA Technologies  is built around many products including:

Capacity management, using the data from APM etc. as an input to CA Capacity Management, which allows you to right-size your application delivery environment.

CA Application Performance Management, for end-to-end transaction performance;

CA Application Delivery Analysis – end-to-end application response time monitoring, with pro-active alerts, service desk and operations views and third-party integrations;

Cloud Performance Management – using CA Cloud Monitor and CA Nimsoft Cloud User Experience Monitor for easy SaaS monitoring.

CA Technologies supports a rich set of user communities via MyCA; CA Technologies offers expected enterprise levels of services and support for APM, with global 24x7x365 support if necessary, as well as classroom and web-based training.