I’ve received requests from many of you to discuss best practices for performance tuning of CA Identity Suite, so that is today’s topic.
Call me biased, but I am firmly convinced that CA Identity Suite is the most comprehensive identity and access governance (IMAG) solution in the industry—and the most scalable. CA Identity Suite comprises three key applications:
- CA Identity Manager
- CA Identity Governance
- CA Identity Portal
These applications, embedded in your business processes and your IT infrastructure, are supported by several commercial technologies such as application servers, databases, LDAPs and operating systems. In the last 18 years, I’ve done almost countless IMAG assessments and CA Identity Suite health checks for customers of all sizes in a wide variety of industries. Those health checks all start with one seemingly simple question: What constitutes optimal performance, now and in the future? But as simple as it seems, you’ll be surprised how elusive the answer can be.
Performance tuning is easier to accomplish if we first establish qualitative metrics (such as the customer experience) and quantitative metrics (such as transaction speed) for the business process in question, say, user login. Your qualitative and quantitative metrics for user login (or any other process) will drive the metrics for individual solutions and components.
During this stage, it’s important to understand that each enterprise has its own unique metrics. To be successful, your organization needs to establish its own particular metrics rather than duplicate or approximate those of another enterprise—even if that enterprise is a leader in your industry.
After determining your metrics, you need to construct your test scenario, test data and test data automation. You then need to run them using a performance testing tool such as CA BlazeMeter and a testing automation tool such as CA Test Data Manager (CA TDM) to generate test data and verify results.
Testing your use case for metrics is not enough; you need the right set of eyes and ears to find out what’s going on. Gone are the days when monitoring server uptime, process, CPU and hard disk utilization were enough. The Application Economy demands a much more effective monitoring system that contributes to a successful digital transformation and a superior customer experience. This requires sophisticated low-level monitoring of components that can monitor the business process.
That’s where CA Application Performance Management (CA APM) enters the picture. Having worked with most of the performance monitoring tools on the market, I can assure you that none comes close to the capabilities and insights provided by CA APM (formerly CA Wiley). CA APM monitors CA Identity Suite tasks, events and business logic, providing full drill-down monitoring of low-level entities within a business process.
The powerful combination of CA BlazeMeter, CA TDM and CA APM allows performance testing and tuning for continuous delivery (#Agile) of CA Identity Suite. These tools provide the necessary insights for tuning the performance and adjusting the capacity of these CA Identity Suite components:
- CA Identity Manager Server, CA Identity Portal and CA Identity Governance Server JVMs running on IBM WebSphere, Oracle WebLogic, RHEL WildFly or RHEL JBoss EAP
- CA Identity Suite runtime and operations databases running on Oracle and/or Microsoft
- CA Identity Suite user stores running on CA Directory, LDAP, Active Directory and other support databases such as Oracle and Microsoft
- CA Identity Suite provisioning server and directory running on CA Directory
- Supported operating systems such as Windows Server, RHEL, and Oracle Solaris
- Network components
Whether you have performance issues or you want to build a highly scalable, high-performing CA Identity Suite infrastructure to enable your digital transformation, the CA Services team has the expertise to help you do precisely that. CA Services tunes the performance of Identity Manager by conducting technical health checks and, if requested, a full business process review. CA Services also specializes in performance testing and SaaS-based monitoring.
Please feel free to reach out to CA Services to find out how to engage us to facilitate your digital transformation and create a superior customer experience.