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What's New in CA APM 10.2

By Amy.Feldman posted Mar 23, 2016 01:13 PM

  

We are proud to announce the general availability of CA APM 10.2 providing visibility from mobile to mainframe within Team Center, new features that give you the ability to tame your complex enterprise environments and a focus on simplification.

 

Visibility from Mobile to Mainframe

CA APM 10.2 provides increased visibility from mobile to mainframe with a new integration between Cross Enterprise APM and APM Team Center.  As part of this integration, three new mainframe components were added to APM Team Center allowing you to see the performance of CICS, IMS and DB2 in context of your application performance.  Also within Team Center, you will also be able to view the mainframe metrics of these components.  This new integration allows you to pivot on these critical mainframe components providing greater insights and increasing your ability to quickly triage application performance issues.

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Taming your Complex Enterprise

Some of the largest enterprises rely on CA APM due to our ability to scale with their growing needs.

 

Here are just a few customer data points as to how vast in scale we can go:

  • A large communications service provider is currently using CA APM to monitor over 25,000 Java Virtual Machines (JVMs) across multiple datacenters, capturing 25,000,000 metrics every 15 seconds, reporting into over 400 EMs, many of which are in the customer’s internal cloud.
  • A large online services and tax management company monitors 2,500,000 concurrent customer sessions processing 200,000 transactions per second. This customer monitors 9,000 JVMs and network components on more than 120 EMs. They monitor applications in their private cloud, legacy datacenter and public cloud using CA APM.
  • A major US bank manages more than 14,000 JVMs and middleware components using CA APM. This bank also uses CA APM to manage critical applications, like online banking, fund transfers, wealth management, lending and mortgage, investment banking and more.

 

Over the years of collaborating with large enterprises, we understand the challenges with taming complex environments such as how do you view application performance that spans across data centers globally?  How do you simplify and aggregate complex mass sets of performance data quickly and easily?

 

Introducing Enterprise Team Center, which works under the hood to provide Team Center to aggregate data across your APM enterprise environment.  Team Center centralizes information from all MOMs and standalone Enterprise Managers in the environment to present a single view of any area of the enterprise environment.

 

Enterprise Team Center allows users to:

  • Easily view app performance across large-scaled environments
  • Ensure consistent, simplified monitoring across large deployments with managed agent bundles/packages
  • Pulls aggregate data across clusters (i.e. average heap in Data Center, etc.)

 

Another new feature in APM Team Center are Universes providing security, management and navigation needed to understand application environments. Universes are a focused partition of the application environment across clusters that is defined using attributes and based on business requirements for a userThink of these like a global filter that are assigned to users and detailing what users are allowed to see.   Universes are also great for providing specific user views into not only large enterprises but also complex application environments such as those using microservices architectures. 

 

The example below shows transactions across three different APM clusters which previously you would have had to log into each cluster separately in order to view the application performance.

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Enterprise Team Center and Universes provide an easy way to view application performance data across complex environments in a way that makes sense to the business and to the various users of CA APM. 

In addition, CA APM 10.2 provides better clarity with a new Path-based Filtering capability. Often times, application maps quickly become unwieldy, even in small environments and typical filtering cuts too much from the view.  In CA  APM 10.2, you now have the ability to add path-based filtering along with the attribute filter to show all relevant components or “cousins” related to that transaction flow.  This allows you to reduce complex maps by only showing what is relevant to the users task. In addition, you do not have to be an expert to understand what the critical pieces to the puzzle are; it connects the dots for you.

 

 

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Simplification

Over the past few releases, we have been focusing on simplifying CA APM, asking ourselves for every new feature “is it easy”.   In CA APM 10.2, we continue down the path of simplification with a new ACC Agent Builder and APM Team Center UI improvements.

 

APM Command Center (ACC) Agent Builder enables you to create and manage custom agent packages suitable for your environment. Using the graphical user interface (Agent Package Builder), you can build packages by combining various agent functionalities. The completed package can be downloaded, either manually or using an API.

 

Agent Builder helps to simplify the download and configuration of agents by:

  • Providing simpler download and configuration of agents.
  • Centralizing agent configuration making it easier to manage agent complexity. 
  • Making it easier to find the agent package needed for each environment.
  • Providing an API that allow users to easily configure agents by pushing scripts.
  • Keeping track of agent versions.

 

In order to make CA APM more prescriptive, we continue to fine-tune and improve APM Team Center.  In this release, we have updated the Team Center UI by replacing ribbons with collapsible navigation for filters and highlighting, which allows more space to view the application environment. Also APM Team Center includes a new welcome page with readily accessible information to get started quickly, the ability to build perspectives on any attribute and easily add metrics to the details pane for better context when triage application performance issues.

 

Additional Improvements

CA APM 10.2 introduces new features to CA Customer Experience Manager (CEM) including real time transaction metrics to include 95th % metrics.  This allows you to understand the outlier data points to identify any issues in a business transaction.  Also added are geo-location metrics, which tracks the geographic locations of any business transactions, and the performance metrics for a location.

 

These are only just few of improvements introduced in CA APM 10.2 for the complete list; please refer to the release notes or the CA APM 10.2 documentation.

 

Learn more about 10.2:

 

Attend the What's new in CA APM 10.2 Webcast

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