I don’t miss the days when a zillion raw data points made up a transaction and application experience was displayed on something resembling a starship console. Application monitoring tools could, albeit with a great deal of elbow grease, identify performance issues, but they weren’t up to the challenge of helping an organization fix or prioritize issues. In this light-speed world of application performance management, with shrinking OPEX budgets, we have to do both: identify issues and make immediate fixes, balanced with the messy necessity of drilling down into detailed information for deep performance profiling.
You don’t have to make a trade off between simple and clean visualizations and messy-but-detailed ones. CA has a history of identifying meaningful metrics and understanding cause to a high degree of detail for issues that impact organizations. CA APM’s latest version gives users access to the full starship console when needed, but starts with a new, very powerful front-end Team Center view with a sleek interface that provides a clear view of what’s wrong and indications as to why the problem exists. All users in the organization can find the right mix for their responsibility areas.
For example, at a management level, a starting point is a quick view of whether the business application is performing properly—and if not, why not. Some analytics build that in, bringing root causes into a likely-issues box at the top level of API. It’s a clean, consistent way to get to root cause, but still opens the ability to drill down. Do you want to see all the gory metric details that used to be on that starship console? You can still get to them in a logical way, drilling down to the business logic.
I’ve seen a proliferation of simple, slick interfaces for APM that don’t offer much more than a quick view. Having the depth of metrics and the ability to leverage integrations is critical, especially if your organization is looking to a future that will depend on strong analytics capabilities. The persona-based views in the latest CA APM go well beyond previous versions in terms of quickly getting value from the solution.
With Agile Operations capabilities, you’re looking at metrics that you can correlate to a bigger picture from your hosted apps, to your organization’s teams that use those apps, all the way up the stack—from the inside out—to the business processes. AgileOps analytics takes an outside-in approach: looking at business analytics and correlating them to their underpinnings. Integrating application performance management with AgileOps analytics delivers meaningful metrics on operations that impact the organization, from the outside-in approach of processes down to what supports them.
Disconnected systems looking at a variety of data sources can result in a scenario like this: You ask what happened to cause call center calls to start dropping. After digging around, you realize you’re not getting any information from a particular router, so you have to figure out why by drilling into the device. With the new Team Center view, you can go from business cause to root cause rather than having an issue and not being certain what devices are affected. The latest CA APM enables that view from inside-out or outside-in, and in an unmatched, comprehensive way.
This new view also focuses on helping with business issues, instead of looking at everything through the lens of IT issues. When a slew of issues hit, some are going to impact the organization and some aren’t. Correlating IT issues to business services allows you to triage IT issues appropriately, according to business impact. The new view’s filters allow you to see some issues from a network or application perspective, while other filters provide a true business-level view. Ultimately, this latest version removes the friction between business and IT to get meaningful metrics without the mess.