In a recent APM digest article, one of my colleagues succinctly summarized the imperative for IT operations to become more agile. With the increased speed of development and shift to continuous delivery, it’s fair to say that IT operations as a discipline must adapt from ‘managing the status quo’ to fuelling the business with new innovations.

To help IT ops quickly achieve these goals while making their jobs easier, modern monitoring and automation tools need to be engineered to meet the business mandate for speed, quality and scale. At CA Technologies we’ve taken a lead by announcing new capabilities for our CA Application Performance Management (CA APM) and CA Unified Infrastructure Management (CA UIM) solutions.

What’s new in CA Application Performance Management

In the TV documentary ‘Air Emergency’, investigators aim to recover flight recorders to help recall and replay the conditions that lead to adverse situations. With monitoring we’ve been badly in need of a similar capability that helps cross-functional teams quickly roll back to a point where a change condition occurred, pinpoint the element and correlate this with performance anomalies. With CA APM’s Timeline Views, teams have a visual way to roll back infrastructure to points in time to reliably determine what changes impacted performance and quickly initiate remediation. This means no more pouring over log-files, or worse – development getting pulled off critical projects to argue that it wasn’t their code that caused a problem.

Also, in many ways Google Earth’s high altitude maps resemble the infrastructure topology maps we’ve tried for years to get our heads around. Like IT topology, they’re cluttered with masses of detail. Of course in Google Earth there is an option to remove the noise by filtering according to what’s important – like finding the quickest route to the gas station. Once again this type of dynamic visualization has been sadly lacking in the monitoring solutions. That’s why CA has completely redesigned CA APM’s new user interface to provide support staff, APM administrators and developers the ability to dynamically present topology in context of their own roles, tasks and area of responsible. So, using Relationship Views as we call it, together with advanced analytics from new Differential Analysis, teams no longer get distracted by noise and irrelevance, but zoom into what’s important to them.

Updates to CA Unified Infrastructure Management

A successful Agile Operations strategy also removes the complexity and specialization needed to manage Big Data infrastructure, so that organizations can quickly adopt these architectures to future-proof the business. To help our customer achieve this, the new release of CA UIM now provides support for Hadoop, Cassandra and MongoDB – all from a single, unified console. These capabilities help focus teams around big data and analytics business services, without incurring additional costs involved with managing multiple tools. This unified approach is illustrated perfectly by a major health care IT service provider who realized a 60% reduction in time spent administering monitoring tools, while also reducing resolution times by 76%

In the spirit of DevOps collaboration, we also believe vendors have a role to play in fostering the sharing of information, knowledge and expertise. That’s why we’ve announced our new Marketplace @ CA. Here our customers and partners, can quickly download monitoring probes or integrations. Like for example a new gateway probe that enables quality of service metrics from CA UIM to be correlated and combined with CA APM performance metrics so that teams have an end-to-end view across applications and infrastructure – the result – lower TCO for clients who’ve invested in both solutions. On the marketplace, partners can also contribute new probes that can then be shared across the Agile Operations community.

Business success in an increasingly software-driven economy means IT Ops team must become agile as development. We’ll be discussing this imperative during a 2-hour Agile Operations virtual summit on July 14 at 12pm ET. Please join us to see how Agile Operations helps remove silos, improves collaboration between all stakeholders, and unifies Dev and Ops teams.If you are not able to join the live event, the on-demand version will be available on/before July 17.

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