SOLUTION BRIEF
CA APPLICATION PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT
Our apps are the face of our
business, but what impression
are they leaving?
premier business enabler to help
you drive app user-loyalty so that
every user transaction becomes a
loyalty-building interaction.
Executive Summary
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Challenge
In a time when businesses are literally being recoded by software, applications have now become the face of your business. Physical interactions are being replaced with digital interactions. And in the age of rapid adoption and rapid rejection, you have mere seconds to impress your users. This is the reality of the app economy. Despite the enormous complexity of today’s application delivery chain, your end users expect a flawless app experience, regardless of how, when or where they access your app. This means app issues aren’t IT issues, they’re customer satisfaction and retention issues.
Opportunity
Your organization must create unique digital offerings and deliver app experiences that inspire your end users. Today’s application performance management (APM) solutions fall short of delivering critical insights around your app users; today’s APM solutions wind up being used solely as IT performance tools and not as mechanisms to create strategic advantage to your business. Leaders in the app economy need a smarter APM—one with advanced analytics to spot anomalies earlier, which offers informed corrective action and can leverage the big data of APM to become more proactive. They need an APM that provides deeper insight into mobile app performance around users’ behavior, location and crash analytics. They need an APM that can supercharge DevOps by providing a common performance language in both production and preproduction environments.
Benefits
CA Application Performance Management (CA APM) is designed for enterprise organizations who demand the absolute best to help them proactively monitor the applications they rely upon to stimulate user loyalty and to differentiate their business in the app economy.
CA APM is well positioned as an APM solution that can deliver mobile to mainframe insight for code level, root cause diagnostics, embedded multivariant behavioral analytics and enterprise scale management and metric analysis for the most demanding apps, so that every user transaction becomes a loyalty building interaction.
It gives you 20/20 insight into the complexity of your apps, from the point of user access, into the middleware components and back to the backend database or mainframe so you can pinpoint and resolve performance issues quickly.
Section 1: Challenges in the Application Economy and the Need for APM
Applications Reign Supreme
Applications are rewriting the world in which we live. They drive our economy. They are how partners and suppliers interact, how employees connect, how consumers share, learn and purchases goods and services and how we separate our business from our competitors. Every business is becoming an applications business. Every industry is becoming an applications industry, and this business model shift is only accelerating. There are currently four or more customer-facing applications delivered per year by leader IT organizations to their businesses. This data comes from a recent survey commissioned by CA Technologies which consisted of approximately 1,400 senior IT executives in global organizations with over UD$500 million in revenue, in 13 countries and across five industries (Financial Services, Healthcare, Retail, Telecom and Media/Entertainment). Half of these organizations state that the application economy is disrupting their industry, with 94 percent saying they feel pressure to launch new applications.
In addition, the importance of applications is growing. According to research firm AppNation1, “The combined value of paid apps, app-enabled purchases of goods and services and in-app advertising is expected to surge to US$151 billion in the U.S. by 2017.” The European apps market, according to GigaOM2, “Will grow from 17.5 billion euros (US$23.5 billion) in 2013 to 63 billion euros (US$86 billion) in 2018.”
“The combined value
of paid apps,
app-enabled purchases of
goods and services
and in-app advertising
is expected to surge to
$151 billion in the U.S.
by 2017.”
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End Users Expect a Flawless App Experience—Every Time
According to Forrester Research’s John C. McCarthy, VP and Principal Analyst for CIO’s in a 2014 report “Software Must Enrich Your Brand3,” “More than ever, software either enriches or degrades your brand.” Undoubtedly, this “impress me now” expectation comes from our experience with consumer mobile apps. Enterprise level applications now must deliver a flawless, even inspiring, experience every time. In today’s application economy, where apps have become the very heart and soul of your business, you have mere seconds to impress your user. The quality of the applications that the business builds and the performance of those applications are essential to the quality of your customer’s digital experience.
Why APM Is Critical
With this increased reliance on applications, it’s more important than ever that enterprises monitor and manage the end-user application experience across all environments: physical, virtual, mobile, cloud and mainframe.
The pressure to ensure a positive end-user experience with mission critical applications and to identify, diagnose and fix application issues quickly is imperitive with today’s environment of composite applications at a boiling point.
This is why APM is a key solution for enterprise organizations that rely upon these digital experiences to impress and build loyalty to the brand.
“ More than ever,
software either
enriches or degrades
your brand.”
Section 2: Deliver an Inspiring User Experience by Proactively Monitoring the Apps that Drive Your Reputation
CA Application Performance Management
CA APM is designed to be the premier APM solution in the marketplace for enterprise organizations who demand the absolute best when monitoring applications they rely upon to drive revenue and strengthen their brand reputation. Many of the largest and most innovative global organizations use CA APM to build, deploy and manage applications so every user transaction becomes a loyalty building interaction.
Make no mistake; CA defined the APM market in the late ninties by providing a solution that could scale and meet the performance requirements of the most demanding environments (CSPs, MSPs and large enterprises). By relying on CA APM, the biggest global organizations could bring applications to market that built their brand, while also giving them a competitive advantage. CA continues this APM legacy today by enabling enterprise organizations with the ability to reliably deploy and manage mission critical, highly complex applications.
In a very real sense, the world economy runs on CA APM. The majority of the Fortune 500 global organizations who want to ensure the best end-user experience with their applications entrust their brands to CA. If you are serious about building, deploying and managing applications, at scale, that inspire your users and that won’t tarnish your brand, CA is and will always be the clear APM choice.
Here is who chooses CA to manage their mission-critical apps: • Seven out of the top 10 Banks
• Seven out of the top 10 Telcos
• Seven out of the top 10 Healthcare Organizations
E.P.I.C. APM Strategy: The Catalyst to Stimulate User Loyalty and Differentiate
Your Business
With the APM 10 release, CA continues its E.P.I.C. APM strategy, a solution that creates a competitive advantage in the app economy by proactively managing the user experience. CA APM 10 delivers new innovation, based on the E.P.I.C. APM strategy that continues with each new release.
APM delivers a solution that is easy, proactive, intelligent and collaborative (E.P.I.C.) across the application lifecycle. This means easy deployment of APM agents to get value in minutes. It means automatic visibility into each native mobile or web-based transaction. It means obtaining intelligence and insight of end users’ interactions with your applications, from native mobile to mainframe. And it means E.P.I.C. APM acts as the catalyst for DevOps to fuel collaboration across the organization by providing a common vocabulary to analyze performance data thereby instilling continuous performance improvements at every stage of the software lifecycle.
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• Easy – Simplify and speed the triage process through a customizable patent pending relationship view
and timeline that helps you easily locate where performance problems originate.
• Proactive – Quickly recognize problems as they develop and intuitively understand the most critical and
recurrent problems across your application landscape—all with zero configuration.
• Intelligent – Automatically detect and monitor application processes without requiring any deep
knowledge of either the application or application framework.
• Collaboration – Enable better communication between Dev and Ops specialists to resolve problems
faster by utilizing the same production tool in development and with a unified view of the infrastructure and apps that affect business services.
Easy, proactive, intelligent and collaborative and with support for modern frameworks, such as PHP, Node. JS, MongoDB, and FUSE, CA APM can help you ensure a positive end-user experience across a broad range of Tier 1/2/3 applications.
Simplify and Speed the Triage of Performance Issues
For APM 10, CA undertook an extensive ethnographic research project where the typical day in the life and workflow of 80 individuals across 17 organizations in 18 cities were studied. From support analysts, to developers, performance engineers, APM administrators and managers, this research helped us understand the biggest challenges facing those that manage application performance. We learned how best to help make their lives easier and make application triage more efficient. Support analysts, in particular, whose job within a typical organization is to monitor hundreds of different apps and systems, need help to declutter from what is often a mixed bag of siloed performance tools and traditional “app maps” that are anything but easy to understand.
An innovative approach to simplifying chaos
The adoption of new technologies such as Node.js, MongoDB, Docker, PHP, Cloud Foundry have enabled applications to be portable, dynamic and agile. This adds a new layer of complexity to an already complex application environment. When application issues arise, it becomes difficult to pinpoint the issue and too often you find yourself in lengthy war rooms or assigning experts to triage every issue. As a result, brand loyalty, customer satisfaction and innovation are negatively impacted. The old approach to application performance management just isn’t working. A new approach is needed.
CA APM 10 Team Center, a modern user interface designed from the ground up, simplifies and speeds the triage of application performance issues. It allows users to naturally and easily triage application problems, even with little to no knowledge of the application. The patent pending relationship view of Team Center lets you overlay real world attributes onto complex application relationship data to simplify the view and minimize the “spaghetti” seen in typical application topology maps. By applying attributes, various users across operations can filter based on geography, business unit, application component, operating system and more, to easily view what is important to them and the task at hand. Reducing the chaos helps you to focus on the issue to deliver better customer experience.
Go back in time to find the start of a performance issue
One of the first questions that is asked when performance problems arise is “what changed?” Understanding changes over time and the ability to dive into the changes that precede a performance issue is a key element of CA APM 10. Team Center has an integrated timeline which lets you see the sequence of change events in chronological order and navigate the series of events to see the impact of change related to the application components. By simply dragging the timeline backwards from a performance issue, you can easily identify the start point of the issue and the first affected components. This can help identify the beginning of performance issues and help to address future problems by addressing the true root cause.
Figure A. Patent Pending CA APM Team Center Perspectives Figure B. Patent Pending CA APM Team Center Timeline
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Know when and where to act
In the past, APM solutions have dealt with false positive alerts by using baselines. Although this has helped, these approaches typically look at only one part of the issue, severity. A different way to look at the issue is to analyze severity and duration. Is the problem a small problem that has been occurring over a long period of time? This could eventually escalate into a larger issue and you would probably want to investigate. Is the problem a medium issue that occurs some of the time? Once again this should be alerted as it could become a larger issue very soon. Analyzing severity and time arms you with the right information to know when and where you should act.
In CA APM 10, the Differential Analysis capability uses a technique totally new to the APM market that mirrors the work a human operator would do to monitor transactions. This new approach involves no configuration and produces alerts that catch both slow growing, chronic problems and fast acting acute ones. When trouble is brewing, highly diagnostic transaction traces are automatically captured and made available for review. No complex rules and configuration are required for success.
Figure C.
Patent Pending CA APM Differential Analysis
Mobile-to-Mainframe APM: 20/20 Insight for Root Cause Diagnostics
CA APM 10 provides a mobile APM solution that helps ensure optimal end-user experience through 360-degree performance visibility with mobile-to-mainframe capability. Mobile CA APM is an integration of CA APM 10 with mobile app analytics, discussed below.
Focus on mobile apps
In today’s mobile application economy, providing the best user experience is critical to building customer loyalty. With over one million mobile apps available for download, you have one chance to provide a great user experience and deliver value to our mobile customers. How can you ensure a great mobile app experience that elevates your offering above the thousands of other choices our customers have? CA Mobile App Analytics is a SaaS based and on-premises solution that provides your business analysts, app developers, IT operations and support teams with the complete visibility and the insights needed to achieve user loyalty and maximize potential value to customers. CA Mobile App Analytics provides a comprehensive solution to visualize and analyze user experience and app health, capture and investigate issues and inform app teams with real world customer usage data to deliver the most impactful features and fixes in the next app update.
CA APM integrates with CA Mobile App Analytics to provide a true mobile to mainframe offering. With this mobile APM solution, IT operations teams can investigate where issues reside across the end-to-end mobile app infrastructure so that they can be fixed quickly. IT operations teams and support teams can then feed that real user data back to the app development teams to improve the next version of the app, greatly enhancing the user experience. It offers clarity into the performance of mobile applications to help pinpoint issues across the mobile infrastructure. The solution enables a better understanding of the usage of the app by geography, carrier, device and more in order to deliver dynamic applications that delight users.
Figure D.
CA APM consuming mobile data from CA Mobile App Analytics
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Focus on middleware
CA APM has 20/20 visibility of all your transactions from the mobile device, through the middleware, back into the mainframe/database backend. Middleware components can’t be ignored as they often represent the secret sauce of transaction routing and transformation for many enterprise customers. Coverage of middleware ensures the required end-to-end visibility that results in accurate and actionable performance metrics.
CA APM monitors an extensive list of middleware components, such as middleware from IBM®, Oracle, Red Hat, Software AG, Tibco, and more as well as non-Java™ environments like MQ.
Focus on mainframe
CA APM closes the loop on 360-degree visibility of applications by tracking user transactions within the mainframe. CA has been monitoring mainframe applications for years and, since 2009, with the CA Cross-Enterprise Application Performance Management (CA Cross-Cross-Enterprise APM) cross-enterprise component, is uniquely positioned to provide detailed infrastructure and transaction metrics with drill-down capabilities for all mainframe sub-systems. CA Cross-Enterprise APM provides a unified view of enterprise transactions by monitoring the real-time performance of customer facing applications that span the mainframe.
As the solution helps users identify and isolate performance problems by monitoring health metrics of critical application components, it also delivers deep visibility into the performance of key mainframe resources including z/OS, USS, TCP/IP, WebSphere MQ, CA Datacom/DB, IBM IMS™ and DB2 for z/OS in
Figure E.
Mobile transaction data captured with specific meta-data about carrier, network, location, device, etc. Figure F. Health of Middleware Components is Critical to Application Performance
a single unified APM dashboard with drill-down capabilities. The unified view empowers IT and the business with important data to make informed decisions without needing specifics skills in other tools or environments. Figure G. An end-to-end application flow, including the mainframe. Figure H. Information provided to your mainframe performance team for detailed analysis and action.
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Enterprise Scalability
Whether you are a large organization or a smaller and growing organization, CA APM can meet your scalability requirements. We offer full featured APM capabilities that scale to monitor billions of
transactions in the most demanding data center, cloud or hybrid environments. Start with one instance of APM, enterprise manager (EM), to collect up to 500,000 application metrics and grow to monitoring billions of metrics across your applications every day.
Some 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.
Sizing and scalability of a CA APM instance is based largely on the number of metrics that are collected and the number of agents instrumenting the application, as opposed to the number of applications being monitored. A single instance of a CA APM cluster (10 EMs) is capable of managing up to 3,000 agents, and collecting up to 5,000,000 (500,000/EM) metrics every 15 seconds.
And the CA APM Command Center, an included component of CA APM 10, provides simple management for thousands of agents, with easy UI integration. The APM Command Center acts as a central repository of all agent configurations and meta-data across all your APM clusters. This is management at enterprise scale.
Smart Instrumentation — Proactive, Automatic Evidence Collection
Understanding the path of transactions is critical in today’s application monitoring. When a transaction doesn’t complete, you need to understand where the issue took place. But doing application triage often requires in-depth knowledge of the application or the need to modify the instrumentation of the
application. This means a lot of manual effort involved to getting the deep call stack visibility you need to see the application performance and even more effort when instrumentation needs to change based upon changes to the application.
Instead of having to recreate the issue, or having the administrative burden and cost of monitoring every single transaction, Smart Instrumentation automatically collects transaction traces when a problem occurs. It gives you deep diagnostic information about the transaction error automatically so you can better triage the problem. With Smart Instrumentation, the system learns what transactions are most important to your business. It begins to trace anything that takes too long or has errors or stalled transactions. It does this without you having to do anything, although you can customize it as needed. It simply watches what should be watched and when it should be watched. This means rapid triage doesn’t require in-depth knowledge on the application or the instrumentation of the application.
Section 3:
Delight Your Users, Differentiate Your Business and
Protect Your Experts
Delivers Mobile-to-Mainframe Transaction Insight
Have 20/20 visibility into all your transactions from the mobile apps and device, through the network, infrastructure and middleware, all the way back into the mainframe/database backend.
Scales at a Level you can Trust to the Most Demanding Apps
CA APM is uniquely architected to run with low overhead in the largest and most complex IT environments, scaling seamlessly to easily manage and verify billions of transactions for critical applications.
Redefines Triage with Built-In Intelligent Analytics
CA APM redefines application triage by giving you an at a glance view of application stability over time, task related views to help you quickly pinpoint and prioritize problems allowing you to pull in experts only when needed.
Creates Personalized View into the Health of Your App
Team Center allows you to create meaningful perspectives that remove the clutter from the traditional “app map” to simplify and speed triage. This complements customizable dashboards that allow you can see what matters most to you and your stakeholders.
Figure I.
Automatic transaction tracing of transactions important to you. The “lightning bolt” icons reveal what transactions are monitoring automatically.
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Copyright © 2015 CA. All rights reserved. IBM z/OS and IMS are registered trademarks of IBM Corporation in the United States and/or other countries. Java is a trademark of Oracle Corporation in the United States, other countries, or both. All other trademarks, trade names, service marks and logos referenced herein belong to their respective companies.. CS200-141420_0715
1 Computerworld, July 15, 2013. “App economy expected to double by 2017 to $151B.” Matt Hamblen. 2 Forbes, February 13, 2014. “Fast Growing Opportunity in Europe’s $86 Billion App Economy.” Haydn Shaughnessy. 3 Forbes, February 13, 2014. “Fast Growing Opportunity In Europe’s $86 Billion App Economy.” Haydn Shaughnessy.
To learn more about how to better manage the performance of your applications, visit ca.com/apm.
Connect with CA Technologies at ca.com
CA Technologies (NASDAQ: CA) creates software that fuels transformation for companies and enables them to seize the opportunities of the application economy. Software is at the heart of every business, in every industry. From planning to development to management and security, CA is working with companies worldwide to change the way we live, transact and communicate – across mobile, private and public cloud, distributed and mainframe environments. Learn more at ca.com/apm.
