Service Assurance

RFD became a provider of Service Assurance solutions in 2004 when it partnered with Wily Technologies. This partnership continued after CA acquired Wily Technologies,and is expanding as CA widens its offerings in this area. RFD is a staunch proponent of Service Assurance because our customers have reaped its benefits time and again. Service Assurance solutions from CA Technologies will help your organization improve service quality, predictability, and efficiency by linking the end-user experience with its underlying systems and network infrastructure. These solutions enable all types of managers to understand performance, risk, and quality of services across physical, virtual and cloud environments. Service Assurance empowers your IT department,

allowing it to:

• Increase agility, which helps the organization optimize revenue and enhance productivity.
• Gain greater value and relevance to core business objectives.
• Prioritize actions based on business impact and SLAs.

Application Performance Management

The CA Wily Application Performance Management (“APM”) suite provides transaction visibility across the entire infrastructure—Web to middleware to mainframe—linked with business impact and end-user quality of experience metrics for Web and non-Web applications.  With these tools, your organization can monitor, analyze and report on transactions, response times and end-user experience across physical, virtual, cloud and mainframe environments to ensure optimal application delivery and protect revenue.

The CA Wily APM solution (formerly CA Wily Introscope and Customer Experience Manager) can help IT organizations exceed their specific service level agreements promised to customers, partners, and employees while realizing exceptional application availability and performance. The CA Wily APM solution can help application executives manage their business based on the key performance indicators that are most important to customers.

Part of CA Service Assurance solutions, these application management tools are integrated with Infrastructure Management and Service Operations Management to provide complete solutions that assure business service performance. We can help you deliver the performance your business demands across the board.

CA Application Delivery Analysis is designed to provide end-to-end application response time monitoring—without desktop or server agents—providing companies with a consistent and common set of service quality metrics that help prove the performance of applications delivered over the network, mitigate risks from planned changes or unexpected events, and resolve problems faster.

An understanding of normal performance is established via automatic, intelligent baselines. When problems are detected, CA Application Delivery Analysis intuitively gathers diagnostic data that helps further enable faster resolution of performance problems. Convenient application scorecards provide an at-a-glance view of critical application performance, while SLA reporting summarizes both performance and availability of applications. You can measure the before-and-after impact of infrastructure changes on application performance as well as validate the effectiveness of an MPLS migration, VoIP deployment, WAN optimization, QoS policy change, load balancers, and link and server upgrades.

CA Spectrum®

CA Spectrum® is a foundational component of the CA Infrastructure Management portfolio that, along with other performance and traffic analysis products, focuses on properly managing converged and dynamic IT infrastructures. CA Spectrum (formerly CA Spectrum Infrastructure Manager) integrates service-centric and change-aware infrastructure management, fault isolation and root cause analysis into a single tool to provide better service at a lower cost.

CA NetQoS ReporterAnalyzer provides insight into how application traffic impacts network performance. It harvests a rich set of traffic statistics, and easily scales to support the volume of data on the largest of networks. It provides real-time visibility and behavior analysis of network traffic, customizable reporting, actionable alerts, and automatic investigations. CA NetQoS ReporterAnalyzer tracks 100% of all flow traffic to provide an enterprise-wide view of traffic.  Its capacity planning calculations are changeable, allowing “what if” trending based on application, location, and bandwidth. Better data supports better decisions regarding resource allocation and capacity planning.

CA eHealth gives you the flexibility to manage multi-vendor networks, systems, databases, and client/server applications with proactive, real-time analysis distilled from disparate data sources across all technology silos.  CA eHealth monitors and collects information from network components, networking technologies, RFC standard/vendor-specific MIBs, and environmental sensors.  With the add-on capabilities provided by CA Mediation Manager, it gives you access to the following domains:

• Voice infrastructures like Avaya, Cisco, and Siemens
• Virtual systems such as IBM LPAR, Microsoft Hyper-V, and VMware environments and their associated virtual machines (VM)
• Cisco Unified Computing System
• Physical systems through autonomous, SNMP-based monitoring of heterogeneous systems with extensible plug-in architecture

CA Mediation Manager

CA Mediation Manager is a single integration layer for the critical non-IP and non-SNMP devices and EMSs and introduces these environments to the extensive management capabilities of the Service Assurance portfolio from CA Technologies.  Communication service providers (CSPs) can obtain an integrated availability and performance solution that spans the IP/MPLS network and the packet core, mobile transport, backhaul and radio access domains.  The following benefits accrue through an integrated service assurance portfolio:

• Integrated availability and performance management of your service infrastructure
• Incorporate non-IP and non-SNMP devices into your management solution
• Integrate multiple subtending element management systems (EMSes)
• Understanding the health and performance of critical transport and edge delivery components
• Designed to support enterprises, service providers and government agencies

Network Performance Management

CA eHealth helps you improve IT service quality, increase IT efficiency and reduce cost. It offers proactive network performance management for your entire enterprise IT infrastructure — voice and data networks, physical and virtual servers and databases.  CA eHealth helps you take corrective action before business processes are negatively impacted by collecting and analyzing key performance information across the IT infrastructure, providing both real-time and predictive performance analysis.

The CA NetQoS Performance Center is designed to unlock the infrastructure intelligence needed to manage the network for application performance with an extensive suite of analytics and reporting fueled by comprehensive data collection. Through a customizable Web-based reporting dashboard that integrates Service Assurance products from CA Technologies as well as third-party vendors, IT teams from engineering through IT management executives can access the right information at the right time.

Monitor network traffic with CA NetQoS Reporter Analyzer and get real-time visibility and historical analysis of which applications and hosts are consuming the most bandwidth, enabling you to make cost-effective decisions for optimizing and improving network service delivery.

CA Service Operations Insight (CA SOI) is a next-generation tool for managing business services for traditional and cloud-connected enterprises, service providers and governments. With CA SOI, you visualize and analyze your infrastructure domains, applications and transactions together, according to the services they support. This lets you pinpoint, prioritize and resolve service problems across your IT supply chain to help you minimize risks to your business, improve service quality and predictability and optimize operational efficiency.

RFD sells and supports additional CA products that contribute to the Service Assurance solution, some of which are listed below:

• CA GigaStor™.  Long-term Packet Capture and Analysis.
• CA NetQoS NetVoyant®.  Device Performance Management.
• CA Application Delivery Analysis.  End-to-end application response time monitoring.
• CA NetQoS Unified Communications Monitor.  Gain Unified Communications quality of experience and network monitoring for your voice and video traffic.

Literature

Success Story: 
Failure to safeguard the performance of the website could have impacted customer satisfaction and even resulted in lost sales.

Industry Analyst Reports:
CA Introduces “Cross Enterprise Application Performance Management,” Bridging the Distributed and Mainframe Silos for APM
CA Wily Announces APM Enhancements Focusing on SOA and Web Services Deployments

Product Briefs:
CA Wily Application Performance Management Product Sheet
CA Application Performance Management Services Brief

White Papers:
Achieving Top Performance and User Experience with Next Generation Services and Applications
APM: The Key to EITM Success
End-User Monitoring: Gaining Visibility into Hidden Business Risks
Managing Application Performance to Achieve Mission Success
Optimizing Performance of Business-Critical Web Applications

If your organization would like a more in-depth viewing of the technology, we would be pleased to setup a webinar and review the capabilities of the CA Technologies APM solution. This demonstration utilizes the actual product and will allow both business owners and technical staff to get a hands-on feel for what data can be presented. Please contact us to schedule a time.

DIR’s Information and Communications Technology (ICT) Cooperative (Co-op) Contracts Program

RFD is an authorized DIR ICT Cooperative Contract holder for DIR-SDD-788 and authorized partner and reseller for CA Technologies in the State of Texas. Click here to find out more about the RFD/CA Technologies ICT Co-op relationship.