Get the Most Out of Your Application Performance Monitoring Tool – Upgrade Today

by Haroon Ahmed August 16, 2017

It’s no secret that upgrading your existing application performance monitoring tool can be a timely an extensive process. But here at CA, we are commited to making this process as easy and smooth as possible by helping each step of the way.

Recently I was asked to help a customer get up to speed with the latest version of  CA Application Performance Management (APM) 10.5 and some of its new features and capabilities. As you could imagine, there is a bit of a learning curve customers coming from an older version.

In this instance, one of the key customer requirements was to create dashboards quickly so they could give APM access to several of their app and support teams as part of their on-boarding strategy. They primarily had three categories (or roles) of users for their dashboards, as described below:

• Executive: “How are my revenue impacting services doing and is end user experience good?”
• Support: “Are systems, apps and data centers that am responsible for healthy and if not what’s the root cause and who do I triage to?”
• App Dev: “Are any of my recent changes to servlets, EJB’s and DB’s causing any negative impact and if yes how and what’s the root cause?”

Apart from role based dashboards, another ask was the ability for a user to view his or her own data and nothing else. Not an unusual request as many of our customers have similar requirements, however traditional Application Performance Monitoring tools don’t offer an easy solution.

The Solution – CA APM 10

Enter CA APM 10 – it completely redefines the way dashboards are created and used. Among many features and functionalities – CA APM 10 introduced the concept of Perspectives, Attributes and Universes that together make dashboard creation a piece of cake. Before we get into the details let’s quickly recap what Attributes, Perspectives and Universes are:

• Attributes: Are meta data associated with the Team Center elements like vertices and edges that give more information about that element. Attributes show up on the right-hand side of Team Center when you select a vertex or an edge (E.g. Location, Owner etc.).
• Perspectives: The ability to set views by grouping attributes (E.g. AWS perspective based on grouping of attributes like Region, Apps and EC2ImageID). And allows the user to create a Team Center view that reflects their mental map of the layout.
• Universes: Allows the user to define ACL based on user info and attribute data. For example, you can select all the Team Center elements based on a certain application (attribute here is application) and assign only the users who are responsible for those apps.

Creating Custom Dashboards with Ease

Now that we understand some of these concepts let’s see how CA APM 10 makes dashboard creation easy, going back to our customer use case. We started off with one perspective for each of our roles (i.e. Executive, Support and AppDev). Each of these perspectives were grouped by following attributes (determined by the customer, yours could be different):

•  Executive Perspective: BT, Application
•  Support Perspective: Location, Application, Hostname
•  AppDev Perspective: Application, Type (component)

These perspectives formed our templates. In CA APM 10 this is as simple as creating three new perspectives with relevant attributes from the perspective drop down and takes only a minute or two to implement.

Next, we needed to populate each perspective with relevant data and associate users. For this we leveraged CA APM 10’s Universes and created new Universes based on data access requirements (in this case we defined Universes based on the application). Once the Universes were defined, the customer associated the data to each template relevant to that Universe – based on attributes and filters.

Last but not least, we needed to associate appropriate users to each Universe, so that a user who is responsible for say App A, when logged in, would only see data related to App A. This is easily done in the settings tab by associating users to the Universe. Once we had one template completely nailed, the customer went on to create additional Universes based on other apps.

All in all,  we were able to complete defining dashboards in less than two hours which can now be used for any number of users with the defined roles – and anytime a new app came in that required a dashboard, all we needed to do was define a Universe, associate team center data and relevant users and all our templates would be automatically populated. If a new view (template/perspective) was required, it would take only a few minutes to set up and relevant data would be automatically populated.

In summary, the old way of creating dashboards (which just about every APM vendor still follows) is cumbersome, error prone and time consuming. It’s hard to maintain and requires constant tweaks. With CA APM 10 and dynamic dashboards, in just a matter of minutes one could create templates and populate them with data that is relevant to the user – making it effortless, clean and easy to maintain.

To learn more about the new features in CA APM 10.5, watch this video:

Upgrade in 4 Simple Steps

Convinced it’s time to upgrade your application performance monitoring tool? Get started now and take advantage of all CA APM 10.5 has to offer!

Future Proofing Business with Microservices and Docker Monitoring

Future Proofing Business with Microservices and Docker Monitoring

February 17, 2017

Pete Waterhouse
CA Technologies

Imagine you're a cog in a well-oiled team that's architected a wonderful new business app comprising 50 plus microservices running across Docker containers (it's a small deployment). Pretty standard stuff, right?

And everything's Docker-centric across dev, test, and pre-prod environments. The team is so DevOps awesome that they're even thinking about running Docker in production – gasp!

Perhaps it's a cloud delivery model, so you're using a number of elastic compute instances for each one of those container-housed microservice nuggets.

Now let's get down to monitoring.

No problemo I hear you say. Resilience is the mantra, so the team probably automates a swag load of health checks in short time intervals each and every day. Ok, it's resulting in an increase in events and alarms, but we can take it – we always have.

Of course, monitoring doesn't end at the ops console. Because this is a business-critical app, there are some pretty important functional considerations too. Being services-driven, the team is laser-focused on capturing "golden signals" all google SRE style (latency; traffic; errors; saturation), or perhaps they go further, injecting app performance checks into Jenkins CI builds and analyzing cloud instance level performance metrics.

But there is a pattern emerging and it isn't one of those funky analytics-based insights you keep reading about on the Interwebs. Nope, because of the dynamic (even ephemeral) nature of container architectures, microservice dependencies and API-centric communication, that sharp increase in alarms is becoming unmanageable. So much so that the notion of running Docker in production is not looking so good after all.

This is tragic for business.

Why? Because Dockerized applications and services are unequivocally the architectural fabric needed to engage customers at scale. Not next month or next year, now. Defer adoption due to concerns about service levels and the only thing we might be guaranteeing is an uncertain business future.

It's not to say that monitoring is trivial – it certainly isn't. It just requires a different approach. One that treats dockerized apps as the future of a modern digital business and works to, well - future proof them.

There are four important considerations:

1. FAST, SIMPLE AND EASY-TO-USE

There's no rest for the wicked in the Docker world. What you configure for today can change in minutes, so explore agentless approaches that continuously detect, discover, model and map containers and clusters. When it comes to Docker monitoring, what's key is ensuring monitoring is baked into dockerized apps right from the get-go; not being forced to treat it as tough operational chore.

2. DEEP, ACTIONABLE MONITORING INSIGHTS

Tech loves tech (and there's not much more techy than Docker), but the business cares about functionality and customer experience. It's why you'll need visibility into the "vital signs'"of containerized applications; including latency, response time and performance. Use analytics sure, but to find signals in all the noise, expose patterns, anomalies, behaviors. There'll be plenty of these with Docker, you just need a system that knows what questions to ask to find them.

3. HYPER PERFORMANCE DELIVERED AT SCALE

Table stakes is aggregating millions of data points; rapidly detecting, diagnosing and isolating problems across Docker containers, clusters and elastic cloud services. For DevOps goodness give a big tick to approaches that allow cross-functional buddies to share deep Docker performance insights, while serving up actionable information in context of roles and tasks.

4. COMPREHENSIVE, FULL STACK SUPPORT

Monitor Docker platforms and architectures top-to-bottom, inside-out and outside-in. Sounds like a mouthful, but what it really means understanding Dockerized app performance in context of business outcomes and then correlating to every nook and cranny (across apps, infrastructure and networks) that support them. Whether you're an SRE, app owner or sysadmin, this approach is sure to pay dividends.

Docker is transformational because it helps companies architect and deliver better business outcomes from software - faster. To support these goals, it's time to rethink and re-engineer our Docker monitoring approaches. Seek out solutions that help ensure this tech always delivers on its promise – today and well into the future.

Pete Waterhouse, Advisor, Product Marketing at CA Technologies.

Winning the customer experience battleground, Game of Thrones style

There's a battle on the horizon and I'm not just referring to the armies amassing in Westeros.

Derek Stevens • July 13, 2016

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The new battleground that will determine which businesses win and lose in the application economy is customer experience. And if Game of Thrones has taught me anything, it’s that you best be prepared, winter is coming.

Here are three tips for providing an unbeatable digital experience:

Keep your loyal subjects happy…Optimize the customer journey

A poor app experience will frustrate your customers. Your customer can now engage with your brand through a huge number of digital channels, making it more difficult than ever to ensure they’re getting the best possible digital experience. In addition, your customers want to access your services where and when they need them, whether that’s on the web or a mobile or wearable device. You need to provide a seamless experience across all of your applications.

Understanding customer pain-points and where and when they’re dropping off in their journey will give you the visibility that can help you improve your apps and the overall customer experience. Analytics tools that provide deep insights into how, when and where users are interacting with your apps are immensely powerful in helping you understand where you can optimize and how best to keep your customers happy.

Know your kingdom…Bolster your infrastructure by improving digital performance & availability

Your customers want to accomplish the goal they set out to complete as fast as possible, whether that’s purchasing tickets online or depositing a check from their mobile device. You need to be able to provide fast transactions, as a slow performing app could result in your customers switching allegiances.

But knowing where the issue is occurring can be challenging. An analytics tool can help you quickly pinpoint if the problem is an issue with the infrastructure, code or design. It can also provide visibility from the user’s device all the way to the backend systems, so you can quickly repair issues as they occur.

Winter is coming…Plan, strategize and design with the customer in mind

Too often, companies put the cart before the horse and release applications that aren’t fine-tuned to their customers’ needs. Analytics provide visibility into how users are flowing through your app, what pages their visiting the most, how often their returning and what issues their encountering will give you the insight you need to provide a great experience for your customers. These insights will allow you to improve your apps for future releases so you can stay ahead of the competition.

Winning the battle

To win the battle, you need a solution that covers all of these areas and ensures that you’re delivering a 5-star application experience. With CA App Experience Analytics (formerly CA Mobile App Analytics), you can gain proactive, real-time insights into user behavior, buyer trends and omnichannel performance for complete visibility into digital performance and customer experience across web, mobile, and wearable devices.

Downloading the CA App Experience Analytics free trial takes five steps and less than five minutes to implement. Otherwise you can check out this test drive to explore a CA App Experience Analytics environment, complete with all the app performance, crash and usage analytics you’d gather from a real-world installation without downloading any software.

Want to learn more on using analytics to deliver flawless digital experience? Join the 2-part webinar and live demo series starting on July 14 at 1 p.m. ET featuring 451 Research and CA Technologies.

Guest Blogger: The ill-effects of past APM practice

The ill-effects of past APM practice

A smaller metrics haystack makes finding the application performance needles easier.

Guest Contributor • April 20, 2016

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In most application teams, the approach to application monitoring is to watch everything in production environment – all the time – to find customer applications issues that have slipped through the cracks.

This produces reams of deep-dive metrics that are then used for post-mortem analysis by developer experts and middleware mavens, in much the same way doctors study patients to prescribe medicines and assist in recovery.

However, time and time again this approach has been proven ineffective, because the Application Performance Management (APM) solution used is simply too metrics-oriented and descriptive – not prescriptive or offering much in the way of problem resolution.

Needle and haystack problem

By fixating on just how much descriptive data they can get from logs, app servers, browser engines, web servers and the like, it’s as if most APM solutions try to resolve app problems by adding more hay to the haystack where they are trying to find a needle. A more pragmatic APM solution would try and reduce the haystack of data, not increase it.

Similarly, in modern engineering, you don’t have to open the hood of an engine to find faulty or corrupted parts. Today, troubleshooting complex machinery is simplified via sensors and color-coded status indicators lights.

We could simply borrow this concept for application troubleshooting, but until now, critical end-user application support has suffered from approaches that solely address the wrong audience – the application developers.

It is high-time to alleviate the complexities in APM solutions by making them work like the intuitive sensors that exactly pinpoint offenses and eliminate guesswork. This calls for high-level dashboards with status indicators that provide an end-to-end view of the app ecosystem for quick diagnosis.

Application support utopia is analytics-oriented, not metrics-driven

Paradoxically, in contrast with the design justification of most APM toolsets, almost all organizations allocate less savvy support analysts to the problem-finding tasks.

These first-line support teams mostly tend to have rudimentary understanding of application technologies and programming languages used in creating cutting-edge user experience-based apps.

This causes the support teams to seek help from experts – the developers and middleware specialists – on many issues, unintentionally wasting their precious time in app maintenance and support, rather than developing that next cool feature that will ensure end-user loyalty.

Furthermore, the rate at which new programming languages and frameworks are releasing is faster than ever, and this puts a lot of pressure on developers to update their skills, let alone the support analyst.

Demystifying application management

APM toolsets must aim to demystify application management by providing simple and intuitive screens backed by strong filtering capabilities that allow flexible pivoting and easy root-cause analysis. Fundamentally, this demands a shift in making APM toolsets less metrics-drivenand more analytics-driven.

This can be achieved by redesigning APM solutions that were never purposed for support teams and involving direct feedback from support team members. It’s critical to making APM toolsets easier to use, and also to reinforce support functions and meet the expectations of customers that invest heavily in these technologies.

APM is no longer a tool just for the experts but a technology that requires simplification to help support teams make application monitoring easy, proactive and exciting. This is the only way to empower support analysts to handle a majority of issues themselves and to minimize the unnecessary involvement of busy developers.

Blog written by Nik M Jain, principal consultant for APM Presales at CA Technologies.

The Tyranny of Choice

As technology experts (i.e. sales people) we are focused on helping our clients' solve problems with our solutions or services.  What we really should be doing it making the decision easier for them.

Exceptional sales people transform themselves into advocates for their clients and build relationships based on trust and a history of success.  In 2016 from my experience, this type of sales person is flat out hard to find both for technology companies looking to hire them and for their clients.

Because of this and the explosion of content, more and more technology buyers (both consumer and enterprise) have turned to educating themselves before ever talking to a sales rep.  A lot of stats are thrown around about when clients choose to finally engage a sales rep  (usually 50%-60% through the process).

A couple years ago, I read an article, based on a book called, "The Tyranny of Choice."  The theory of the book is that consumers face so many choices, they become overwhelmed and decide not to purchase anything.  Around that time, I went with my dad to Best Buy to look at new TV's.  He had an old tube TV that weighed about 500 pounds and was thinking about an LED.  We walked into Best Buy and were amazed by the 200 foot wall full of TVs of all size and variety.  LED, LCD, Plasma, Megahertz, apps, networked, refresh rate were all things that he had to consider before making his purchase.  My dad ended up walking out more confused than ever.  He said to me, "maybe I will just stick with my old TV."  The choices and decision making process scared him so much, that he didn't buy anything.

I can tell you for a fact, that in 2016 enterprise IT, "The Tyranny of Choice" is still alive.   Enterprise IT organizations face a lot of choice for every purchase decision that they make.

To overcome, "The Tyranny of Choice", technology companies need to adjust their thinking and do the following things:

1.  Empathy - put yourself in your customer's shoes and really try to understand his world.  How many vendors call him every day?  What does his boss and the business demand of him?  and most importantly, how risky is investing in new technology to his career?  Truly empathize with your client's needs.

2.  KISS (keep it simple, stupid) - technology companies need to simplify their products, the evaluation process and most importantly the pricing and licensing process.  Remember, if we give our clients too many choices, we are at risk of confusing them.

The technology companies who change their thinking and simplify their offerings, will win in a world of choice.

Come back next week to hear about how industry leaders like CA Technologies are partnering with some of the largest media companies in the world to get the word about their products and services...and not how you'd think.

The Opening Post...The Application Economy

Have you heard of this phrase yet?  The Application Economy is everywhere.  It is an energy field created by all living things...it surrounds us, it penetrates us, it binds the galaxy together....OK, maybe I am taking power of The Application Economy too far there...

I asked my 10 year old the other day if he could tell me what "The Application Economy" is...and he gave me a pretty good answer.  All 10 year olds know what an "app" is because their iPads are never more than an arms length away... and hey, they are actually teaching economics in the 4th grade now.  He told me that the application economy is how people make money by selling apps or things through the app....from the mouths of babes.

Now I am not going to waste my initial blog by telling you how Uber, Amazon or Yelp are good examples of The Application Economy.  Or how VRBO manages more than a million reservations with 1500 employees while Marriott does the same with 200,000 employees.  If you are reading my blog to learn that,  we all have problems.  No...instead, we all need to think about the future...of The Application Economy and how it will affect all of our personal lives and if you are working in the technology world, our careers.

One example of the future of The Application Economy is happening in Van Buren Township, MI...home of automotive supplier, Visteon.  While we all await the arrival of the autonomous car, Visteon is currently developing a platform that will allow a car owner to customize the dashboard in his or her car.   You will be able to custom create the layout and functions of your car dashboard including apps that you can interact with, just like your phone.  You will be able to download thousands of 3rd party apps, giving E-commerce a whole new world.  The future of the Application Economy will be in your car...

Make sure to visit my blog in the future where I will tell you more about how global technology companies like CA Technologies are helping companies get their apps to market faster with higher quality and speed and how the data center is more important than ever.

By the way, that 10 year old that I was telling you about earlier..is also coding on his iPad.  Watch out world...

Adam

Also, follow me on Twitter at:  @aprogolf