APM solution designed for simplicity, mobility and DevOps velocity

To make it easier for users to adopt, manage and upgrade their implementation, CA APM’s new APM Command Centre serves as a central hub for agent configuration. The unique user-friendly dashboard enables users to access an inventory of thousands of agents across multiple APM clusters in one view so that they can more quickly generate diagnostic reports and diagnose agent configuration problems.

New Smart Instrumentation functionality in CA APM automatically collects transaction traces so that failures can be proactively corrected without having to recreate issues or change an application’s instrumentation. It also provides diagnostic information about the transaction error to help users better triage problems.

“CA APM’s Smart Instrumentation gives us deep visibility into transaction traces, down through the call stack and into the code which is not only critical in helping our application development and delivery teams improve code quality, it also enables our application support teams to diagnose problems faster and reduce mean time to repair of outages,” said Chris Proulx, principle systems engineer, Liberty Mutual. “Also just as important, the process was completely automated, making it extremely easy to track transaction performance of the applications.”

For comprehensive end-to-end business transaction monitoring and mobile-to-mainframe visibility, CA APM integrates mobile app and user data from the recently announced CA Mobile App Analytics (MAA). Together, the solutions provide insight into complex applications from the mobile app, into middleware/infrastructure components, to the backend database or mainframe enabling IT operations teams to easily link a mobile app user’s experience to the performance of their data centre.
“More and more of today’s organisations are relying on mobile apps to help secure user loyalty and maximise potential value to customers,” said Julie Craig, Research Director, Enterprise Management Associates. “However, simply monitoring mobile devices isn’t enough to ensure that the diverse services underlying mobile apps are up and running. A comprehensive mobile APM solution tracks the user experience from the application through its supporting backend services. Such solutions are the key to understanding and improving the mobile app user experience across the entire DevOps application lifecycle.”

CA APM can also be used as a catalyst for DevOps to fuel collaboration across the organisation by providing a common vocabulary for development and operations teams to analyse performance data across the application lifecycle via its integration with CA MAA. CA APM agents can be deployed through CA Release Automation to enable the collection of application and performance data much earlier in the software development cycle, further enhancing an organisation’s ability to proactively address issues. Also for a unified view of infrastructure and applications that impact business services, infrastructure management data from CA Unified Infrastructure Management (formerly CA Nimsoft Monitor) can be viewed and correlated within the CA APM dashboard.

“Despite the enormous complexity of today’s application delivery chain, end-users expect a flawless app experience, regardless of how, when, or where they access an app,” said John Smith, general manager, Enterprise Management. “This means app issues aren’t IT issues; they’re customer satisfaction and retention issues. CA APM provides organisations with automatic visibility into each transaction across all environments so that they can proactively diagnose an issue before it affects customer experience and ultimately their business.”

In addition to providing support for Java and .Net applications, CA APM now includes support for PHP. CA Technologies is also a MongoDB Partner and has certified CA APM on MongoDB Enterprise. The CA APM MongoDB Collector integrates MongoDB metrics into CA APM for intelligent analytics, alerting and visibility in a single dashboard.