CA Wants to Blend IT Management and Application Management

CA Technologies today released two updates to its IT management software portfolio, meant to further unify infrastructure and application management.

Release 10 of CA Application Performance Management software sports a revamped user interface and support for access rules based on roles inside the organization. The company also added support for topology maps that make it simpler to correlate role- and task-based views using attributes such as location, application type, business service, or owner name.

Kieran Taylor, senior director for solutions marketing for DevOps at CA, said the goal is to make it easy for IT organizations to visually identify the root cause of any particular problem or issue. To that end, release 10 of CA APM also provides an ability to visually chart changes to application topology, status or other attributes alongside historical performance metrics.

“IT organizations are always looking for patient zero when something goes wrong,” Taylor said. “We can now make it easier to isolate any changes made to the environment.”

Version 8.3 of CA Unified Infrastructure Management, meanwhile, provides both tighter integration with CA APM along with additional support for Hadoop, Cassandra, and MongoDB platforms. Also included is integration with CA Network Flow Analysis software that makes it simpler to correlate events between server environments and the underlying network.

Taylor said the biggest challenge confronting most IT organizations today is finding a way to scale their expertise in a way that allows the organization to be more agile.

It’s clear that, thanks to convergence, IT management is getting more complicated across the data center. As a result, too many false positives are being generated that don’t actually signify a real IT problem.

Faced with a steady stream of alerts, Taylor said, IT organizations clearly need a better way to identify the real signal being generated by all the IT noise. The latest updates from CA aim to solve that problem by making is possible to visually mine the data being generated inside data center environments that today span everything from mobile applications to the mainframe.

What’s still unclear is the degree to which application and infrastructure management will ultimately merge.

There appears to be a growing requirement to correlate more data across applications and infrastructure. But many application management teams may not choose to standardize on management software from the same vendor as the IT infrastructure team.

In the absence of any real consensus, the next best thing to make it as simple as possible to share data as cleanly and clearly as possible between management environments.