ehealth Simplifies Performance Management across Diverse Networks

Transcription

1 PRODUCT FAMILY BRIEF: EHEALTH ehealth Simplifies Performance Management across Diverse Networks CA Network & Voice Management ehealth SPECTRUM ehealth for Voice

2 ehealth ehealth E2E Console ehealth Live Health Application ehealth Distributed ehealth ehealth Traffic Accountant ehealth Business Service Console ehealth SPECTRUM Integration ehealth Universal Workflow Integration Modules (HP OpenView, Micromuse Netcool, Cisco CIC) ehealth Universal Data Integration Modules (Cisco WAN Manager, Cisco IP Solution Center, Lucent, Nortel, Alcatel) ehealth Universal Wireless Data Integration Modules (Nortel, Starent) Copyright 2007 CA. All rights reserved. All trademarks, trade names, service marks and logos referenced herein belong to their respective companies.

3 ehealth helps you reduce operational costs while improving service assurance across your multi-vendor, multi-platform network infrastructure. With the proactive management from ehealth, you can pinpoint areas of service degradation and fix problems before users are affected. Overview Benefits CA Advantage Management of today s enterprise networks can be a very noisy affair as various management tools bury you in data. This data is in different formats, reports are not correlated and your IT staff spends most of its time chasing false alarms instead of working on strategic initiatives. ehealth unifies and automates management of multi-vendor, multi-technology networks with proactive, real-time analysis, distilling data from disparate sources into actionable information. ehealth proactively identifies trends and deviations from normal activity on your network, reducing downtime and repair times with rapid problem identification. You can analyze network capacity, optimize resource utilization and perform predictive capacity planning. ehealth also helps you manage network performance across multiple classes of service, and document compliance with internal and external service level agreements (SLAs). ehealth integrates with other CA network and voice management product families and third-party products to provide rapid problem identification and resolution and proactive service assurance across multi-vendor and multi-technology infrastructures, ensuring high availability and performance. ehealth is also a key component of CA s broader Enterprise IT Management (EITM) initiative, which provides a service-oriented architecture for unifying and simplifying the management of your entire IT environment. PRODUCT FAMILY BRIEF: EHEALTH 3

4 ehealth Integrates and Automates Performance Management Across Multi-vendor, Multi-technology Networks Business in the Internet age is increasingly network-dependent, with applications that must be always available and operating at acceptable performance levels for both internal and external users. The price of downtime is escalating, and studies indicate that network outages now cost enterprises an average of $100,000 per hour. This challenge is compounded by budgetary constraints that force IT departments to do more with less as they struggle to tame converged multi-vendor, multi-technology network environments that add new dimensions of complexity. Using fragmented management tools that manage various systems and network elements in isolation, IT teams are buried in redundant and conflicting data and are assaulted by false alarms. In fact, industry research reveals that if your IT operation is at all typical, your staff members are spending about 80% of their time looking for the causes of network problems. You need to recapture this time with a proactive network performance management system that gives you a unified view and centralized control of your entire heterogeneous network infrastructure. Integrated Automation Is the Key The ehealth product family integrates performance management across the most complex multi-vendor and multi-technology networks, tying information from multiple sources together and presenting it in one single, personalized business view. Hard failures account for about half of network degradations and outages, and ehealth takes you beyond fault management to address the remaining half as well. ehealth collects event data in a historical database and uses this store to perform trend analysis and detect problems before they impact users and business processes. You can spot developing bottlenecks in various network elements and links, and document the need for additional capacity. Conversely, you can identify underutilized assets and downsize or redeploy them. ehealth includes granular service level management for defining different classes of service and assigning goals, core thresholds and other performance metrics to them. Service level reports show the Quality of Service (QoS) achieved and police service provider compliance with external SLAs. Proactive Service Availability Management When your network monitoring and management tools are generating hundreds of alarms each day, it is difficult to determine which problems are real and which are false. ehealth proactively watches and sends alerts about problem indicators in real time, enabling you to take corrective measures before service levels are affected. You can drill down to the source of the problem quickly. ehealth also pre-processes performance alarms with its embedded intelligence, powerful algorithms and natural de-duplication capabilities. This effectively eliminates the noise caused by false or repetitive alarms and takes the guesswork out of prioritizing management efforts. You get fewer, more intelligent alarms that have been refined by business and historical perspectives. The proactive intelligence in ehealth is based on two key algorithms that are used to understand exceptions in a historical context. 4 PRODUCT FAMILY BRIEF: EHEALTH

5 TIME OVER THRESHOLD This algorithm compares the value of a variable at each poll to a predefined threshold and reports if the value has been too wrong for too long. Instead of generating a trap each time the threshold is crossed, the software looks to the historical data to spot real, persistent problems. DEVIATION FROM NORMAL This algorithm exploits ehealth s ability to baseline the end-to-end performance of your network infrastructure. Rather than comparing current performance to a fixed threshold, the software uses historical data to establish what is normal for a specific day and time, and then assesses whether the current behavior deviates from that norm. Using these algorithms and applying out-of-the-box rules, ehealth can baseline your network and begin detecting performance degradations within hours of installation. Ongoing service availability testing helps to assure the availability and response time of your network circuits, router ports and critical network services. Real-time monitoring tools with default profiles for detecting brownouts and service delays let you start monitoring your network without configuring complicated rules. You can elect to monitor your infrastructure at user-defined intervals on specified days, and to un-monitor specified devices, systems and applications if you want to focus on areas with higher probabilities of failures. FIGURE A Live Status highlights your business topology with current alarm status and is a navigation point to drill down into real-time and historical reports. LIVE STATUS DIAGRAM PRODUCT FAMILY BRIEF: EHEALTH 5

6 A high-level diagram displays the current alarm status of key network elements, using live analysis of incoming data based on performance over time. Designed to serve as a single central console for performance alarms, it is customizable and can display active alarms that map customers, services, technologies and regions. LIVE EXCEPTIONS BROWSER This live interface has three interactive components an event chart, an organization view and an event table. The event chart at the top displays the number of active alarms or exceptions over time, and the event table below it provides details on all events for a selected group in the organization view. LIVE TREND APPLICATION Using the live trend application, you can seamlessly launch real-time monitoring of affected elements to view performance patterns. These patterns are based on a rich historical database that gives a profound context to raw data. Sophisticated End-to-End Performance Reporting Sophisticated performance reporting is at the heart of the ehealth product family. ehealth combines historical and real-time metrics with intelligent analysis to generate personalized views you can use to rapidly pinpoint and correct developing performance degradation before service quality is jeopardized. AT-A-GLANCE REPORTS Ad hoc At-a-Glance reports provide a comprehensive view of the availability and performance of a particular element, displaying the key statistics over a specified time interval. By automatically capturing performance data and presenting it uniformly, these reports can reduce the time spent troubleshooting significantly. TOP N REPORTS A tabular Top N Report sorts the elements that meet some user-defined criteria. For example, you can use it to find the best, worst, fastest, slowest or least-utilized circuits. Top N reports can be scheduled to run automatically at specified intervals and they also make a useful ad hoc tool. TREND REPORTS ehealth generates Trend Reports that track the value of one or more performance variables over a period of time. Because of its flexibility, you can use a Trend Report to reveal traffic patterns over time as well as relationships between elements and between variables. Element and system components that you can track this way include CPUs, disks, LANs, WANs, processes and process sets, and user or system partitions. 6 PRODUCT FAMILY BRIEF: EHEALTH

7 FIGURE B Trend Reports provide valuable information for capacity planning. Ease of customization lets you view exactly the information you need. In this report, the average daily CPU utilization is tracked for one week. TREND REPORT CAPACITY PLANNING REPORTS Use ehealth capacity planning reports to analyze the behavior of your network resources under varying conditions, and predict where and when you ll need to add capacity. What-If Capacity Reports. Run what-if scenarios of possible future conditions to prepare for problems before they occur. Capacity Projection Reports. These reports forecast how the capacity requirements of a particular variable partition utilization, for example will change in the future. Capacity Provisioning Reports. Use these reports to compare projected capacity values against an upgrade threshold, identify the elements predicted to exceed the threshold, and determine the number of days until an upgrade is required. PRODUCT FAMILY BRIEF: EHEALTH 7

8 MYHEALTH REPORTS Displayed in the ehealth Web interface, MyHealth reports are tailored to meet the needs of individual users. They can include one or more customized reports on the elements and groups that are critical to a particular user s job function. HEALTH REPORTS These reports evaluate the health of a group of elements by comparing current performance to historical performance over the course of a day, week or month. The report provides a list of situations to watch, and identifies errors, unusual utilization rates or volume shifts that warrant investigation. SERVICE LEVEL REPORTS These reports demonstrate overall QoS across different classes of service and document compliance with internal and external SLAs. You can adapt them to your specific business by defining service level goals, core thresholds and other performance metrics. In addition to the business level report, there are views tailored for business executives, IT managers and service customers. TRAFFIC ANALYSIS REPORTS Traffic analysis capabilities let you monitor traffic across Cisco NetFlow routers and standard RMON2 probes. These reports show you who is saturating particular links and what protocols and applications they are using. You can view network resource consumption by users, business units, regions or applications, and use this mechanism to allocate costs back to individual departments. DISTRIBUTED REPORTING You can manage up to 1 million elements from a single view by distributing ehealth applications across multiple systems, either in server clusters or in multiple locations around the globe. The machines can be inside or outside the enterprise firewall, and you can have multiple simultaneous operators. Predictive Capacity Planning Using increments you define, ehealth collects vital information from your network environment and stores it. Out-of-the-box and customized reports use this rich, historical database to help you analyze trends, determine whether critical resources are available and are over- or underutilized, and decide which capacity planning initiatives make sense. RIGHT-SIZE YOUR INFRASTRUCTURE Capacity planning reports identify network traffic patterns, trends and areas of high resource utilization. You can make proactive and informed decisions about where to upgrade, downgrade or eliminate capacity. The result is a right-sized infrastructure that delivers maximum performance at minimal cost. WHAT-IF ANALYSIS AND REPORTING Use what-if analysis and reporting to understand the effects of growth on available network resources. With the information you need to make capital expenditures at precisely the right time, you can save money and get more out of existing resources. Integrated Multi-vendor, Multi-technology Management The ehealth E2E console acts as a central point for performance management so you can measure performance end-to-end over the entire infrastructure. A wide range of network technologies is supported, including LANs, routers, switches, ATM, Frame Relay, end-to-end permanent virtual circuits, Remote Access Servers, cable, DSL, MPLS, IP VPN, VoIP, QoS and cellular wireless. Applications are included as managed elements and application availability is actively tested end-to-end. In addition, ehealth manages a broad array of multi-vendor products. 8 PRODUCT FAMILY BRIEF: EHEALTH

9 The ehealth product family also includes integration modules linking ehealth applications with third-party management systems and tools so you can leverage and enhance existing investments while managing your network more effectively. VPNs pose some significant management challenges to service providers, and one of the ehealth integration modules is designed to help with Cisco VPNs based on Multi-Protocol Label Switching (MPLS) or the IPsec protocol. Using integration with Cisco IP Solution Center, ehealth obtains configuration and performance information from Cisco VPNs. You can prioritize fixes, document adherence to SLAs, and report performance in VPN-oriented reports that distinguish between classes of service. Toolbars added to third-party management consoles such as HP OpenView Network Node Manager and Micromuse Netcool/OMNIbus provide direct access to ehealth applications, so operators gain ehealth performance management capabilities without having to learn a new product. There is two-way communication between the two environments: Redundant alarms are reduced so operators can focus on problem resolution. Operators of the third-party applications gain an ehealth historical context for more effective troubleshooting. Equipped with ehealth capabilities, operators of the third-party applications can detect service degradations before faults occur. ehealth scales to meet the needs of service provider networks, and a number of integration modules address carrier-class switching environments. Collectively these modules support equipment from Cisco, Lucent, Nortel and Alcatel and bring them into the ehealth management domain: You get a powerful, integrated solution for managing carrier-class environments. ehealth retrieves utilization and configuration information from the switches. Reports automatically reflect configuration and service changes across large networks. Rules-based filtering enables efficient data collection. You can define data-import periods as you see fit. CA Integration The ehealth product family integrates smoothly with SPECTRUM, combining the best in network performance management with the best in network fault management to create a comprehensive solution for ensuring the high availability and responsiveness of critical business services. The combined capabilities include: Alarms generated by ehealth Live Health are presented in SPECTRUM s OneClick interface. SPECTRUM provides context-sensitive launching from SPECTRUM alarms and topology views to ehealth reports. SPECTRUM global data collections are used to seed ehealth discovery. Administration is simplified by combining fault and performance management. PRODUCT FAMILY BRIEF: EHEALTH 9

10 Some other CA products and solutions that the ehealth product family integrates synergistically with include: ehealth for Voice, which bring data networks, IP telephony and legacy voice under one management umbrella. Unicenter Network and Systems Management, which unifies and simplifies systems management to ensure service availability. Unicenter Service Desk, a scalable, ITIL-compliant help desk solution for automating and controlling IT processes and providing audit trails. CA Database Management, which consolidates and streamlines management of multi-vendor database environments to ensure availability of critical business applications. The ehealth Family of Products EHEALTH E2E CONSOLE The foundation component of the ehealth family of products, ehealth E2E Console collects and analyzes data from all areas of your business infrastructure and delivers sophisticated performance reporting and predictive analysis. Available in Windows and UNIX versions, the software integrates real-time performance management within the context of historical performance so you can quickly identify, detect and correct performance degradation before end user service quality is jeopardized. EHEALTH LIVE HEALTH APPLICATION Working in conjunction with the ehealth E2E Console, ehealth Live Health Application provides real-time performance management across applications, systems and networks. EHEALTH DISTRIBUTED EHEALTH Designed for geographically dispersed environments, ehealth Distributed ehealth is a highly scalable solution for distributing data collection, analysis and storage across multiple machines residing inside and outside the enterprise firewall. The software delivers a seamless view of your entire enterprise to a single Web-based workstation. EHEALTH TRAFFIC ACCOUNTANT ehealth Traffic Accountant provides a business-level view of network utilization and delivers automated reports on network resource consumption by users, business units, regions or applications. The software imports and analyzes Netflow and RMON2 data, combining it with sophisticated grouping and sorting capabilities to create concise, understandable reports revealing trends and usage patterns that can impact the performance of your network. EHEALTH BUSINESS SERVICE CONSOLE ehealth Business Service Console provides a real-time, high-level view of the availability and performance of your internal and customer-facing business services. The Web-based tool runs on Solaris, HP/UX and Windows, offering customized views tailored to individual job requirements. EHEALTH SPECTRUM INTEGRATION With ehealth SPECTRUM Integration, you can combine best-in-class fault management and best-in-class performance management into one unified management solution for ensuring high availability and responsiveness of your critical business services. ehealth alarms are integrated into SPECTRUM and presented through the OneClick interface. SPECTRUM global collections seed ehealth discovery, and there is context-sensitive launching from SPECTRUM alarms and topology views to ehealth reports. 10 PRODUCT FAMILY BRIEF: EHEALTH

11 EHEALTH UNIVERSAL WORKFLOW INTEGRATION MODULES (HP OPENVIEW, MICROMUSE NETCOOL, CISCO CIC) These integration modules provide two-way communication between the ehealth product family and third-party management platforms. Operators of these third-party products gain a historical perspective of network performance by accessing ehealth reports dynamically. They can also launch ehealth applications from a toolbar inside the third-party consoles to exploit ehealth troubleshooting capabilities without learning new applications. EHEALTH UNIVERSAL DATA INTEGRATION MODULES (CISCO WAN MANAGER, CISCO IP SOLUTION CENTER, LUCENT, NORTEL, ALCATEL) Designed for carrier-class environments, these integration modules enable ehealth to manage a variety of high-end voice and data switching equipment from industry leaders. ehealth can collect performance, configuration, utilization and availability data from these third-party platforms, correlate and analyze it, and generate reports with actionable information. Supported technologies include legacy voice as well as VoIP and data networking. EHEALTH UNIVERSAL WIRELESS DATA INTEGRATION MODULES (NORTEL GGSN, STARENT PDSN) Designed for carrier-class wireless networks, these integration modules enable ehealth to gather the statistics needed to manage these industry leading wireless voice and data gateways. ehealth can collect performance, configuration, utilization and availability data from these platforms, correlate and analyze it, and generate reports with actionable information. ehealth Improves Service Assurance while Optimizing Resource Utilization and Managing Costs With ehealth proactive performance management, calls to the help desk no longer provide your first warning of network degradations or failures. The typical IT department spends 80% of its resources troubleshooting problems that ehealth can pinpoint and resolve automatically before they impact users and business processes. Consequently, you reduce or prevent degradations and downtime. ehealth automatically captures performance data and displays it as uniform information you can act upon immediately. Fewer trouble tickets get generated, and the ones that do are a lot less likely to get escalated to higher-paid personnel. Rapid problem resolution is further enhanced with service-level management and QoS reports you can use to adjust prioritizations across service classes. You can use the ehealth predictive capacity planning capabilities to right-size your network infrastructure, adding capacity before performance starts to degrade and eliminate any excess on underused links. Similarly, you can identify and focus on the devices with the greatest failure potential, and fine-tune your network design with built-in redundancy where it is really needed. Aided by the ehealth powerful automation capabilities, you can deliver dependable, aroundthe-clock services to employees and customers, and ultimately provide higher-value services. Such service assurance and application availability protects and enhances your company s brand integrity and gives your business a competitive advantage. PRODUCT FAMILY BRIEF: EHEALTH 11

12 Equipped with rich and multi-dimensional reporting capabilities, ehealth can generate a wide variety of reports tailored for different audiences. You can make more efficient use of staff specialties, and better understand and communicate how well the IT team is delivering service and preventing expensive outages. You also get the ammunition you need to make a case for additional resources when capacity is running out. Granular service-level management adds to the flexibility of ehealth, enabling you to design a highly adaptable infrastructure that can respond quickly to changing business needs. This flexibility also makes it easy to deploy new applications and to support rapid growth and mergers and acquisitions. Exploiting the advanced automation and out-of-the-box value of ehealth, your IT team can focus on fine-tuning, building new tools and other high-value activities instead of running down problems and putting out fires. With the increased staff efficiency and infrastructure optimization, you reduce network latency and improve application performance while managing a larger environment and more users with the same or less people. ehealth enables you to save money, time and people, lowering capital and operational expenditures. CA Advantage ehealth integrates with other CA Network & Voice Management and third-party products to provide comprehensive, end-to-end management of diverse IT network environments. Rapid problem identification and resolution and proactive service assurance ensure high availability and performance of heterogeneous infrastructures. Vendor-neutral and platform-independent, CA management products offer the widest support of system types and versions available, as well as broad language support for global deployments. CA Technology Services and our partners can help you assess your current IT situation, define your goals and implement solutions to gain measurable results. To keep your CA solutions operating at peak performance, CA support delivers unparalleled technical and customer support worldwide, and we offer training and certification through CA Education. Next Steps You should consider ehealth if you re finding that: You are experiencing too much costly service degradation and downtime. Your staff can t identify and fix performance problems before users are affected. Managing different technologies and systems separately is too inefficient and error-prone. The ehealth product family unifies and automates network performance management across multi-vendor and multi-platform networks, improving service levels while managing costs. To learn more about ehealth, and to see how CA software solutions enable organizations to unify and simplify IT management for better business results, visit ca.com/products. 12 PRODUCT FAMILY BRIEF: EHEALTH

13 CA, one of the world s largest information technology (IT) management software companies, unifies and simplifies complex IT management across the enterprise for greater business results. With our Enterprise IT Management vision, solutions and expertise, we help customers effectively govern, manage and secure IT. PB05HLTH01E MP Learn more about how CA can help you transform your business at ca.com