assure the quality and availability of business services to your customers

Transcription

1 SOLUTION BRIEF Service Assurance May 2010 assure the quality and availability of business services to your customers we can

2 is a mature, integrated portfolio of management products for delivering exceptional application experience to help increase revenue and productivity, assuring quality of service across the infrastructure to help reduce IT costs, and linking applications with infrastructure to help prevent business-service-impacting degradations and outages. CA Service Assurance helps you integrate IT with the business. 02

3 executive summary Challenge As IT organizations are increasingly measured by their relationship to revenue, employee productivity, and business success, the more they need to visualize, analyze, and manage how the components in their IT environment impact business services. Dynamic change in the business climate, constant pressures to curb IT expenses, and implementation of new IT paradigms, including virtualization and cloud computing, pose significant challenges to IT-business alignment. Solution CA Service Assurance is a mature, tightly integrated portfolio of management products that provide end-to-end visibility into applications and transactions while giving you top-to-bottom insight over the entire infrastructure and, ultimately, a comprehensive, unified understanding of how applications and infrastructure deliver business services. The portfolio spans three key competencies Application Performance Management, Infrastructure Management, and Business Service Assurance each addressing key IT challenges and together comprising a comprehensive solution. Benefits CA Service Assurance provides a collaborative platform for IT executives, IT operations staff, infrastructure domain experts, application owners, and support teams to deliver the right information to the right people in real time. The solution helps IT organizations facilitate exceptional application experience to help increase revenue, improve customer experience, increase quality of service across the infrastructure to help reduce IT costs, and reduce business-impacting degradations and outages by unifying application management with infrastructure management for business service assurance. 03

4 CA Advantage CA s approach to service assurance is a more effective and dynamic way to deliver IT-dependent business services, to manage physical, virtual, and cloud computing environments, and to leverage your existing investments in CA, third-party, and custom IT management tools. The solution uniquely links end-to-end application performance and transaction visibility with top-to-bottom understanding of the underlying IT infrastructure. Proven in the world s largest enterprise, government, and service provider IT environments, CA Service Assurance provides exceptional reliability and power to collect and retain data and perform complex analysis. The solution is rooted in practical innovation with heavy investment in usability, workflows, and reporting tailored for each stakeholder. Its platformindependence and flexible architecture accommodate any environment and are built to adapt to rapid change. Section 1: Challenge Constant change, high expectations for business results, and emerging technologies challenge every IT organization As IT professionals are increasingly measured by their relationship to revenue, employee productivity, and business success, they must overcome significant technology, operational cost, and business climate challenges to assure that service level expectations and agreements are met. Converged networks and complex applications create constant threats to service quality and end-user experience. Virtualization and cloud computing promise capital expense savings and business agility, yet expose existing IT management weaknesses and present new challenges to service delivery and performance. Unfortunately, most IT teams are ill-equipped to overcome these challenges and risk losing revenue, customers, and credibility with the business. They lack tools and insights to anticipate and preempt service issues such as poorly performing, customer-facing, web-based applications, or to accurately plan infrastructure changes to support new applications, users, and locations. Poorly integrated IT domain management tools reveal little or no linkage between application performance, infrastructure status, and business service impact, often resulting in investments based on guesswork, extended troubleshooting, slow meantime-to-repair, and inconsistent service performance. Siloed infrastructure and application support teams, like their tools, inadvertently promote ineffective, inefficient processes that prevent IT operations from truly aligning with the business. 04

5 Section 2: Solution A best-of-breed portfolio that links applications to infrastructure CA s Service Assurance is a multi-dimensional solution that provides all levels of the IT organization as well as line-of-business owners and other business stakeholders with role-specific views, workflow, and a common understanding of service impact, risk, and root cause of problems: Customizable, real-time executive dashboards report on business services according to their priority, service level agreement compliance, quality of experience, levels of risk, and root cause of serviceimpacting problems. Automated discovery, relationship mapping, and model-based root-cause analysis allow IT technical staff to adapt to dynamically changing business and technology environments and to quickly identify and address issues affecting service delivery. Transaction-aware application and infrastructure performance management enables staff across all technology domains to focus on what s important rather than treating symptoms. Dynamic performance thresholding and alarming allow rapid problem identification and resolution before users are impacted. CA Service Assurance is designed to install, configure, and deploy quickly with easy customization and out-of-the-box speed, minimizing professional services, one-off integrations, and total cost of ownership. The solution scales to the world s largest environments with the power to collect and process data for real-time analysis and capacity planning. 05

6 Figure A CA Service Assurance uniquely links real end-user experience, transactions, and services with the underlying systems and network infrastructure. Best-of-breed capabilities and practical IT innovations enable superior business responsiveness CA Application Performance Management Monitors end-user experience to ensure high levels of service delivery to customers, partners, and employees Abstracts application data to map transactions and process flows in business terms and context Traces applications and transactions traversing the infrastructure to proactively identify performance problems and identify the root cause across platforms CA Infrastructure Management Discovers and monitors the availability and health of infrastructure assets and adapts to and understands infrastructure changes Proactively identifies performance degradations for proactive corrective action before customers are impacted 06

7 Conducts advanced traffic analysis to determine how specific applications, locations, and users are consuming infrastructure resources to speed remediation of problems and plan for future capacity needs CA Business Service Assurance Builds real-time, detailed business service models using configuration items and data from CA Application Performance, Infrastructure, Workload, Security, and Compliance Management tools as well as third-party IT tools Provides actionable information to direct the actions of IT operations staff, infrastructure domain experts, and application support teams according to business priorities Shows how IT is aligned with the business, drives continuous improvement, and enables more informed IT CAPEX/OPEX decisions Section 3: Benefits Integrate IT with business CA Service Assurance helps you to integrate IT with your business: CA Application Performance Management to enable exceptional application experience helps you increase revenue and improve your customers experience by managing business transactions end-to-end CA Infrastructure Management to enable quality of service across the infrastructure helps you reduce costs by more proactively monitoring the health, capacity, availability, and performance of your service delivery infrastructure CA Business Service Assurance to unify application performance management with infrastructure management helps you prevent business-impacting degradations and outages by enabling you to direct staff actions according to business priorities and make more informed CAPEX/OPEX decisions Delivery Approach CA products that comprise the Service Assurance solution are renowned for their fast time-to-value and payback. To further accelerate CA Service Assurance implementation and results, you can leverage the skills of CA Services. Standard, repeatable deployments address service modeling, security configuration, policy definition, and connection with other CA and third-party software products. Our nine-stage methodology and strict project governance help keep your project on time and on budget. 07

8 Section 4: Next steps To learn more about how the CA Service Assurance Solution can meet your needs, visit CA can provide web-based demos, personalized consultations, and an on-site proof of concept so you can quickly determine how CA s Service Assurance solution can address your challenges with fast time-to-value. CA Technologies is an IT management software and solutions company with expertise across all IT environments from mainframe and physical to virtual and cloud. CA Technologies manages and secures IT environments and enables customers to deliver more flexible IT services. CA Technologies innovative products and services provide the insight and control essential for IT organizations to power business agility. The majority of the Global Fortune 500 rely on CA Technologies to manage their evolving IT ecosystems. For additional information, visit CA Technologies at ca.com. Copyright 2010 CA. All rights reserved. All trademarks, trade names, service marks, and logos referenced herein belong to their respective companies. Nothing herein (i) affects the rights and/or obligations of CA or its licensees under any existing or future written license agreement or services agreement relating to any CA software product; or (ii) amends any product documentation or specifications for any CA software product. The development, release and timing of any features or functionality described herein remain at CA s sole discretion. This document is for your informational purposes only. CA assumes no responsibility for the accuracy or completeness of the information. To the extent permitted by applicable law, CA provides this document as is without warranty of any kind, including, without limitation, any implied warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, or noninfringement. In no event will CA be liable for any loss or damage, direct or indirect, from the use of this document, including, without limitation, lost profits, business interruption, goodwill, or lost data, even if CA is expressly advised in advance of the possibility of such damages. 2112