Work Smarter, Not Harder: Leveraging IT Analytics to Simplify Operations and Improve the Customer Experience

Transcription

1 Work Smarter, Not Harder: Leveraging IT Analytics to Simplify Operations and Improve the Customer Experience

2 Data Drives IT Intelligence We live in a world driven by software and applications. And, the expectations end users place on these resources have never been higher. To stay competitive, businesses need to ensure critical services are consistently available and performing optimally. Even more crucially, they must identify and address issues before they impact internal and external consumers. Enter analytics for IT operations. Analytics for IT operations promises to help organizations address these vital concerns by arming them with a deeper understanding of their infrastructures and reducing the time and money spent monitoring and fixing issues. Only 26 percent of organizations believe IT delivers an exceptional customer experience. 1 1 CA Technologies. TechInsights Report: The Changing Role of IT and What To Do About It. February 10,

3 The Power of Analytics Analytics are a vitally important facet of today s IT operations. Because critical applications reside in numerous environments, monitoring them has become an increasingly complex task. Operations teams simply cannot oversee everything in an effective manner without the help of intelligent analytics. For this reason, analytics functionality should be embedded within monitoring solutions, provide role-based access and aggregate data from multiple monitoring tools into a single view. This is the only way to gain the actionable insights IT operations need to spend less time hunting down alerts and more time proactively improving the services that drive the business forward. With analytics, IT operations teams can: Manage risk: Reduce false alarms, gain cross-domain views of business services, accelerate root-cause analysis and identify problems before they impact end users. Reduce costs: Minimize waste and optimize operations by determining where to cut costs and deploy new workloads. Drive growth: Ascertain when resources are scarce, enhance capacity awareness across domains and, in the case of managed service providers, give customers insights that can help them grow. Enable DevOps: Provide the single source of truth that development and operations teams need to work toward a common goal, quickly resolve issues and prevent similar problems from happening again. Derive value from big data: Turn an unwieldy mass of data into actionable intelligence that helps IT take a more proactive approach to performance monitoring. Individuals across IT face challenges every day that can be solved by analytics. Here s how. 03

4 Increased Operational Visibility The Problem It falls to the IT operations director to make sure the department upholds all committed service levels. To do so, her team must be able to identify and respond to issues before they impact end users. Though the IT operations director is doing what she can to work toward this goal, she s forced to contend with: Constant fire fighting Alarm storms and false alarms Slow root-cause analysis and mean time to repair (MTTR) Finger-pointing across silos A poor perception of IT among end users The Solution Analytics for IT operations can help the IT operations director and her team reduce MTTR and minimize risk by providing: Increased collaboration through a single point of correlation and escalation for all events and alerts Shared information that spans multiple monitoring tools Real-time visualizations of service performance across domains Prioritization of actions based on potential service risk and impact Predictive analytics that reduce fire fights, enable proactive monitoring and sharpen her team s focus on service stability and reliability A reduction in false alarms and faster root-cause analysis Normalized data, baseline metrics and enhanced anomaly detection Intelligent alerts that reduce false alarms and decrease MTTR Integrated insights into key data center power and cooling information Common sets of data to more effectively collaborate with development and operations teams 04

5 Enhanced CIO Insights The Problem It s the responsibility of the CIO to guide multiple IT transformation efforts everything from virtualization and hybrid cloud strategies to DevOps and mobility initiatives. Although the IT organization has steadily become responsible for more and more customer-facing applications, the CIO s budget and staff haven t kept pace with the added demands he s juggling. As a result, he routinely experiences: Day-one application failures Downtime and slow MTTR Capacity constraints The Solution Analytics for IT operations can help the CIO reduce cost, risk and complexity by enabling him to: Identify waste and right-size his infrastructure accordingly. Monitor the entire IT environment from end to end. View dashboards that increase visibility into, and control over, business services across technology domains. Analytics from CA Technologies helped a major financial institution quickly identify the root cause of failures, detect problems not visible before and recognize deviations in the behavior of its infrastructure and applications. Learn more. 05

6 Optimized Capacity Planning The Problem Although his company wants to update its server infrastructure, the capacity planner isn t completely certain how many additional machines the organization should purchase. He s long relied on spreadsheets to predict capacity needs, but as business demands increase in size, complexity and speed, this manual planning method is proving both ineffective and error-prone. As a result, he s struggling with: Accurately forecasting both current and future capacity requirements Determining if servers are underutilized or nearing maximum capacity The Solution Analytics for IT operations can enable the capacity planner to make smarter, faster decisions by helping him: Shorten capacity planning time. Accurately predict future needs. Gain an understanding of current utilization rates and where to optimize for better performance and cost efficiencies. Predict how changes to the infrastructure will impact capacity. 06

7 Advanced Data Center Management The Problem The facilities manager wants to support her company s server-refresh initiative, but she s not sure if its data centers have enough power, space and cooling to accommodate the additional hardware. That s because she routinely finds it difficult to: Monitor power distribution and usage across data centers. Plan for future growth. Quickly and accurately collect data about power consumption, free space and available capacity. The Solution Analytics for IT operations can help the facilities manager by showing her: The impact different hardware deployments will have on available data center resources Visualizations of the data center that feature accurate, real-time views of hot spots and concentrations of rapid power consumption CA Technologies helped one managed service provider gain real-time, centralized visibility into energy consumption at both the customer and device levels, helping it reduce operational costs and ensure customers are accurately billed. Learn more. 07

8 Improved Developer Enablement The Problem It s the developer s job to create the applications that power his organization s business. But, he s finding it difficult to deliver the best possible experience to the organization and its customers because he s lacking: Visibility into how an application will perform when deployed in physical, virtual or cloud environments Cooperation from the operations team whenever issues occur The data and insights to determine if an application failure was caused by the code or the infrastructure The Solution Analytics for IT operations can help the developer by allowing him to: Predict how new applications will impact the performance of the environment. Adopt a more collaborative relationship with his colleagues on the operations team. Share data and knowledge that helps development and operations groups learn from issues and react appropriately in the future. Monitor applications down to the code level, so he can improve performance and strengthen his focus on the customer experience. 08

9 Sophisticated Marketing Insights The Problem The CMO is about to invest a considerable sum of money in an advertising campaign for the organization s new mobile app. But first, she needs to ensure the application can handle increased demand and track how customers are using the application. However, this is hard to do because she doesn t have the ability to: Predict how the app will hold up to increased demand. Identify why customers are complaining about certain business services. See the number of current and future users. The Solution Analytics for IT operations can help the CMO by giving her: Views that show how the application is currently performing Insights into how a spike in demand will impact application performance Awareness about how the app is being used Metrics about campaign activity 09

10 Why Analytics? As these examples have shown, analytics can play a pivotal role in helping many individuals in IT operations roles from the CIO down to the development team function with greater efficiency and make smarter, more effective decisions. Although analytics capabilities are already valuable today, they are poised to mature significantly over the coming years and deliver even greater benefits to organizations that adopt them. Specifically, they are well-positioned to become more predictive and may even be able to automatically react to changes in the infrastructure, allowing IT operations personnel to intensify their focus on enhancing the reliability of applications and the stability of the infrastructure. And, no vendor is better suited to help you effectively incorporate analytics into your IT management strategy than CA Technologies. 10

11 Why CA? CA Technologies has the advanced analytics IT operations teams need to do their jobs right the first time. Our analytics capabilities are relevant to more than one environment or system they collect insights across systems to provide a holistic picture of what s happening, prevent issues before they occur, reduce MTTR and tie the effects of issues or benefits back to the business and, ultimately, the customer. Our powerful monitoring solutions, which span our Infrastructure Management (IM) and Application Performance Management (APM) portfolios, provide direct access to key sources of data. And since IT analytics capabilities are embedded within our IM and APM portfolios, the intelligence you need is always in a convenient place. In addition, our capacity management capabilities help organizations better plan for what s needed in the short term and accurately gauge the impact future events such as a merger or holiday promotion will have on critical business services. 11

12 Key Analytics Capabilities Among the broad set of capabilities in the CA portfolio, we deliver powerful descriptive, diagnostic and predictive analytics that provide the insights IT operation teams need, when they need them. These capabilities are offered across a continuum that allows you to address your most pressing requirements today whether it s gaining real-time decision support, improving forecasting or something else and determine what will be essential to success tomorrow. Descriptive Analytics Diagnostic Analytics Predictive Analytics Gain insight into your environment. Pinpoint problems. Identify patterns. Increase visibility into real-time and historical data. Quickly identify root causes. Improve MTTR. Find dependencies and relationships across systems. Understand the full impact of what happened to users and why. Improve performance and plan for change. Stop problems before they impact users. Model the future state of the infrastructure. Enhance budgeting and space management. Let s take a look at what the analytics we offer can do for your organization. 12

13 Descriptive Analytics The CA portfolio includes the following descriptive analytics capabilities: Normalization of data: Collects and standardizes data from numerous sources, enabling the infrastructure to be monitored and managed from a holistic perspective. Event correlation: Consolidates events into single alarms or indicators that deliver more meaningful, actionable intelligence while reducing the amount of noise there is to manage. Baselining of data: Constructs a reference point of behavior based on historical data and applies analytics to generate alerts whenever there is a deviation from the norm. Anomaly detection: Uses probability-based thresholding and correlation of behavior metrics to present users with fewer, higher-quality and more actionable events. Intelligent alerting: Identifies such situations as deviation from the norm and time over threshold and performs complex operations event processing. Cross-domain metrics and calculations: Use data from multiple systems and areas to reveal insights beyond what could be derived from any single silo. 13

14 Diagnostic Analytics The CA portfolio includes the following diagnostic analytics capabilities: Root-cause analysis: Leverages intelligent event correlation to generate a single alert that enables operators to focus on the true problem, not symptomatic issues. Escalation policy analytics: Enables the intelligent escalation of notifications that utilize business logic and rules based on metrics, events, patterns or other user-defined attributes. Topological relationship analytics: Help model the structure of network, system or service components and build a clear, visual representation of the condition of connected devices, as well as the business services running on top of them. 14

15 Predictive Analytics The CA portfolio includes the following predictive analytics capabilities: Capacity projections: Support the use of a wide array of algorithms from basic, linear regression to sophisticated, single- and multi-variant analytics to provide detailed forecasts of future capacity consumption. Predictive forecasting: Shows how new code or a change to the infrastructure will affect the environment before it s actually implemented. Impact analysis: Determines the effect outages and performance issues will have on specific end-user services. Predictive risk analytics: Uses statistical patterns of discovery and recognition to identify problems before they impact the end-user experience. Bringing Analytics to Life As the analytics capabilities described on the previous pages illustrate, CA Technologies is well positioned to deliver the insights your team needs to effectively support key organizational goals. Our tools offer direct, comprehensive access to cross-domain data sources and combine descriptive, diagnostic and predictive analytics to provide complete and actionable insights. 15

16 CA Technologies (NASDAQ: CA) creates software that fuels transformation for companies and enables them to seize the opportunities of the application economy. Software is at the heart of every business, in every industry. From planning to development to management and security, CA is working with companies worldwide to change the way we live, transact and communicate across mobile, private and public cloud, distributed and mainframe environments. Learn more at ca.com. Copyright 2013 CA. All rights reserved. All trademarks, trade names, service marks and logos referenced herein belong to their respective companies. 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 Copyright limitation, 2014 CA. lost All profits, rights business reserved. interruption, All trademarks, goodwill, trade or names, lost data, service even marks if CA and is expressly logos referenced advised in herein advance belong of the to their respective companies. This document is for your possibility informational of such purposes damages. only. The CA information assumes no and responsibility results illustrated for the accuracy here are or based completeness upon the speaker s of the information. experiences To with the extent the permitted by applicable law, CA provides this document referenced as is without software warranty product of any in a kind, variety including, of environments, without limitation, which may any include implied production warranties and of nonproduction merchantability, environments. fitness for a particular Past purpose, or noninfringement. In no event will CA performance be liable for of any the loss software or damage, products direct in or such indirect, environments from the is use not of necessarily this document, indicative including, of the without future limitation, performance lost of profits, such business interruption, goodwill, or lost data, even if CA is expressly advised in advance of the possibility of such damages. The information and results illustrated here are based upon the speaker s experiences with the referenced software software products in identical, similar or different environments. product in a variety of environments, which may include production and nonproduction environments. Past performance of the software products in such environments is not necessarily indicative of the future performance of such software products in identical, similar or different environments. CS