Unified Infrastructure Management-Moving from Reactive to Proactive Monitoring (002)

WHITE PAPER | JANUARY 2016

Moving from Reactive to Proactive IT MonitoringSix Key Requirements for Success in the Application Economy

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The Mandate for Proactive Customer Experience Management in the Application Economy 3

Proactive Monitoring: Six Key Requirements 4

Requirement one: Capture and report on performance metrics 4

Requirement two: Unify views and tools to increase visibility and speed issue resolution 5

Requirement three: Track user experience 5

Requirement four: Employ rigorous SLA management 6

Requirement five: Leverage predictive and actionable analytics 7

Requirement six: Correlate IT and non-IT data to do effective capacity planning 8

Conclusion 8

About CA Unified Infrastructure Management: Proactive Performance Monitoring Solution 9

Table of Contents

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Executive SummaryIn today’s application economy, market success is increasingly being defined by an organization’s ability to deliver multi-channel applications that provide an exceptional and differentiated customer experience. To deliver the service levels required, IT teams need to move to establish proactive IT monitoring approaches. This white paper offers an overview of the key requirements that must be met for IT teams to establish effective proactive monitoring capabilities.

The Mandate for Proactive Customer Experience Management in the Application Economy Today’s IT organizations are serving audiences with exacting demands and expectations. Employees expect and count on immediate access to applications to get work done—no matter what time it is, where they’re located or what device they’re using. Customers expect to engage through the platform of their choice and receive an optimized experience—and they’re perfectly willing to go to elsewhere if they’re expectations aren’t met. In fact, 25 percent of users will abandon applications after just a three-second response delay.1 Ultimately, the market victors will be those that deliver compelling user experiences—and that do so instantaneously.

To ensure that applications meet or exceed these high expectations, underlying IT infrastructures need to deliver continuously optimized performance. However, while delivering this optimized performance is critical, it is also growing increasingly challenging. Infrastructures continue to get more dynamic and

1 Aberdeen Group, Reaching the Top of the Web Performance Mountain, March 2013.

Figure A.

Many organizations lack the visibility required to proactively manage user experience, while this effort grows increasingly critical. (Source: CA survey).

“25 percent of users will

abandon applications

after just a three-

second response

delay.”

4 ©2014CA.ALLRIGHTSRESERVED.

Measureandreportoninfrastructureavailabilityonly(28%)

Measureandreportoninfrastructureperformancetosomeextent,withsiloedviews(46%)

HolisDcallyandcentrallymonitorinfrastructureperformance(15%)

Trackend-to-enduserexperience(4%)

LeveragepredicDveanalyDcsandacDonableinsightstopreventissuesbeforetheycausedisrupDon(7%)

74%Lackacomprehensiveunifiedview

Only11%areabletoproacRvelytrackuserexperience

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complex. To optimize application performance, IT teams need to ensure the optimized performance of every underlying component and environment, including physical and virtual servers, networks, storage devices, databases, end-user services and cloud and big data environments.

To provide an optimal application experience, IT teams need to proactively manage infrastructure performance. It is imperative that they identify and resolve issues quickly, and pre-empt potential issues before there’s an adverse impact on the user experience. The following section offers an overview of the key requirements for achieving these objectives.

Proactive Monitoring: Six Key Requirements Requirement one: Capture and report on performance metrics In the application economy, downtime is devastating, and poor performance is just about as bad. Given the criticality of performance, simply reacting to alarms when infrastructure elements go down isn’t sufficient. IT personnel need to be able to identify potential performance issues, and address them, before users ever know there’s a problem.

To achieve these objectives, IT teams need to be able to capture vital metrics for each and every infrastructure element, so they can track performance and spot utilization trends. In addition, they should be able to leverage advanced alerting capabilities so they can automatically receive alerts if a specific infrastructure element is about to cause an issue. For example, IT staff members should be able to see if the CPU utilization of a certain element is about to cross a specified threshold, so they can take corrective action, before an issue arises.

Figure B.

VMware performance and availability dashboard.

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Requirement two: Unify views and tools to increase visibility and speed issue resolutionIn many enterprise IT and service provider organizations, dozens of point monitoring tools and platforms have been implemented. Often, different groups each use their own tools and myriad tools have been employed for monitoring specific technologies and environments. These disjointed, complex approaches deliver limited, piecemeal visibility.

The result is that staff can only operate reactively. When issues arise, team members spend countless hours on conference calls and in triage meetings trying to figure out what went wrong and how to fix it, all while the user’s experience suffers. In addition, IT staff is relegated to never-ending cycles of responding to issues and scrambling to address them. As a result, staff can’t be proactive in solving issues and more strategic activities are left undone.

To combat these challenges, IT operations teams need to adopt a single, unified view and architecture for monitoring their most critical IT services, whether they’re running in virtual, physical, cloud or big data environments, or any combination thereof. By leveraging this unified visibility, IT teams can more effectively preempt problems and, when issues do arise, address them faster.

Requirement three: Track user experience End-user response. To borrow a phrase, it’s where the rubber meets the road. IT teams can be armed with vast amounts of performance metrics, but if they don’t know what users are actually experiencing, they don’t have the real performance picture. However, user-response monitoring represents a vital missing piece in many organizations’ monitoring capabilities.

IT teams need to be able to track end-to-end application performance. This measurement needs to span the entire transaction, from the time a request is submitted until the request is ultimately returned to the user. IT teams also need to track the critical phases that make up this transaction lifecycle, measuring response as a transaction moves from application to server, from server to network and so on.

In addition to collecting and analyzing infrastructure response times for real transactions, IT teams should also leverage capabilities for generating synthetic transactions that allow consistent tracking of transaction times, even during periods in which users aren’t working with applications. This allows IT teams to identify and fix problems before they are encountered by end users.

Figure C.

Unified dashboard of IT and business services.

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To fully leverage the value of user-response monitoring, IT teams need to be able to track not only end-user response times, but to couple this visibility with a holistic view of the underlying infrastructure, as outlined in requirement 2. It is only with this holistic visibility that IT personnel can both identify when users are experiencing delays or outages, and quickly pinpoint what the source of the issue is—no matter where that issue may arise.

Requirement four: Employ rigorous SLA management Once organizations have holistic monitoring in place, it is vital for IT teams to track performance and experience against service level agreements (SLAs). IT teams need to be able to track SLA compliance, immediately identify when potential issues arise and address them—before the SLA is breached.

SLA management is vital, both for service providers and for internal IT organizations. Even if the IT organization doesn’t have financial penalties associated with SLA breaches, SLAs remain a critical benchmark. Through tracking SLAs, IT organizations can measure their effectiveness in managing user experience and infrastructure performance. This measurement is also vital in accurately gauging team performance, setting goals and tracking progress.

Figure D.

User experience monitoring dashboard for an email application.

Figure E.

SLA overview report.

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To effectively monitor and report on SLAs, it is critical to get full access to data that reveals the status of the entire service infrastructure, and to do so with minimal manual processes and effort. In addition, IT teams should also be able to get access to end-user quality-of-service metrics and service desk performance statistics. To realize optimal efficiency and intelligence, IT teams need to leverage an infrastructure monitoring solution that can automatically aggregate comprehensive monitoring data in a central database, where it can be leveraged for SLA compliance calculations and reporting.

Requirement five: Leverage predictive and actionable analytics To optimize both infrastructure performance as well as operational efficiency, IT teams should leverage sophisticated reporting capabilities that help users maximize the value of the monitoring data being captured. Following are some of the attributes required to ensure monitoring data fuels maximum value:

• Intelligent. Through capabilities like automatically tracking statistics such as the duration in which a threshold has been exceeded, reports and alarms can help ensure IT teams aren’t wasting time and effort on chasing false alarms and are only focused on persistent and real performance issues.

• Predictive. Predictive analytics can provide early warnings of problems in individual infrastructure elements so that they can be corrected before end users are affected. IT teams need prioritized lists of problems that represent the highest-priority items to track.

• Intuitive. IT organizations need intuitive dashboards that make it easy to assess performance at a high level. These dashboards should also enable personnel to quickly drill down to get details for investigation and analysis.

• Automated. IT teams should leverage automated, intelligent alarm routing capabilities and automated remediation processes to help speed issue resolution.

Figure D.

“Situations to watch” report offering a prioritized list of possible issues.

Situations To Watch

Group: Machines

Metric Threshold Days fromThreshold

Actual DailyAverageElement NameComputer Name

7,500.00Disk Usage (MB)C:\ 13.39e3 -4,988.71ump2current

7,500.00Inbound Traffic (B/s)Inbound Traffic 17.5e3 -1,575.08ump2current

75.00Idle (%)CPU-0 97.56 -1,008.46hub2

7,500.00Aggregated Traffic (B/s)Aggregated Traffic 18.9e3 -739.42ump2current

750.00Physical Memory Usage (MB)Physical 1,247.54 -51.12hub2

7,500.00Total Throughput (B/s)QOS_DISK_TOTAL_THROUGHPUT 17.27e3 -29.42ump2current

750.00Up time (s)Host 23.18e5 -27.33ump2current

75.00Up time (s)Host 23.15e5 -27.29hub2

7,500.00Aggregated Traffic (B/s)Aggregated Traffic 13.92e3 54.25hub2

75e3Write Throughput (B/s)QOS_DISK_WRITE_THROUGHPUT 16.9e3 97.42hub2

1Generated on 03/30/2015 09:14:33 PM

Time Zone: Mountain Standard Time

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Requirement six: Correlate IT and non-IT data to do effective capacity planningAddressing evolving customer expectations isn’t just a matter of tracking IT data. Business data can provide invaluable insights for application and infrastructure design and performance optimization. By leveraging both IT and business data, IT teams can proactively identify bottlenecks and improve end-user experience. For example, correlating server CPU utilization metrics with even simple historical data, such as volumes of user logins or transactions, can provide meaningful insights into planning for capacity to accommodate future growth.

Dashboards that combine real-time IT and non-IT data can provide useful insights. For example, if a retailer is running a flash sale on its site, the IT team can do side-by-side tracking of IT infrastructure utilization and sales trends, and so gain more context in determining whether to take corrective actions if IT infrastructure performance is in danger of failing to keep pace with customer demands.

Conclusion Today, it’s not an overstatement to say that application performance can have a very real and significant impact on business performance. Therefore, it is increasingly essential for IT organizations to move from traditional reactive approaches and start proactively managing and optimizing performance. When they address the requirements outlined in this paper, IT teams can put themselves in a position to ensure critical business applications consistently deliver the performance required.

Figure G.

Trend analysis of IT and non-IT data.

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About CA Unified Infrastructure Management: Proactive Performance Monitoring SolutionCA Unified Infrastructure Management (CA UIM) enables organizations to proactively manage the performance of physical and virtual servers, applications, networks, storage devices, databases, end-user services and cloud and big data environments—all through a single view and architecture. With this visibility, organizations can not only speed mean time to resolution, but start more proactively managing service levels and preempting issues before they have any impact on the end-user experience.

For more information on the product please visit ca.com/uim

Figure H.

CA UIM facilitates proactive management by providing a unified view of all IT infrastructure services, SLAs and user experience.

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.

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