CA Unified Infrastructure Management

Deepens its Visibility Into Cloud

and Hybrid IT With Comprehensive
New Capabilities
An ENTERPRISE MANAGEMENT ASSOCIATES® (EMA™) White Paper
Prepared for CA
June 2016

IT & DATA MANAGEMENT RESEARCH,

INDUSTRY ANALYSIS & CONSULTING
CA Unified Infrastructure Management Deepens its Visibility
Into Cloud and Hybrid IT With Comprehensive New Capabilities

Table of Contents
Executive Summary.................................................................................................................................. 1

The Many Challenges of Monitoring Cloud and Hybrid IT Infrastructure.............................................. 1

A Status Quo Approach to Hybrid Cloud and IT Infrastructure Monitoring Doesn’t Work.................... 2

Unified Infrastructure Monitoring Can Meet the Challenge of Hybrid Infrastructure Management....... 3

CA UIM Delivers Most Comprehensive Capability for Cloud and Hybrid IT .................................. 3

Single Monitoring Solution for Hybrid Cloud Environments ........................................................... 4

EMA Perspective....................................................................................................................................... 5

About CA................................................................................................................................................. 5

©2016 Enterprise Management Associates, Inc. All Rights Reserved. | www.enterprisemanagement.com

CA Unified Infrastructure Management Deepens its Visibility
Into Cloud and Hybrid IT With Comprehensive New Capabilities

Executive Summary
Hybrid IT and cloud architectures are key enablers of digital transformation, but IT operation will
need the right tools to assure applications and service performance in these new environments. Hybrid
IT combines a variety of legacy and next-generation technologies, which presents a conundrum for the
IT organization. Do they combine their existing management and monitoring tools with new tools that
address new technologies like containers, cloud, and software-defined infrastructure? Or should they
take a more unified approach to IT operations but extend their existing monitoring tools?
For the sake of efficiency and operational effectiveness, Enterprise Management Associates (EMA)
recommends that IT organizations extend the visibility of their existing tools whenever possible.
This paper explores a leading option for that approach. With its Unified Infrastructure Monitoring
(CA UIM) solution, CA offers a hybrid IT monitoring platform with visibility into traditional and
next-generation technologies. CA UIM’s modular architecture allows CA to extend visibility into new
technologies on a continuous basis without reboots or software upgrades.

The Many Challenges of Monitoring Cloud

and Hybrid IT Infrastructure
In today’s digital economy, IT infrastructure is the backbone of a business. Infrastructure availability
and performance directly affect the bottom line. In a hybrid IT environment that spans public cloud
services, private cloud infrastructure, and legacy infrastructure, the failure of a single workload in the
cloud or the failure of a single device in an enterprise data center can have a cascading deleterious effect
on the health and performance of applications. IT organizations need infrastructure monitoring tools
that can find the sources of these problems quickly, before application
degradation kills productivity, impedes revenue generation, and tarnishes
a company’s brand.
Cloud technologies are
However, IT infrastructure is continuously becoming more complex
as enterprises adopt new technologies to enable digital transformation.
inherently dynamic,
For instance, they are deploying production applications on containers, so monitoring tools
they are installing converged infrastructure, and they are transitioning must be elastic and
to new storage media, such as high-performance flash arrays. Enterprise responsive to changes
Management Associates has seen evidence that a significant number of
enterprisers are building private clouds with OpenStack. Enterprises in cloud infrastructure.
need infrastructure monitoring tools that can extend their visibility into
these new technologies.
As enterprises create hybrid clouds by combining their new private cloud infrastructures with IaaS
and PaaS services from cloud providers like Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure, they
increasingly need monitoring capabilities that can span internal infrastructure and external, public cloud
infrastructure. In particular, public cloud services introduce new demands for dynamic infrastructure
management. First, IT operations must monitor the cloud environments themselves and then the
applications and services that run on top of them. These cloud technologies are inherently dynamic,
so monitoring tools must be elastic and responsive to changes in cloud infrastructure. If the enterprise
bursts into the cloud, the monitoring tools must be ready to burst, too. Given that cloud providers
charge daily or hourly rates for workloads, enterprises must also be efficient with their use of the public
components of their hybrid clouds. Their monitoring tools should be able to tell the IT organization
whether it is maximizing its use of public cloud resources. With proper monitoring, the IT team can
make informed decisions about expanding or shrinking its public cloud footprint.

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CA Unified Infrastructure Management Deepens its Visibility
Into Cloud and Hybrid IT With Comprehensive New Capabilities

A Status Quo Approach to Hybrid Cloud and

IT Infrastructure Monitoring Doesn’t Work
When an IT organization adopts an entirely new type of technology, it is often tempted to procure
specialized management tools to operationalize these new components. For instance, IT operations will
acquire a new monitoring tool with visibility into Docker containers or an OpenStack cloud. It might
also install a product aimed at monitoring a specific public cloud provider, such as AWS. This piecemeal
approach to management tooling often leads to a fragmented and overcrowded monitoring toolkit. In
its research and interactions with the IT operations professionals, Enterprise Management Associates
research found that many enterprises rely on dozens, if not scores, of individual tools to monitor and
troubleshoot applications and services. When an IT team assembles multiple point tools like this, it is
usually making a grave mistake.
Adding more monitoring tools to gain visibility into new infrastructure inevitably adds complexity. First,
IT operations must devote resources to learning how to use new monitoring tools. Then it has to devote
resources to maintaining them. As IT operations assemble a disparate set of specialized management
tools to monitor the health and performance of each of the elements in its infrastructure, the workflows
it develops with such tools are inherently inefficient. Administrators will find themselves logging into
countless tools to find the answers they seek, when a more efficient organization might require them to
log into one tool. These heterogeneous approaches to management also present visibility gaps between
individual tools. Often, IT operations lacks a higher-level understanding of interdependencies among
each management domain, which makes it difficult to detect application service problems, let alone
identify their root causes.
Cloud adds more hurdles to the IT management field. It is difficult
enough to wrangle a fragmented management toolset to monitor and 93% of enterprises plan to
troubleshoot the health and performance of infrastructure that sits under
one roof, wholly owned by a single IT organization. When applications,
use new tools to monitor
services, and business processes span traditional infrastructure, private cloud-based and hybrid
clouds, and public clouds as they do in hybrid IT environments, applications and 40%
performance monitoring and management becomes even more complex. say it is more difficult
In unpublished research from 2015, EMA asked enterprises to name the top
challenges they encounter when managing cloud performance. Difficulty to support performance
with cloud troubleshooting performance issues topped the list, with 41% problems for cloud-
identifying it as one of their biggest problems. A significant number of based applications.
enterprises also said that poor visibility into network performance (29%)
and poor visibility into application performance (21%) were major issues
in the cloud. Furthermore, 40% of these enterprises told EMA that it is
more difficult to solve performance problems for cloud-based applications and workloads than it is for
traditional, non-cloud environments. Ninety-three percent (93%) of these enterprises said they were
using or plan to use new tools with visibility into cloud and non-cloud environments to monitor cloud-
based and hybrid applications. Again, EMA would advise these companies to extend their existing tools
first to avoid complexity.

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CA Unified Infrastructure Management Deepens its Visibility
Into Cloud and Hybrid IT With Comprehensive New Capabilities

Unified Infrastructure Monitoring Can Meet the Challenge

of Hybrid Infrastructure Management
IT operations needs a more unified approach to infrastructure monitoring. As IT infrastructure becomes
more complex, hybridized IT organizations should strive to keep their management systems simple and
unified. By doing this they can establish an understanding of the interdependencies among the various
infrastructure layers that comprise applications and services in today’s
hybrid clouds. Otherwise, IT Operations might find itself struggling
with situations where a single device failure can set off hundreds of alerts
across dozens of monitoring tools. By consolidating tools and avoiding
Enterprises should
these alert storms, an IT organization can accelerate its mean time to consider a unified
insight and mean time to resolution. Enterprises should consider a platform for monitoring
unified platform for monitoring the health and performance of multiple the health and
technology domains to avoid operational complexity.
performance of multiple
CA Unified Infrastructure Monitoring (UIM) provides a robust platform
technology domains
for monitoring the entirety of today’s cloud and hybrid IT infrastructure
environments. It already provides deep insight into server, hypervisors, to avoid operational
Databases, storage, packaged applications, networks, and the cloud from complexity.
one console. Meanwhile, CA is constantly expanding the breadth and
depth of CA UIM’s visibility
CA UIM Delivers Most Comprehensive Capability for Cloud and Hybrid IT
Most recently, CA added several new UIM probes that expand the tool’s visibility into several
technologies that enterprises are adopting for hybrid infrastructure. First, CA has added a Docker probe
that monitors a Docker container environment and the processes or services running on the containers.
CA added a probe for Nutanix Enterprise Cloud, a converged infrastructure solution. The Nutanix
probe monitors the health and availability of Nutanix clusters, hosts, VMs, storage pools, containers,
and disk components. With a new PureStorage probe, UIM can monitor performance and usage of
PureStorage FlashArray storage systems, which are a critical piece for building scalable private cloud
storage. Finally, CA introduced a new probe for monitoring the health and performance of OpenStack-
based private clouds.
CA also enhanced its visibility into the public cloud by enhancing CA UIM’s AWS probe with
support for several new AWS services, including DynamoDB, Route53, and ECS. The AWS probe
also has the ability to monitor and alert on AWS billing, which will help IT control costs and manage
capacity. Additionally, CA enhanced the usability of CAUIM’s AWS monitoring, including a workload
tagging scheme in UIM that matches the tagging scheme enterprises used in AWS. This enhancement
will streamline workflows. (These new enhancements give CA UIM industry-leading visibility into
a wide variety of infrastructure components and cloud services that are in use in today’s hybrid IT
infrastructures.)

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CA Unified Infrastructure Management Deepens its Visibility
Into Cloud and Hybrid IT With Comprehensive New Capabilities

Single Monitoring Solution for Hybrid Cloud Environments

CA UIM can monitor traditional infrastructure, private cloud, and public cloud in one IT operations
console. In the public cloud, UIM can proactively monitor SLAs, performance and user experience
of the cloud environment and the services running on them. CA UIM’s performance management
capabilities can validate cloud workload migration by revealing performance before and after the
workload has migrated to the cloud. It can also conduct performance trending and analysis for root
cause analysis and future resource planning, which is essential for cost optimization. The solution also
provides template based configuration, which allows an enterprise to deploy monitoring rapidly in
highly elastic cloud environments
CA designed CA UIM so that there is no barrier to adding new monitoring capabilities as they become
available. CA UIM has an open architecture with a single back-end message bus that integrates multiple
monitoring capabilities via a publish-and-subscribe model. This architecture makes it easy for IT
organizations to customize new monitoring probes. In fact, many CA UIM users created their own
AWS probes before CA released productized versions. Infrastructure teams can also leverage CA UIM’s
APIs to extend and automate monitoring deployment and to establish triggers for automated problem
remediation or provisioning of new cloud instances on demand.
CA UIM probes are also independent of core product releases, which
eliminates any barriers to the adoption of new monitoring capabilities.
When CA adds a new probe to the UIM library, an IT organization only This architecture is
needs to update its probe inventory. The core UIM product doesn’t need important to public cloud
an update so there is no reinstallation. With these updated probes, an IT
organization can start monitoring Docker, OpenStack, PureStorage, and
monitoring because cloud
Nutanix, and deepen its monitoring of AWS today without upgrading providers continuously
CA UIM. update and enhance
This architecture is important to public cloud monitoring because cloud their infrastructure
providers continuously update and enhance their infrastructure and and services.
services, which can require frequent updates to a probe. When the probe
can be updated without disrupting the core management platform, IT is
able to extend visibility pain-free.
It is also important to manage the health and performance of the networks that connect and scale
hybrid cloud environments. EMA research has shown that many enterprises are now leveraging
software-defined networking (SDN) and network functions virtualization (NFV) to build these new
cloud network. CA has created the Virtual Network Assurance (CA VNA) that complements CA UIM
gateway and enables SDN and NFV management and monitoring.

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CA Unified Infrastructure Management Deepens its Visibility
Into Cloud and Hybrid IT With Comprehensive New Capabilities

EMA Perspective
No IT organization starts with a blank slate today. If one could do so,
perhaps IT operations would be much simpler. Instead, IT organizations With new probes that
are dealing with increased complexity as they combine legacy infrastructure enable visibility into
with public, private, and hybrid cloud technologies. Older technologies OpenStack, PureStorage
now coexist with OpenStack, Docker containers, AWS, and much more.
The typical IT organization will struggle to support these new elements flash arrays, Docker
with its existing infrastructure management tools and practices. In fact, containers, and Nutanix
it will be tempted to acquire several new management tools to account hyperconverged
for new hybrid infrastructures. While some IT organizations can succeed
by adding new tools to monitor the health and performance of each new
infrastructure and deeper
technology, EMA believes that many businesses will struggle with this visibility into AWS, CA is
piecemeal approach. staying at the forefront
Instead, enterprises should explore ways to adopt a unified approach to IT of Cloud hybrid IT
monitoring, with platforms that can span multiple technology domains monitoring with UIM.
and multiple clouds. An end-to-end view of the entire infrastructure
footprint, from internal legacy infrastructure out to the public cloud, can
reveal the technology interdependencies that dictate whether applications
and services are performing at a satisfactory level.
CA continues to expand the robust monitoring capabilities of CA UIM, a leading platform for monitoring
an enterprise’s entire IT environment from legacy architecture to cutting edge hybrid clouds. With new
probes that enable visibility into OpenStack, PureStorage flash arrays, Docker containers, and Nutanix
hyperconverged infrastructure and deeper visibility into AWS, CA is staying at the forefront of Cloud
hybrid IT monitoring with UIM.

About CA
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 www.ca.com.

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About Enterprise Management Associates, Inc.
Founded in 1996, Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) is a leading industry analyst firm that provides deep insight across the full spectrum
of IT and data management technologies. EMA analysts leverage a unique combination of practical experience, insight into industry best practices,
and in-depth knowledge of current and planned vendor solutions to help EMA’s clients achieve their goals. Learn more about EMA research,
analysis, and consulting services for enterprise line of business users, IT professionals and IT vendors at www.enterprisemanagement.com or
blogs.enterprisemanagement.com. You can also follow EMA on Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn.

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©2016 Enterprise Management Associates, Inc. All Rights Reserved. EMA™, ENTERPRISE MANAGEMENT ASSOCIATES®, and the
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