CA Technologies Delivers Next-Generation Operational Control with CA Service Operations Insight

Abstract

In August of 2011, CA Technologies introduced its next-generation answer for effective cross-domain service management with CA Service Operations Insight r3.0. The solution is an enhanced, functionally enriched and rebranded version of CA Spectrum Service Assurance Manager (SSA) designed at once to provide an effective migration middle-ground for IT operations organizations not yet ready for service modeling, while meaningfully extending its modeling and automation capabilities for more mature IT organizations. This ENTERPRISE MANAGEMENT ASSOCIATES (EMA) impact brief presents the highlights of CA Technologies functionally rich August announcement in industry context.

Event

On August 16, 2011, CA Technologies introduced CA Service Operations Insight r 3.0, a capability that it rightly described as next-generation for cross-domain service management including operations managers and professionals, as well as application and service level managers, service desk and change management professionals, and business executives. As the follow-on to CA Spectrum Service Assurance Manager (SSA), the solution leverages CAs Catalyst integration platform and Unified Service Model (USM) capabilities for assimilating CA and third-party sources and generating flexible, dynamic service models through multiple federated sources.

On August 16, 2011, CA Technologies introduced CA Service Operations Insight r 3.0, a capability that it rightly described as nextgeneration for cross-domain service management.

The new capabilities of CA Service Operations Insight include advanced, cross-domain event correlation and queuing that can be used with or without full service model implementations, enhanced integration with CA Process Automation for lifecycle service management and closed-loop Incident, Problem and Configuration management, overall enriched third-party and CA integrations, and a Realtime Business Service Dashboard, among other features. CA Technologies executives describe Service Operations Insight as closing the continuous business alignment gap a reasonably fair statement given both the breadth of existing functionality, and the larger vision behind it.

CA Service Operations Insight: A Closer Look

CA Technologies got a jumpstart on a unified approach to service operations with the introduction of Spectrum Service Assurance Manager (SSA) in Q2 2009 when it began its campaign to integrate more CA and third-party solutions and enrich core functionality in terms of diagnostics, business impact, and user experience. The current CA Service Operations Insight solution profits from and enhances a number of core architectural advantages inherited directly from its previous incarnation as CA SSA. Among the new and enhanced features are: New unified event and alert management that does not require maturity levels typically associated with service modeling, but which can profit from modeling as IT organizations evolve. Operations professionals can launch root cause analysis procedures across a wide range

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2011 Enterprise Management Associates, Inc. All Rights Reserved. | www.enterprisemanagement.com

of domain-specific management tools with consistent policies for analysis and escalation. This includes service impact and risk alert escalation to the service desk as well as more operationally specific escalations. It also provides ongoing or continual risk analysis and can highlight which hardware and software assets have been most problematic to service delivery over time and which assets are most likely to cause problems in the future. This also complements pre-existing analytic strengths such as CA Spectrums model-driven inferencing, and transaction and user experience monitoring and analysis from CA Application Performance Management. Extended integrations span operations monitoring, application performance management, and service desk requirements. These include CA Application Performance Management, CA Access Control, and infrastructure management solutions such as CA Spectrum, CA eHealth, CA NetQoS, and CA NSM among others, and CA Service Desk and CMDB, CA Service Catalog, and CA Clarity (for PPM), just to highlight a few key CA integrations. Fully supported thirdparty solutions include BMC Atrium, BMC Remedy, IBM Service Request Manager, IBM Tivoli Monitoring, IBM Tivoli Netcool OMNIbus, Microsoft SCOM, and NetApp SANScreen, as examples. Various integrations support bi-directional alert, maintenance flag and service model synchronization to foster cross-discipline collaboration and best practices. Enhanced real-time business service dashboard that can provide clear, executive-level visualization for service-related parameters such as importance, risk, health, quality, availability, along with snapshot views of historical status as well as transaction-related links to business process impacts. New support for mobile devices with configurable views so that administrators, engineers, operations managers and executives can view services status and alerts and take action via CA Service Operations Insight remotely. Enhanced support for dynamic, end-to-end service modeling which can import and reconcile information (e.g., configuration items, groups of configuration items that comprise transaction/ application and infrastructure models, real-time configuration item status), from a wide variety of CA and third-party products across the application performance, infrastructure, workload, compliance, configuration, change and other management arenas. In the previous version of the product, CA SSA, service modeling capability was one of the earliest expressions of CAs Unified Service Model (USM) an extensible schema that models entities and relationships as well as policies and rules to support federation, correlation and reconciliation across multiple CA and third-party management sources. The USM normalizes imported configuration items, their relationships and alerts from the CA and third-party sources. CA Service Operations Insight leverages the USM information for service modeling and impact analysis, and does not require, but can leverage a prior CMDB deployment. This core architecture has been enhanced to support fully distributed environments for increased scalability via USM data stores and distributed Service Operations Insight Connectors. Enhanced, policy-based discovery which can span federated Management Data Repositories (MDRs), agents and CMDBs, and includes full support for the CA Configuration Automation application dependency mapping solution, the CA Application Performance Management solutions transaction mapping, and CA and third-party Infrastructure Managements discovery to establish across-the-board application/infrastructure interdependencies including interdependencies on physical and virtual hosts and networks. The enhanced discovery capabilities include three new ways to build and maintain service models: populate services based on user-defined policy; create relationships between CIs (Configuration Items) based on user-defined policy; and maintain relationships as CIs are added to pre-existing groups. These capabilities are automated so that when new CIs appear, or aging CIs are withdrawn from production, the changes are immediately viewed in context. Optional model granularity, also new, allows child objects imported into CA Service Operations Insight from data sources to impact a service without being explicitly modeled as part of the service.

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 Enhanced automation unifies service, change management and workload management. The integration with CA Process Automation has been enriched to support standard, pre-built, automated process flows that can trigger automated provisioning, diagnostics and other actions across domains. Other automation-related integrations include the two full CA Automation Suite for data centers and CA Automation Suite for Cloud solutions, as well as support for mainframe and workload management with third-party support for IBM Omegamon and Terma Software Labs JAWS. Integrated support for Service Level Management (SLM) offers dynamic insights into operational SLA-related performance (e.g., service quality, risks and availability thresholds) and provides service models and their status to CA Business Service Insight, a solution that builds upon CA Technologies Oblicore acquisition for contractual SLM to provide broader service performance management capabilities.

EMA Perspective

With CA Service Operations Insight the company took a compelling step forward. It did so both in advancing the art of model-driven service management and automation, and in enabling an easy migration to more mature service management via enriched capabilities for cross-domain root cause analytics and escalation, support for mobile monitoring, extended integrations and enhanced executive dashboard support. EMA evaluated CA Service Operations Insights previous version, CA Spectrum Service Assurance, in Q3 2010, and ranked it as the most balanced Value Leader in its EMA Radar for Business Service Management: Service Impact market assessment for leading the way in service modeling beyond traditional CMDB deployments to support more real-time, operational control. In some respects, CA Service Operations Insight assumes a more modest posture recognizing that not all IT and even all service provider organizations are ready for true business service management with model-driven interdependencies. But given the need to help IT organizations mature and grow, CAs move is a wise one, as it both raises the breadth and depth of functionality for service operations, while lowering the barriers to entry.

CAs Service Operations Insight should provide IT adopters with a breadth of compelling options with a solid balance across infrastructure management, application performance management, and automation.

EMA believes that CAs Service Operations Insight should provide IT adopters with a breadth of compelling options with a solid balance across infrastructure management, application performance management, and automation. As such it should also help to move the industry forward as a whole, as federated service management systems are finally beginning to emerge as a major force in addressing service delivery requirements for traditional, Cloud, and hybrid environments.

About EMA

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 its clients achieve their goals. Learn more about EMA research, analysis, and consulting services for enterprise IT professionals, lines of business users, and IT vendors at www.enterprisemanagement.com or follow EMA on Twitter (http://twitter.com/ema_research). 2315.081811

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2011 Enterprise Management Associates, Inc. All Rights Reserved. | www.enterprisemanagement.com