TechValidate Research on CA Infrastructure Management

Introduction

This case study of a large enterprise telecommunications services company is based on a September 2014 survey of CA eHealth customers by TechValidate, a 3rd-party research service. The profiled company asked to have their name blinded to protect their confidentiality.

Challenges

• Held back from investing more into their infrastructure management and monitoring solutions because:
  • Nothing

Use Case

• Is currently investigating ways to better monitor routers and switches across many domains.
• Uses 2-5 products for infrastructure management and performance monitoring.
• The following features are most important in providing insight into the performance of their infrastructure:
  • Monitoring non-SNMP devices
  • Monitoring all network devices
  • Monitoring all servers
  • Monitoring server app performance
  • Managing traps, alarms and alters
  • Separating interfaces for admin and non-admin users
• Currently runs the following in addition to CA eHealth:
  • CA Application Performance Management
  • CA Network Flow Analysis
  • CA Performance Management
  • CA Service Operations Insight
  • CA Spectrum
  • CA Unified Communications Monitor
• Runs the following add-on capabilities to improve service quality and visibility into infrastructure performance:
  • SNMP agents
• Uses the following resources in order to maximize their CA eHealth investment:
  • CA Support (support.ca.com)
  • CA Services

Results

• Rates the following CA eHealth capabilities as compared to other network monitors:
  • Live KPI reporting: superior
  • SLA reporting: superior
  • Application performance: vastly superior
  • Server and system performance: vastly superior

Introduction

This case study of a state & local government is based on a November 2013 survey of CA Spectrum customers by TechValidate, a 3rd-party research service. The profiled organization asked to have their name blinded to protect their confidentiality.

Challenges

• Purchased CA Spectrum in order to:
  • Speed fault isolation and resolution
  • Pre-empt service issues before user impact
  • Understand the impact of outages on users and business services
  • Monitor and manage physical, virtual and cloud environments
• Solved the following challenges with CA Spectrum:
  • Improved the productivity of their IT staff
  • Improved service levels to end users
  • Increased visibility across their network – physical and virtual
  • Reduced change and configuration errors
  • Improved reporting
  • Reduced the number of alarms

Use Case

• Has 5,001 – 10,000 monitored devices.
• Is monitoring and managing the following with CA Spectrum:
  • Physical Servers
  • Virtual Machines (VMs)
  • Network Devices

Results

• CA Spectrum is differentiated from competitive products in the following ways:
  • Range of vendors and technologies supported
  • Breadth of monitoring/management functionality
  • Depth of monitoring/management functionality
  • Reliability
  • Scalability
  • Value for price
  • Speed /time to value
  • Flexibility
• Rated the following Spectrum features in terms of how easy they are to use:
  • overall ease of use: very easy
  • out-of-the-box functionality: very easy
  • platform support OOTB: very easy
  • spectrum report manager: very easy
• Increased the productivity of their IT staff by 50% to 74% with CA Spectrum.
• Improved their MTTR by 25% to 49% with CA Spectrum.