CA Spectrum and CA Unified Infrastructure Management (UIM) are powerful monitoring tools helping enterprises in improving network service levels no matter how complex. The value proposition is accelerated issue resolutions and faster adoption of innovative technologies. In this blog post I will shed some light over the much awaited CA Spectrum and CA UIM integration which is now generally available with CA Spectrum 10.2.
What does integration entail?
The integration will sync inventory and alarms from CA Spectrum to CA UIM and vice versa. Several customers participated in an earlier beta program this year where alarms and inventory sync from CA UIM to CA Spectrum. We received invaluable information back from that beta and are pleased to announce these additional enhancements to the GA version.
- Inventory sync from CA UIM to CA Spectrum
- Inventory sync from CA Spectrum to CA UIM
- Customers can select the inventory to be synced by adding it to the container they chose to sync
- Alarms sync has also been enhanced to give the option to select the direction of sync. The administrator can choose to sync:
- Only from CA Spectrum to CA UIM
- Only from CA UIM to CA Spectrum
- Or both ways, CA UIM to CA Spectrum AND CA Spectrum to CA UIM
Benefits of the Integration
Though CA Spectrum and CA UIM have their own unique value add for an enterprise; ultimately they help monitor the network infrastructure. The integration is intended to reduce duplication of efforts for an administrator who might be using CA Spectrum for fault isolation and root cause analysis and CA UIM at the same time for optimizing the infrastructure. Once the integration is setup, the administrator will be able to view the inventory and alarms from both CA Spectrum and CA UIM in a single admin console. This will enable the administrators to continue to use the solution of their choice with the advantage of seeing all relevant information at one place. More importantly they will be able to perform actions and drive alarm related workflows using any of these two solutions which will reflect in both the solutions. So for example, if the administrator wants to assign an alarm to a troubleshooter in their team, they can simply do that using either CA Spectrum or CA UIM and it will reflect on the other solution!
How to setup the integration
The integration can be set up in two easy steps:
- Enable the integration in CA Spectrum. The administrator has the option to select what inventory they would like to sync from CA UIM to CA Spectrum
- Activate the integration in CA UIM by activating and configuring the spectrumgtw probe on the UIM admin console. The administrator has flexibility to configure the frequency, time and direction of sync.
Bingo! You will start seeing the sync result within few minutes. You can get more details about the setup in CA Spectrum documentation. Once the integration is set up successfully, you will see the inventory and alarms synced. Once a full sync has happened, the incremental syncs continue periodically based on your configuration of spectrumgtw probe.
See the bidirectional integration in action, from the steps to set up, to syncing inventory and alarms in both products: