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Introducing CA Performance Management 2.5 and what we learned during Early Access

By Dan_Holmes posted Jun 22, 2015 03:00 PM

  

Today, our team is very excited to introduce the next version of CA Performance Management together with CA Mediation Manager.

 

You can now access CA Performance Management 2.5 and CA Mediation Manager 2.5 at http://support.ca.com

 

Please remember to log in to the support site. Depending on your license, you may have to download using:

 

    • CA Infrastructure Management 2.0

 

    • CA Infrastructure Performance 2.0

 

    • CA Performance Management

 

   

If you have any trouble, contact support for assistance immediately

 

In addition, consistent with many other CA products, you can now access the latest documentation at: http://wiki.ca.com/capm and http://wiki.ca.com/camm

 

CA Performance Management continues to build upon last year’s success, focusing on scaling the performance management use cases to support the largest infrastructures in the world. They also build upon our commitment to develop this product within a Customer-Centric Development Culture.

 

Our Early Access program is a classic example of our belief in in building high quality software focused on what matters most - quality and customer value! This program enables us to observe the total customer experience, and NOT just the software code itself. In fact, many of the things that we improve prior to Open Access GA is not the software, but rather the 'stuff' around the software to drive your success (i.e. sizer, documentation, support personal, etc.)

 

Over the past three weeks, we have been working closely with 10 of our strategic customers that include large enterprises and communication service providers in North America and Europe. All customers have successfully deployed in their pre-production and test environments to validate the quality of the software, and to plan their upgrade. More than half of these customers are now running in production, with other production deployments continuing this week as our team observes their experience.   We support this activity with Early Access Buddy Teams that consist of Support, Development, Product Management, and are lead by SWAT (Field Engineer). Every member of the Early Access Buddy team is an advisor, on call to help, and more importantly an observer to help measure how well we can provide our customers with simple upgrades and compelling capabilities with high quality. These teams use every opportunity to learn, and return to the CA team with new ideas. I am really excited about this release because the EA Teams were prepared to help our customers perform 'pre-flight' assessments and analysis of the deployment environment, as well as configure 'in-flight' self monitoring and instrumentation. This provides our teams with data to compare the software performance before and after the upgrade.

 

Here is an important light bulb that has recently lit for me. DevOps and Continuous delivery will ONLY be successful if you improve your Application Performance Management capabilities. If we are going to build market-leading performance management that scales, we had better improve our applications performance. You are going to cringe when I say this, but I'll be really honest - our team has spent the better part of the past year learning how to apply APM to the CAPM product (FOR THE FIRST TIME EVER). The results are starting to pay off. We are now able to make changes to the product faster, and with higher confidence. We have taken the time to instrument CA APM within our R&D environment to obtain data to understand the root cause of performance and spot opportunities to improve. More importantly, we are improving our understanding of how our application and the underlying Vertica database perform, and how configuration of the underlying infrastructure can affect our application solution's performance. Our teams now use real data to drive validation of our engineering hypothesis as we change the software and expose key areas of opportunity to improve. Weare not restricting our use of this technology and practice in the lab. We are starting to bring this into our customer environments as well, which allows us to validate every hypothesis on App Performance and Sizing with real customer experience.  I will blog separately on this topic, but the point that I wanted to raise is that during this Early Access program, we collected a lot of great data before and after the installs. As a result, we learned that:

 

    1. CA Performance Management 2.5 is our best release yet, not only in terms of quality and features but also performance and a quality experience at high scale. We have an aggressive roadmap to build upon this success, but we are very pleased with the results so far (based on real data). We believe that our customers will value this effort
    2. Our sizing tool was not giving customers the best guidance on disk requirements. We uncovered this with scripts our teams developed to perform a health check. Our sizing tool was applying formulas using older segmentation algorithms, and we have since updated and corrected this, providing customers with more accurate sizing recommendations
    3. Our new online sizer, accessible now from the CA Performance Management product page as well as links in the Installation and Upgrade guides, is MUCH easier to use than our old Excel spreadsheet. Congratulations to one of our engineers, Michelle Cross, who used her own time to develop the online sizer because she hated using the spreadsheet. Now, our customers are going to benefit at well. Michelle captured a lot of great feedback before early access, and we then asked our buddy teams to perform a sizing for each of our customers. We are posting a new version this week that incorporates feedback on additional data requested. Michelle is now working on great feedback and ideas to improve usability.
    4. Vertica Monitoring Console provides insight into the performance of the Vertica system, but can also make it really easy for customers to modify key parameters of the database configuration, which can have negative consequences on how our software performs As a result, we have updated our documentation to make it clear to customers that this tool should be used for monitoring only, and not for making changes that are not factored into our engineering processes.
    5. While big data solutions like Vertica were designed to run on physical hardware with dedicated storage, our customers need flexibility to deploy on virtual and physical servers.  It is up to vendors like CA and HP to provide guidance on how to be successful. We worked very closely with a really important customer during this release, and as a result are updating our documentation to help. We continue to observe that our customers experience the best performance and success when they deploy the DR on dedicated hardware, but are leveraging new best practice information from HP Vertica.  https://community.dev.hp.com/t5/Vertica-Wiki/Configuring-Virtual-Machines-for-HP-Vertica-7-1-x/ta-p/226932

 

In addition to the great data that we collected from each of the customer environments, we also found a few bugs. Although these bugs would not encourage us to pull the release, I want to share one in particular. We were disappointed that we missed this bug, as it was tied to a very popular request on the community:

 

  1. Only the Interface and High Speed Interface Vendor Certifications include support for newly added Bit rate metrics (Bits Per Second, Bits Per Second In, & Bits Per Second out). This means that any customer upgrading to 2.5 will only see data for the new Bit rate metrics for interfaces backed by the 'Interface' or 'High Speed Interface' vendor certifications. Because we caught this during Early Access, we have already started work on new certifications that will be posted to our OnDemand Certification Portal later this week. If you need this sooner, we have also verified that you can utilize the new Out of Box certification extension functionality included in 2.5. https://wiki.ca.com/pages/viewpage.action?title=.Create+or+Extend+Vendor+Certifications+v2.5&spaceKey=CAPM

 

 

Nothing is more disappointing than a mistake, but our teams will always own up to them quickly and focus our energy to provide you with a resolution. That again is part of our Customer-Centric development culture.  It’s not about who is at fault or why something happened that matters. It’s about focusing on a solution, and then improving our process afterward to avoid the mistake in the future.

 

I want to thank all of our customers who participated with 2.5 Early Access, and all those who have helped our team with our use of Agile Scrum and SAFe in the development of this release. We had record attendance during our End of Sprint Demos, and active collaboration that changed the output of this release. I can think of four unplanned features that were added because of EOS demo participation and customers taking advantage of our sprint kits that we post after the demos.  The four improvements are: 

 

    1. Additional IPSLA test types (DNS and http/https
    2. Additional capacity metrics are available with Scorecards configured with detailed projection
    3. A really cool OnDemand Report that delivers Trend View with Summary Statistics table (thanks to our eHealth customers for pushing for this
    4. A last minute update to let customers set the ordering of columns in our new table views and preserve this for all users.

 

We are very excited to make this release available to you today - we can't want to hear from you (good &/or bad) so that we can learn how to make this product even better!

 

R&D is already hard at work developing even more exciting capabilities. For those of you on the Infrastructure Management Pre-Release Community, stay tuned for an upcoming roadmap presentation, as well as invitations to our CA Performance Management - Sprint complete Demos next month!

 

Thanks again for all your support!

 

-Dan Holmes

 

p.s. feel free to comment on this blog or send me questions or feedback directly: Daniel.Holmes@ca.com

 

 

 

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