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 2.6 and CA Mediation Manager 2.6 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
Our Team remains focused on our core mission of innovating how to scale the performance management use cases to support the largest infrastructures in the world; addressing technical and economic challenges. We do this while also holding true to our commitment to develop a high quality product within a Customer-Centric Development Culture.
This release has been an excellent balance of advancing our strategic priorities while also delivering rapid turn-around on high priority customer enhancement. We chose with this minor release to deliver 100% new features aligned to your enhancements delivered in person or raised and voted on by the online customer community. I am personally proud that we have together reached this level of collaboration and maturity with this product. All of the new features and enhancements are listed in the product release notes and the GA letter that I have attached to this blog.
We extended our early access period with this release to pay close attention to the quality and performance of strategic improvements to the product architecture. Specifically we have made changes to data repository, data aggregator, and data collector. All of these are aligned to a critical milestone of double capacity while improving efficiency of the system at workloads supported today. We are pleased with the positive results that honestly have exceeded our expectations for this minor release.
While customer feedback on the expected features was very positive we did uncover a few unexpected issues during this process that we wanted to share with the community to ensure you have a positive experience upgrading to the new version.
We continue to receive great feedback on the online sizing tool that we released with CAPM 2.5. We made some nice updates based on user feedback. Unfortunately we learned that not all customers may have access to the online sizer and we need to correct this. If you do not have access to support.ca.com and cannot access the online sizer please send me a note or contact support. We have a short term tactical workaround of sending you the files to install locally and long term we are working on a solution.
- CAPM 2.6 is a minor release and we do not like introducing changes outside of major release that might affect system requirements. However with this release we did make a fairly significant change to Data Collector architecture that surprised one of our customers. CAPM 2.6 Data Collectors, , when disconnected from the data aggregator, will now cache polled data to disk rather than memory. This is part of a project to improve reliability of our polling service and to limit data loss during longer maintenance windows or disconnects between DC and DA. The good news is that we use less memory on the DC server however the system requirements for disk has gone up. This will obviously be proportional to number of polled items and length of time you want to save data to disk. Customers are encouraged to review the online sizer to verify that adequate disk is available.
- Product management learned of a feature that development snuck in that we did not think would make the release. It was actually a customer working with the tiger team who discovered this feature. They were testing the new ability to schedule dashboards in csv format. The customer verified with csv format only that content is delivered for all pages and not just the top page for the dashboard when you have lots of rows in your view. This was a pleasant surprise for this customer and for our PM team. We are now taking credit for its delivery.
- We stumbled over a bug that will only impact you if you worked with our team and developed a very sophisticated custom cert for the Interface Metric family. However, that is exactly what happened with one of our customers. The result was a DA Synchronization failures that did not impact data collection but did require a patch to resolve. Our support teams have created a knowledge based article on this and are trained to work with you to check if you are vulnerable or to identify and resolve the sync failure if you encounter it after you upgrade. We believe it is very unlikely that you will run into this but a key benefit of early access is to identify any possible areas of risk and provide additional training and utilities to empower our support team to proactively work with our customers and react quickly if necessary. They have a DB query they can run with you to double check if your custom cert might expose your system to this sync failure.
As we’ve stated before, nothing is more disappointing than a mistake that impacts our customers. Our teams will always own up to them quickly and focus our energy to provide you with a resolution. This is part of our Customer-Centric development culture.
I want to thank all of our customers who participated with CA Performance Management 2.6 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 have excellent attendance during our Agile Sprint Demos with outstanding collaboration between customers and the engineers developing the software.
We are all very excited to make this release available to you today and with every release please tell us your thoughts so we can improve.
R&D is already hard at work developing even more exciting capabilities that we look forward to bringing with us to CA World in Las Vegas in just little over a month from now!
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