One of the key measures of success for both CA Technologies as a company and our Agile Ops products specifically, is how quickly our customers can gain value from our products. With the release of Unified Infrastructure Management 8.4 earlier this year we made this an explicit focus by tackling the difficult task of bulk monitoring configuration. To summarize the problem, we needed to enable our customers to easily and rapidly configure monitoring for large scale deployments and DevOps environments. By reducing the time to monitoring, we are reducing overall time to value. With UIM 8.4, we have taken great care to simplify and speed up the monitoring configuration experience, and if you haven't done so already, please take a moment to read about the initial release of Monitoring Configuration Service (MCS) in CA UIM 8.4. In brief, MCS is a group based monitoring deployment mechanism, enabling our customers to quickly deploy monitoring across their large-scale infrastructure with a simple, intuitive and in context configuration tool.
By addressing this problem directly, we made great progress in how quickly Unified Infrastructure Management can bring value to our customers. In this initial release, we demonstrated that it is possible to bring a scalable solution for bulk monitoring configuration directly within USM. With Unified Infrastructure Management 8.4.7 (released in the Fall of 2016) we further enhanced MCS with more probe support, the addition of out of the box defaults, and even further scale and performance improvements.
Since the initial release of MCS in Spring 2016, and the follow up enhancements introduced in Fall 2016 in UIM 8.4.7, I have heard two things clearly from our customers:
- MCS is a tremendous productivity improvement, delivering much faster "time to monitor"
- While it's a great start, please add more probe support
Firstly, thank you all for the positive feedback, and secondly, let's get to work on what's next for Monitoring Configuration Service!
If you are using MCS today, I think you'll all be happy to know that within the next few months we will be doubling the number of probes supported! While I'm sure many of the probes important to you are either already supported, or slated for support in early 2017, there are likely a few probes for which MCS implementation is still needed. This is where I need your help. Please contribute to the conversation below (or message me directly) and let me know what probes you want us to support next, and/or key configuration features you think are missing from our current solution.
Additionally, it's critically important that the probe support we implement is in line with the use cases you need supported. To that end, I'd like to include you in future feature demonstrations to validate the approach we are taking. Again, please message me directly or comment below if you would like to be involved.
Thanks, and happy monitoring!!