The entire CA UIM team is pleased to present CA Unified Infrastructure Management 8.5.1! This latest release includes several new features listed below and many updates and enhancements to improve usability, performance and security. We are also excited to announce the pending availability of advanced log analytics capabilities for UIM as part of the server and app pack. Upon release and posting of the software for this exciting new feature in the next several days, this document will be updated with links to the necessary downloads and documentation needed to take advantage of these powerful capabilities.
Feature Summary:
- Log analytics as part of the server and app pack, providing deep insight into metrics and events for faster troubleshooting and root cause analysis
- Automatic discovery and monitoring of applications (Apache, Oracle, MySQL, SQL Server, and IIS)
- A simple GUI workflow for deleting inventory and associated metrics, with the ability to close all open alarms
- Expanded MCS coverage to simplify the configuration of monitoring across a larger set of technologies
- Additional capabilities to incorporate metrics from SysEdge agents into UIM
- Improved discovery correlation to reduce duplicated inventory items
Plus, updates to supported operating systems, migration to Java 8, and continued reductions in outstanding defects to improve your experience with UIM.
Downloads and documentation for UIM 8.5.1 are available now from the standard UIM support site:
http://support.nimsoft.com/Default.aspx?center=portal/downloads
We strongly recommended reviewing the release documentation available at the above link so that you are aware of any upgrade or data migration requirements that could be applicable to your environments.
Log Analytics
This new feature delivers rich contextual intelligence needed to help speed root cause analysis and issue resolution. The solution automatically aggregates and normalizes log data from multiple sources and generates actionable dashboards, all without the need for an additional, expensive analysis tools. With this Elastic Stack-based solution, you can correlate infrastructure performance alarms with associated log events and get alarms that offer contextual event details, enabling fast, effective issue resolution. These log analytics help IT teams dramatically enhance infrastructure performance and the user experience.
- Based on the reliable and secure open-source Elastic Stack, consisting of Kibana, Elasticsearch, and Logstash. This scalable, performant solution provides powerful insight and new, meaningful ways to visualize and correlate log data to events in your infrastructure.
- Extract meaningful metrics from logs for incorporation into UIM data streams, providing full access to UIM’s flexible, single-pane visualizations and alarm management. These log metrics co-exist with standard, agent-based metric data in UIM for a more complete view of both performance and potential problems across your infrastructure.
- Easily query and analyze log data from multiple sources for accelerated troubleshooting and remediation. Out-of-box support for numerous log file formats:
- Docker, Syslog, Windows Event Log, Apache Access and Error Logs, Tomcat Access, Catalina, IIS, Java log4j, Oracle, and Microsoft SQL Server
- Automatic, in-context UIM alarm-to-log correlation helps to quickly pinpoint the root cause of an alarm. Navigation and drill down is as simple as selecting an alarm within UIM and clicking on “Log Analytics.”
- Fresh, visually compelling dashboards for Log Analytics are available out-of-the-box and provide rapid insight and quick time-to-value. Dashboards are instantly interactive and can be easily navigated to see problem distributions, comparisons across multiple technologies in the service stack, and details down to the specific log entries analyzed. For many data types, even geographic origin can be pinpointed to show where in the world a problem originated.
Application Discovery and Monitoring
The new Application Discovery features enables system administrators to automatically discover, group, and monitor the applications running on devices in their environment. Using provided scripts and an updated robot (7.90), the robot on a system can intelligently report what applications it discovers to the UIM central hub, where MCS is used to automatically deploy the probes and monitoring configurations needed for best-practices monitoring. Customizable for the detection of additional applications, UIM 8.5.1 comes with the following default application discovery scripts:
- Apache
- IIS
- Oracle
- MySQL
- Microsoft SQL Server
Delete a Device from UIM Inventory
A highly requested feature, this new capability allows administrators to easily remove decommissioned or unmonitored devices from their inventory. The process gives users the ability to:
- Optionally delete the device from inventory and prevent rediscovery – a process known as “blacklisting”.
- Close alarms associated with this device.
- Delete stored QOS referenced for this device.
Expanded MCS Coverage
UIM 8.5.1 has expanded and refined monitoring templates for commonly used services and leading cloud technologies. These templates allow for the bulk configuration of monitoring for the following probes:
- Amazon Web Services
- Docker
- Openstack
- Nutanix
- VMWare
- SAP
- Active Directory Response
- Exchange
- LDAP Response
- IIS
- Net_connect
- Active Directory
- Sharepoint
System Edge (SysEdge) Integration with UIM
Improved integration between System Edge and UIM allows customers to preserve their deployment of SysEdge Agents while migrating visualizations and server monitoring to UIM as a single, unified solution:
- Efficient monitoring of SysEdge agents via UIM’s SNMP Collector
- Existing SysEdge integrations with other CA Products can remain intact (e.g. Spectrum, E-Health), enabling a smooth transition to UIM.
- Easily discover SysEdge Agents using the standard UIM Discovery Wizard and the UIM SNMP Collector Probe.
- Introduction of new "On Demand" CABI Reports from SysEdge Agents to retrieve non-polled data in real time.
- Seamless license migration, allowing customers to transition SysEdge licenses to the equivalent UIM probes without disruption.
Improved Discovery Correlation
Enhanced device correlation logic of the Discovery Server probe. New probe now includes:
- Intelligent out-of-the-box defaults which match on a combination of properties to provide a more accurate match.
- Improved probe configuration options to handle dynamic environments. This includes enhanced support for single and multi-tenant environments.
- Improved troubleshooting capabilities. Introduction of new database table and additional callbacks allow for easier identification of correlation conflicts.