DX NetOps

  • 1.  Transition from CA eHealth to CA PM?

    Posted Jan 30, 2017 09:44 AM

    Currently we can read a lot about a change from eHealth to PM.

    I want start a discussion about this from the customer’s perspective.

    Not all customers use eHealth in the same way. Some of them can certainly switch already today to PM. Some others miss some necessary functions.

    I am one of them.

    When using eHealth, our focus is on generating and storing reports and also on the threshold monitoring with LiveHealth.

    The focus of PM seems clearly more on life reporting.

    Another difference is the adminstration. OneClick for eHealth is a tool for good and effective administration. Not perfect, but really good. (On the other side: There are other GUIs especially for report generating and LiveHealth.)

    And PM (or PC)? There is one GUI (not 3 or more). But, the impression is: You can do something here and something there and only a few things effective. And if you ask “How can I do this or that?” the answer is very often “You can do it with REST API”.

    Many users and administrators are no programmers. For most of them “REST API” is a foreign word.

    We can read (e.g.) “Top 5 Reasons To Transition from CA eHealth to CA Performance Management” (linked: Top 5 Reasons To Transition from CA eHealth to CA Performance Management)

    I’ve commented a former version with this:

    Here are my  Top 5 ideas which should be delivered before I can do the Transition from eHealth to CA PM:

    Automatic report generation without E-mail by CAPC
    https://communities.ca.com/ideas/103007837

    Save scheduled pdf/csv reports on CAPC server and choose a target directory
    https://communities.ca.com/ideas/235724036

    Micro Bursting
    https://communities.ca.com/ideas/235733873

    Scriptbased Alarmforwarding
    https://communities.ca.com/ideas/103005562

    Need both stacked and not stacked vertical bar Graphs in CAPM
    https://communities.ca.com/ideas/235733952

    Redesign "Manage Email Schedules" in CAPM
    https://communities.ca.com/ideas/235733922

    (I know, these are 6 and not  5, but the first 2 are similar.)

     

    Other opinions or suggestions?



  • 2.  Re: Transition from CA eHealth to CA PM?

    Posted Feb 02, 2017 03:10 PM

    Hey Frank, some of the ideas/enhancements mentioned are very well known from eHealth and are still being used by eHealth Users. 

     

    Right, we are still in a phase of migration from eH to PM. Some earlier as "blockers" identified missing functions are now available, for some others as a few mentioned above we need workarounds or cannot provide the same service/report as we did in eHealth (eg for external customers). This is of course annoying for the users - here some examples of enhancements we have posted to this community:

     

    Reports:
    Context Pages: Hide Factory & Custom Tabs based on the role
    Metric Filtering in Dashboards
    Dashboards & ODR: Show ifSpeed
    Multi-page Dashboard Views: only first page exported to pdf
    IM Table Reports: "Show All" Option needed / Max Rows
    On Demand Templates: External Customers should not see Admin-Templates
    Dashboards & ODR: Layout of PDF Exports

     

    Lifecycle: Change Detection is reverting Polling Status
    Lifecycle: Ability to delete Interfaces & Components in DA in UI
    Lifecycle: active - retire - stop polling - start polling for single interfaces/components in UI needed

     

    Schedule: Monthly Schedule cannot be used (Sends the report on the first Sunday of each month)

     

     

    On the other hand we found some valid solutions eg to send Events by Trap to some Alarm Management Tools instead of using script-based alarmforwarding - currently we are fine with that solution. 

    Some of the view-based issues might be easier to solve in BI tools like JasperSoft which for PM 3.1 a strategic topic I heard - we hope that we can solve a lot of them there. 

     

    In regards to REST API; also in eHealth we were forced to automize and customize many things by using eg the DCI interface; now we can do these things via REST. As our customer is a large MSP, there is a high # of users, reports, polled items, networks monitored, Event Rules etc which requires a higher level of automization. 



  • 3.  Re: Transition from CA eHealth to CA PM?

    Posted Feb 24, 2017 02:54 AM

    Here are links to some of the ideas  Matthias has mentioned above: 

    (Sorry, I didn't find all.)

    Context Pages: Hide Factory & Custom Tabs based on the role

    https://communities.ca.com/ideas/111879106

    Metric Filtering in Dashboards

    https://communities.ca.com/ideas/235719280

    https://communities.ca.com/ideas/235716229

    https://communities.ca.com/ideas/106094410

    Ability to delete Interfaces & Components in DA in UI

    https://communities.ca.com/ideas/235720037

    Layout of PDF Exports

    https://communities.ca.com/ideas/112064526 ("delivered")

    Thank you, Matthias!

    I'll try to collect links to some other good ideas and post it here.

    Regards, Frank



  • 4.  Re: Transition from CA eHealth to CA PM?

    Posted Feb 28, 2017 02:04 AM

    @CA:

    Look at PC Webservices to Change Interfaces Aliasname and Speed In and Speed Out ?

    With OneClick for ehealth, this would need only 2 minutes (after the interfaces are selected). 

    Here are the screenshots for all, who haven't seen this tool before:

    This is efficiency and this is what eHealth users may miss in PM/PC.

     

    Regards, Frank



  • 5.  Re: Transition from CA eHealth to CA PM?

    Posted May 09, 2017 05:58 AM

    If anyone is attending DevEx 2017 in the U.K. We have two hands on lab sessions that include a really innovative way to set attributes on devices in CAPM with an OpenAPI app than can be added to a context page - come check it out and then talk with our SWAT and Product Manager about how we could do this for other requirements. 

     

    CA PM with OpenAPI and our GitHub share repository provides a really cool new way to do things better. 

     

    Dan H 



  • 6.  Re: Transition from CA eHealth to CA PM?

    Posted May 03, 2017 05:53 AM

    Now we've got  the EoL announcement for eHealth.

    Let's see, when we will get any response from CA for the ideas, mentioned above.



  • 7.  Re: Transition from CA eHealth to CA PM?

    Posted May 09, 2017 05:38 AM

    Hi Frank -

     

    First of all i have to give a shout-out to your avitar (picture) - i'm not sure if you remember a very early version of Spectrum the VNM icon would move. Unfortunately, some of our customers were really bothered by this and we had to make the image static and then OneClick introduced new branding and we lost our favorite icon.

     

    I want to thank you for sharing your feedback and I am sure there will be a good discussion on this thread which we welcome very much!

     

    Each of the items you have listed above have been reviewed by the R&D and Product Management team as we build our release plans for this year. I can't comment specifically on roadmap but many of these items are recognized as valuable and consistent with our goals. For example,  providing customers more control to build and schedule reports that are mailed or saved to a repository. With CA Performance Management 3.1 we introduced new support for CA Business Intelligence (using Jasper Reports). We piloted this capability with a popular eHealth Top N Report. Our goal is to expand the out of box reports, to enable cusotmers to build their own reports, and to provide a soltuion where you can deploy a single instance of CABI for multiple CA products. We are goign to demonstrate our progress at the CA DevExchagne in the UK this week.

     

    Our team will monitor this thread carefully and will provide updates as we identify OpenAPI Apps that may help with some of these tasks or new features in the product.


    We are also open to hosting open forums to discuss these items with cusotmers - some of the best ideas come from collaboration.

     

    I also encourage all our cusotmers to watch for End of Sprint reviews where our developers and product managers will demonstrate progress on new features as well as some of the old that we are re-inventing (like scorecards to support more simple health reporting).

     

    Regards


    Dan Holmes