WHITE PAPER | MARCH 2015
20 Reasons to Choose
CA Unified Infrastructure
Management
A Comparative Overview of Monitoring Tools
for Enterprise IT Organizations
2 | WHITE PAPER: 20 REASONS TO CHOOSE CA UNIFIED INFRASTRUCTURE MANAGEMENT
ca.com
Table of Contents
Introduction3
Why IT Organizations Choose CA UIM: 20 Reasons
5
1. Comprehensive, unified IT coverage and visibility
2. Service desk integration that boosts service levels
3. Monitoring innovation track record
4. Service level management emphasis
5. Depth of monitoring
6. Scalability: Devices, events and consoles
7. Multi-tenant service delivery portal
8. High-availability architecture: Secure, distributed and multi-tiered
9. Cloud support
10. Virtualization support
11. Voice-over-IP support
12. Data center infrastructure monitoring
13. Application response monitoring
14. SLA monitoring and reporting
15. Event analysis, correlation and automation
16. Dashboards: Dynamic and customizable
17. Ease of deployment and configuration
18. Adaptability, flexibility and customization
19. Extensibility: Business data, custom applications and specialized devices
20. ITIL alignment
Conclusion11
About CA UIM
11
3 | WHITE PAPER: 20 REASONS TO CHOOSE CA UNIFIED INFRASTRUCTURE MANAGEMENT
ca.com
Executive Summary
In the application economy, software plays an increasingly central role in the performance of just about
any organization in any industry. Given their strategic role, applications—and the IT environments they rely
on—have to perform optimally. To ensure applications deliver the service levels required, IT teams need to
have effective monitoring capabilities. This paper describes how CA Unified Infrastructure Management
(CA UIM, formerly CA Nimsoft Monitor) compares with the other monitoring platforms employed today. The
paper details the 20 reasons that CA UIM has become the monitoring solution of choice for IT organizations
that are looking to boost service levels and operational efficiency, so they can better support their business’
ability to compete in the application economy.
“It is therefore not an
exaggeration to say
that as a business’
applications perform,
so performs the
business.”
Introduction
Today’s businesses are competing in an application economy. More than ever, the quality of the customer
experience, the efficiency of operations and the trajectory of earnings are being shaped by the quality of an
organization’s applications. It is therefore not an exaggeration to say that as a business’ applications
perform, so performs the business.
In the application economy, monitoring capabilities grow increasingly strategic. These capabilities are
essential in enabling IT organizations to track, manage and optimize the end-user experience, applications
and the underpinning infrastructure.
However, in many organizations today, IT monitoring approaches are siloed and inefficient. IT teams use
disparate point products or utilities to monitor specific technologies, each with separate interfaces,
infrastructures and administrators. The ongoing management of each tool is too time-consuming, risky,
expensive and complex. While these challenges have been significant in the past, they grow increasingly
costly in the application economy.
Around the world, hundreds of enterprises and service providers have chosen CA UIM because it’s uniquely
equipped to help improve service quality and reduce the costs of IT service delivery. The solution features a
single, unified architecture that enables you to proactively monitor the quality of service delivered by your
virtual, physical and cloud IT infrastructure. The product monitors applications, servers, networks,
databases and end-user experience. With CA UIM, IT organizations can realize:
•Increased operational efficiency. CA UIM delivers the automation, architectural efficiency, performance
and streamlined administration that foster operational scalability—and that have been proven in the
largest organizations. This platform can help you support more events, monitored devices and business
users—with your existing staff and resources.
•Increased service breadth. With CA UIM, you can efficiently deliver additional new services that offer
more value to the business and that help improve funding and support for your organization.
4 | WHITE PAPER: 20 REASONS TO CHOOSE CA UNIFIED INFRASTRUCTURE MANAGEMENT
ca.com
•Increased agility. If your business users need to adopt a new technology, you should be able to deliver
monitoring support for that technology—without having to invest in another monitoring platform. CA UIM
is built to efficiently adapt to new technologies and has proven to be at the forefront of the industry in
terms of supporting newer virtualization technologies, storage environments, converged infrastructures
and cloud services. With this track record, CA UIM is well positioned to help you address the demands of
tomorrow.
The following sections provide more details on the specific features, capabilities and characteristics that
have made CA UIM the platform of choice for today’s top enterprise IT organizations and service providers.
Feature support
key
Feature Support Matrix
Feature
Full
Comprehensive, unified IT coverage and visibility
Strong
Service desk integration that boosts service levels
Medium
Monitoring innovation track record
Weak
Service level management emphasis
Depth of monitoring
Scalability: Devices, events and consoles
Multi-tenant service delivery portal
High-availability architecture: Secure, distributed and
multi-tiered
Cloud support
Virtualization support
Voice-over-IP support
Data center infrastructure monitoring
Application response monitoring
SLA monitoring and reporting
Event analysis, correlation and automation
Dashboards: Dynamic and customizable
Ease of deployment and configuration
Adaptability, flexibility and customization
Extensibility: Business data, custom applications and
specialized devices
ITIL alignment
CA UIM
Other Tools
5 | WHITE PAPER: 20 REASONS TO CHOOSE CA UNIFIED INFRASTRUCTURE MANAGEMENT
ca.com
Why IT Organizations Choose CA UIM: 20 Reasons
1. Comprehensive, unified IT coverage and visibility
CA UIM is an efficient, scalable platform that you can use to monitor and manage the following systems
and services:
•Servers, such as Windows, Linux, UNIX, Cisco UCS, Novell Open Enterprise Server and IBM Power Systems
•Storage, including EMC, Hitachi, IBM System Storage and NetApp
•Networks, including routers, switches and firewalls
•Virtualization platforms, such as VMware and vCloud Monitor, Microsoft Hyper-V, Solaris Zones, IBM
PowerVM, Citrix XenServer and XenDesktop and Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization
•Databases, such as Oracle, Sybase, Microsoft SQL Server, IBM Informix and IBM DB2
“By contrast, CA UIM
provides a single,
unified architecture
that enables
administrators to
proactively monitor
•Applications like Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft IIS, Active Directory, Citrix, WebSphere, JBoss, homegrown applications and much more
•Cloud environments, such as Amazon Web Services, Rackspace, Google Apps, Salesforce.com, Citrix
CloudPlatform, Vblock and FlexPod
•VoIP environments from Cisco
the entire IT
•Virtual desktop infrastructures, including Citrix XenDesktop and XenApp
ecosystem, including
•Data center power, cooling and energy
traditional data
centers, virtualized
environments and
cloud services.”
•End-to-end application response time, including of websites, business services and cloud platforms
Most other monitoring tools fall short of the broad range of IT coverage that CA UIM provides. As a result,
organizations are forced to contend with the complexity of managing multiple point tools. Alternatively, if
solutions do offer broader coverage, it is usually only through the integration of multiple distinct modules,
which can pose their own specific integration and operation challenges. By contrast, CA UIM provides a
single, unified architecture that enables administrators to proactively monitor the entire IT ecosystem,
including traditional data centers, virtualized environments and cloud services. With these capabilities,
CA UIM enables you to expand your monitoring coverage, with unparalleled efficiency.
2. Service desk integration that boosts service levels
CA UIM offers gateways that provide pre-packaged integration with a wide range of service desk platforms,
including the following:
•CA Cloud Service Management
•CA Service Desk Manager
•ServiceNow
•HP Service Manager
•ConnectWise
6 | WHITE PAPER: 20 REASONS TO CHOOSE CA UNIFIED INFRASTRUCTURE MANAGEMENT
ca.com
In addition, CA UIM offers email integration with FrontRange HEAT and it offers a gateway that enables
integration with any service desk that has a RESTful interface. Through this integration, CA UIM alarms can
automatically generate service desk tickets. For example, if an issue arises in the storage environment, a
CA UIM alert can be generated that automatically opens a ticket in the service desk platform, with all
escalation and routing rules instantly applied and all relevant details attached. This integration streamlines
operations and fuels improved service levels.
3. Monitoring innovation track record
CA UIM is a solution with a proven track record of both delivering and supporting innovation. The platform
has been built with the architectural agility that enabled it to be among the first platforms to deliver
monitoring coverage of complex, dynamic virtualization environments and emerging cloud services. Today,
CA UIM offers broad infrastructure coverage, all through a unified platform and administrative interface.
“The platform has
been built with
the architectural
agility that enabled
it to be among the
first platforms to
deliver monitoring
coverage of complex,
dynamic virtualization
environments and
emerging cloud
services.”
Other tool vendors’ solutions typically lack the richness, the range of monitoring functionality and the
enterprise-class scalability found in CA UIM. Side-by-side product comparisons are encouraged to validate
this point.
4. Service level management emphasis
CA UIM is designed for tracking performance against service level agreements (SLAs), providing the ability
to collect and aggregate data from all the infrastructure components that support business applications.
The solution can monitor all relevant technologies and services against SLA metrics, with real-time
compliance monitoring and forecasting.
Other monitoring tool vendors fall short of providing the advanced SLA monitoring and reporting
capabilities many customers require.
5. Depth of monitoring
Some other monitoring tool vendors provide a lengthy listing of IT infrastructure devices and applications
that their tools can monitor. However, these products often only support very few health checks out of the
box. As a result, these products typically lack the depth of monitoring that administrators need in order to
optimize the performance of IT systems, networks and business applications.
Alternatively, other solutions that do provide more detailed metrics tend to do so while sacrificing ease of
use and deployment. With CA UIM, customers gain extensive metrics while still enjoying streamlined
deployment and administration. For each technology, application, platform and device that CA UIM
supports, a comprehensive array of metrics are collected and analyzed. This added depth allows IT
organizations to deliver much more proactive and preemptive monitoring services and more consistently
meet service level commitments.
6. Scalability: Devices, events and consoles
Around the world, some of the largest financial services institutions, healthcare organizations and service
providers rely on CA UIM to deliver the high scalability required. In addition, CA UIM has been proven at the
world’s largest cloud and hosting providers, where it has established its capacity to scale to monitor up to
100,000 servers from a single server domain.
7 | WHITE PAPER: 20 REASONS TO CHOOSE CA UNIFIED INFRASTRUCTURE MANAGEMENT
ca.com
Most other monitoring tools are not well suited to the needs of these large organizations, which often have
expansive, and highly virtualized server environments. Alternative tool vendors are far behind CA UIM in
their support for virtual server environments and in their ability to scale to accommodate large
customer infrastructures.
With CA UIM, IT organizations get the monitoring scalability they need to serve more clients or
environments with existing staff, and monitor more devices and simultaneous events. CA UIM features an
efficient, high-performance, event-processing engine that can scale to support event volumes generated by
tens of thousands of servers. Plus, it offers a secure, reliable and efficient client access model that can
support hundreds of concurrent connections.
Solutions from most other monitoring tool vendors lose efficiencies in their scalability and tend to become
problematic to manage when administrators try to start monitoring new devices or make
configuration changes.
“With CA UIM, IT
organizations get the
monitoring scalability
they need to serve
more clients or
environments with
existing staff, and
monitor more devices
and simultaneous
events.”
7. Multi-tenant service delivery portal
CA UIM features a unified monitoring portal that enables organizations to provide multiple constituents
with convenient access to the dashboards and reports specific to their groups and roles. For each
department or user group, the portal can contain dynamic and custom dashboards, performance reports
and SLA compliance reports. The solution also offers a robust operator’s alarm display that can be made
available to portal visitors in a read-only fashion.
Other tool vendors’ solutions offer client reporting that is limited to prepackaged health status content—
with no custom dashboards, no custom performance reports and no SLA reports available.
8. High-availability architecture: Secure, distributed and multi-tiered
Like most alternative solutions, CA UIM offers an architecture that enables secure communications between
central operations centers and remote locations, without the use of VPNs. However, with its TCP/IP based
publish-subscribe message bus, CA UIM goes steps beyond these alternatives to deliver improved data
transport efficiency and reliability. Further, CA UIM provides a range of high availability configuration
options at each tier of an n-tiered deployment.
The solution’s architecture is designed to prevent data loss as information is gathered and transported
between the collection point and the central monitoring facility. Additionally, CA UIM’s architecture allows
for configuring as many deployment tiers as necessary. For example, the solution can support IT
organizations that need to manage both a central data center and multiple branch offices. CA UIM can
support these tiers without compromising the reliability of IT operations-to-client communications.
Other tool vendors put customers in a precarious situation as their solutions are primarily built upon
unreliable, SNMP-based data collection and transport mechanisms that offer limited highavailability options.
9. Cloud support
For your organization’s business leadership, leveraging the cloud has emerged as a technological and
business imperative, a way to drive down costs, grow more agile and compete more effectively. However,
once implemented, it is critical that cloud services deliver the performance and availability required—or
staff is notified immediately if not. CA UIM offers comprehensive coverage of a range of cloud
8 | WHITE PAPER: 20 REASONS TO CHOOSE CA UNIFIED INFRASTRUCTURE MANAGEMENT
ca.com
environments, such as Amazon Web Services, Rackspace, Google Apps, Salesforce.com, Citrix CloudPlatform,
Vblock and FlexPod. As a result, CA UIM enables IT organizations to make sure the required service levels
are being delivered.
Alternative monitoring tools fundamentally lack visibility into cloud services.
10. Virtualization support
With virtualization growing increasingly ubiquitous, it is critical for IT organizations to be outfitted with a
tool that provides comprehensive monitoring in this area. CA UIM provides robust monitoring for a number
of virtualization platforms, including VMware and vCloud Monitor, Microsoft Hyper-V, Solaris Zones,
IBM PowerVM, Citrix XenServer and XenDesktop and Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization.
Other monitoring tool vendors’ solutions for virtual server environments are limited in their coverage
and capabilities.
11. Voice-over-IP support
CA UIM can track and proactively manage every component within the Voice-over-Internet-Protocol (VoIP)
infrastructure, including the underlying VoIP networks and components, as well as all the services that run
on those networks. CA UIM delivers the insights needed to achieve continuous SLA compliance and improve
end-user service levels. Further, these capabilities are complemented by the solution’s robust network
monitoring. CA UIM features support for Cisco IPSLA, and can track jitter, packet loss and response time
across key network segments that support VoIP traffic. It is easy to have VoIP infrastructure status
information displayed in CA UIM dashboards, performance reports and SLA reports.
12. Data center infrastructure monitoring
CA UIM is fully integrated with CA Data Center Infrastructure Management (CA DCIM). Through this
integration, IT administrators and data center operators can get real-time monitoring of power distribution
and use. Within a single console, you can:
•Track available capacity, both for IT and data center infrastructure.
•View costs and performance-level metrics.
•Monitor application performance indicators, operational efficiency of power and cooling equipment,
utilization of physical and virtual servers and more.
These solutions enable you to measure behavior, spot trends, get alerts and take action. They can also help
you visualize and manage space and capacity, so that you can better plan and optimize your data
center operations.
Alternative monitoring tools fundamentally lack visibility into data center infrastructure and facilities.
13. Application response monitoring
CA UIM provides a full array of solutions for monitoring the transaction response times users receive from
business applications and cloud services. By providing the visibility required to objectively and consistently
track the service levels users are actually receiving, CA UIM can help IT organizations deliver and
demonstrate greater value to the business.
9 | WHITE PAPER: 20 REASONS TO CHOOSE CA UNIFIED INFRASTRUCTURE MANAGEMENT
ca.com
14. SLA monitoring and reporting
CA UIM comes equipped with a sophisticated SLA monitoring and reporting engine that can be used to
proactively monitor clients’ managed environments against agreed upon service level objectives. The
solution’s SLA monitoring predicts violations in SLA commitments and alerts appropriate IT staff well in
advance of a breach so that violations can be preempted. CA UIM provides web-based SLA reporting that
offers historical perspectives and compliance trend analysis, so administrators and business users can
easily track service delivery commitments and value.
Most other tool vendors can’t offer the sophisticated SLA monitoring that CA UIM provides.
15. Event analysis, correlation and automation
“The solution’s SLA
monitoring predicts
violations in SLA
commitments and
alerts appropriate IT
CA UIM offers a core alarm and event-processing engine that is enterprise class and highly scalable,
meaning it can do real-time processing of hundreds of thousands of events that are generated from huge
client deployments. The solution’s alarm server is the central event filtering, correlation, automation,
notification and escalation engine. A graphical, point-and-click interface facilitates the definition of custom
automation routines.
Products from other monitoring tool vendors have event management functionality that lacks
sophistication and only offers limited automation of event handling.
staff well in advance
16. Dashboards: Dynamic and customizable
of a breach so that
CA UIM offers custom dashboard functionality that is another key attraction for customers. With this
solution, IT organizations can provide unique dashboard views that offer more appeal and demonstrate
greater value for internal customers.
violations can be
preempted.”
Other tools’ reports offer constrained, aesthetically unappealing views and minimal types of health status
indicators, which limits the reporting value IT organizations can offer to their teams.
17. Ease of deployment and configuration
CA UIM is a solution that is easy to implement and administer. Deploying the solution, both centrally and
across a widely distributed IT infrastructure, is a drag-and-drop and point-and-click exercise. In addition, no
matter which platforms it is used to monitor, CA UIM presents a consistent, intuitive interface—rather than
complex, platform-specific scripts—which means monitoring administrators don’t need to be experts on
each of the platforms being monitored.
Other vendor’s solutions tend to be much more complex to configure and deploy.
18. Adaptability, flexibility and customization
CA UIM is extremely flexible in its customization and product configuration. The solution can be effectively
aligned with an organization’s preferred delivery and support processes, which is a key attraction for many
decision makers. The solution can collect the data necessary to ensure high availability and peak
performance of the client’s unique infrastructure and business applications.
CA UIM dashboards are highly customizable, so IT management and administrators can see their
environment’s health status in the way that fits their requirements. In addition, IT teams can craft and
deliver custom dashboards for different business groups that can better demonstrate their organization’s
value. Further, CA UIM offers the comprehensive programmatic interfaces that enable advanced IT
organizations to tightly integrate key monitoring functions into automated, self-service systems.
10 | WHITE PAPER: 20 REASONS TO CHOOSE CA UNIFIED INFRASTRUCTURE MANAGEMENT
ca.com
19. Extensibility: Business data, custom applications and specialized devices
With CA UIM, you can leverage a solution that offers all the advantages of being commercially supported.
At the same time, the solution provides you with all the openness and flexibility that you may need to
adapt it to your specific environments and requirements. The solution has been built on open APIs, which
are made available to all customers, at no additional charge. In addition, CA publishes the solution’s
database schema and it provides software development kits (SDKs). Your IT organization can leverage these
resources to incorporate monitoring of all the important technologies within your environment—and so
gain maximum business value from your investments. CA UIM offers support for:
•Custom probe development. CA UIM offers complete flexibility for doing custom development of
monitors and probes, so you can build custom solutions for your unique business infrastructures,
applications and systems.
•Business data. CA UIM provides a unique ability to extend its monitoring to capture data points outside
of typical IT infrastructure and application components. CA UIM can easily target any business database
and query business data, such as parts inventory metrics, number of sales transactions and more. This
business-centric data collection and monitoring allows IT organizations to offer higher-value, more
relevant reporting services to their clients.
•Specialized devices. CA UIM features a large array of monitoring probes, so that data, regardless of where
it resides, is accessible for collection, analysis and reporting. This includes a wide rage of non-traditional
and industry-specific devices, including medical equipment, manufacturing robotics, vending machines
and oil rigs. Effectively, if a device is SNMP enabled or offers some other means for making its system logs
available for interrogation, CA UIM can track and report on its performance.
•Custom code and scripts. If your organization has developed monitoring scripts, for example to monitor
specific internal services, or other internally developed code, there are a number of ways you can leverage
this logic and integrate it with CA UIM.
Other tools have limitations that prohibit customers from meeting many of the unique client requirements
that CA UIM can address.
20. ITIL® alignment
With its service level management architecture and capabilities, CA UIM supports organizations that are
adopting Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL®) to improve their service delivery and support
operations. Even IT organizations that have not adopted ITIL in the past will often embrace ITIL when their
monitoring platform makes the transition easier.
To deliver ITIL-based services, IT organizations require a sophisticated, scalable, SLA-based monitoring
solution like CA UIM. This solution offers coverage of the organization’s full end-to-end IT infrastructure and
monitors it in a service-centric fashion.
Many other monitoring tools lack the key characteristics required to function in an ITIL-centric capacity.
11 | WHITE PAPER: 20 REASONS TO CHOOSE CA UNIFIED INFRASTRUCTURE MANAGEMENT
Conclusion
When decision makers look closely at the monitoring solutions available, some fundamental differences
emerge. In the application economy, these differences can ultimately play a role in the long-term prospects
of a business. After a review of the products available, IT leaders routinely choose CA UIM. This solution
offers a set of capabilities and characteristics that are uniquely equipped to help IT organizations scale
their operations, boost their agility and improve service levels.
About CA UIM
CA UIM offers the capabilities that enterprise IT organizations and service providers need to dramatically
improve service quality and reduce the costs of IT service delivery. The solution enables you to proactively
monitor the quality of service delivered by your virtual, physical and cloud infrastructures. It monitors
applications, servers, networks, databases and end-user experience. IT professionals and business users can
gain end-to-end visibility into their IT services using our customizable portals, dashboards and reports.
For more information, visit ca.com/UIM.
Connect with CA Technologies at ca.com
CA Technologies (NASDAQ: CA) creates software that fuels transformation for companies and enables
them to seize the opportunities of the application economy. Software is at the heart of every business,
in every industry. From planning to development to management and security, CA is working with
companies worldwide to change the way we live, transact and communicate – across mobile, private
and public cloud, distributed and mainframe environments. Learn more at ca.com.
Copyright © 2015 CA. All rights reserved. This document is for your informational purposes only, and does not form any type of warranty.
ITIL® is a Registered Trade Mark of AXELOS Limited.
CS200-120721_0315