CA Shows Off Expanded IT Infrastructure Management Toolset

IT management and DevOps are two pillars of CA Technologies' product portfolio, as company executives made clear at this week's CA World conference in Las Vegas. And that makes the new 8.0 release of CA Unified Infrastructure Management a key addition to the vendor's product lineup.

The 8.0 edition offers expanded analytics, alerting and cloud monitoring capabilities. The software was demonstrated on the show floor this week and is available now.

CA UIM is the continuation of the Nimsoft Monitor product line that CA acquired in 2010. The product is primarily sold today for on-premise deployments, including through CA's channel partners who bundle it with other products and services, said Dan Birck, enterprise management product marketing director, in an interview.

[Related: CA Promises New Channel Commitment, Outlines Plans For Partner Program Overhaul]

CA also offers UIM as a service through managed service providers and Birck said there are now more than 500 MSP partners using UIM.

CA UIM "continues to be the heart of CA's infrastructure management strategy," Birck said. The product has done well with SMB customers, such as businesses running heterogeneous IT environments with 100 or more servers, but Birck said the 8.0 edition "is well-suited for larger IT environments" with capabilities to manage between 1,000 and 2,000 servers.

UIM 8.0 monitors more than 140 named technologies including servers, applications such as Microsoft packaged software, databases, middleware such as IBM WebSphere and Oracle WebLogic, and Infrastructure-as-a-Service systems like Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services (AWS). Customers can also write APIs for monitoring custom systems and technologies not supported out-of-the-box.

A highlight of the 8.0 release is the addition of new advanced analytics that support its system-monitoring capabilities. The new "time to threshold" prediction function issues warnings about performance problems before they impact users. And the new "time over threshold" analytics help IT managers sort out serious and persistent performance problems from false alarms.

New "historical alarms" views and reporting capabilities also provide information about IT infrastructure availability and performance.

On the cloud management side, UIM 8.0 offers enhanced monitoring and management of AWS components including Amazon Relational Database Services, Amazon Elastic Block Store, Amazon ElastiCache and Amazon Simple Queue Service. UIM 8.0 also supports custom metrics for monitoring AWS-based applications and infrastructure.

CA also released a new edition of CA Unified Infrastructure Management Snap, a free version of CA UIM that supports up to 30 devices.

PUBLISHED NOV. 13, 2014