The CIBER / CA partnership &Why CIBER is moving to Nimsoft MonitorTony Testa

Presenter

Tony TestaPrincipal Architect & Global EMS Practice Lead

• 12 years hands on with multiple CA product suites

• 2006-Present – Leading a team of engineers in the selection, architecture, implementation, and ongoing support for several CA products.

• 2006 to 2012 – Board Member – CA Global Spectrum/eHealth User Community

• 2000-2006 – CA Services – Architect & Senior Consultant

CIBER Overview

A $1.1 Billion Global IT services company that builds, integrates and supports applications and infrastructures for business and government in over 90 offices and 19 countries

• More than 8,500 employees

• NYSE: CBR - Headquartered in

Denver

• 94 Offices in 19 countries

• Local Accountability with Global

Delivery

• Growth & Profitability for 36

years

• Focus on Quality

• Best-in-Class Client Satisfaction

Global Delivery Presence

Operations Centers• Tampa, FL• Banaglore, India• Edison, NJ• London, UK• Ponzan, Poland

NOC & SOC• Denver, CO• Edison, NJ• Phoenix, AZ• Highbridge, UK• Bangalore, India

Data Centers• US

• Staten Island, NY• Edison, NJ• Phoenix, AZ

• EMEA• Highbridge, UK• Bilboa, Spain• Oslo, Norway• Stockholm, Sweden

• Savvis Partnership• Access to 50

datacenters,– 1.9M sq. feet

• OC-192 backbone

The CIBER / CA Partnership

CIBER has been a CA partner and CA authorized MSP since 2004.

As an early player in the MSP space, we were able to work with CA to establish a new pricing model that benefits both CIBER and CA.

We were the 1st CA partner to be priced under this new model, which has now evolved into CA’s standard approach to MSP pricing.

2005

• CA partner of the year

• Enterprise Mgmt partner of the year

Why Did We Choose CA?

CIBER / CA offers customers the greatest breadth and depth of IT management solutions and services, based on best practices and proven processes

CA is the global leader in Enterprise IT Management and is the only major player that isn’t tied to specific hardware or software platforms or operating systems

Comprehensive

• Manage and secure all components of the IT environment, including applications, databases, networks, systems, client devices, web infrastructure, IT services, IT users and more

• Manage IT environment across a full array of platforms, operating systems and emerging technologies

Open and Integrated

• Allows the products to integrate with each other at the data, process, and user experience levels

• Standards-based product development approach and pre-built interfaces, CA products integrate with other management products and applications

Cross Platform

• Our management solutions are designed for “portability” — the ability to run on and manage multiple platforms, multiple databases and multiple application servers

• Includes everything from mainframe to distributed environments and Windows platforms

Why Did We Choose CA?

Modular

• Our solutions are offered as product modules or as integrated suites

• Adhere to the CA Integration Platform standards for common services, modular approach to solve your most pressing IT problems first, delivering immediate value, while creating comprehensive and integrated solutions over time

Process Enabled

• We offer “packaged,” repeatable processes for IT management improvement, based on industry experience and best practices

• Reduces risk, delivers the fastest time to value, and helps you determine how to best allocate and optimize resources to solve business problems and capitalize on new opportunities

Why Did We Choose CA?

Your Monitoring Toolbox

Do I have the right tools in my toolbox?

Are you equipped to monitor the entire enterprise?

• Servers

• Cloud / Virtualization Platforms

• Databases

• Middleware

• Applications

• Network

• Storage

• Environmental / Power

• End User Experience

In the Enterprise/MSP space, you need a set of solutions, or ideally a single solution that can do it all.

Our Tool Footprint – Circa 2003/2004 – The “Before”

Remedy

• Incident

• Request

• Change

• Parts Ordering

HP Openview Network Node Mgr

Solarwinds

Snips

eGurka

Multiple data mgmt tools (Arcserve / Veritas / HP / IBM)

CIBER’s Current Tool Ensemble

Nimsoft Monitor

CA eHealth

CA DBCC

CA Virtual Performance Mgmt

CA Spectrum

MS SCOM

CA NSM Event Management

Oracle Enterprise Mgr

SAP Solution Manager

CA NetQoS ReporterAnalyzer

CA Service Desk / CMDB

CA Support Bridge

Object Planet Opinio

Right Answers

Xtraction

CA IT Client Manager

CA IT Asset Manager

CA ArcServe & XOsoft

CA IT Process Automation

CA Workload Automation AE

Why I Recommended Nimsoft Monitoring

Flexible & scalable architecture

Communications resiliency and low impact on monitored servers

Rapid time to ROI & Lowered TCO to provide monitoring services

Multi-tenant support out of the box

Customizable reports, dashboards & SLA reporting

Enables accountability & usage auditing

Ease of probe distribution and updates

Growing list of probes & features

Extensive out of box integration and API features

Ease of troubleshooting

Flexible & Scalable ArchitectureMany other EMS products require you to turn your firewalls into Swiss cheese in order to facilitate communications.

• Nimsoft Monitor requires only one port for hub to hub communications, which is configurable.

Customer XCustomer X

Nimsoft Primary HubWin 2008 A/P MSCS Cluster

ClusterNode 1

ClusterNode 2

Win 2008 / SQL 2008 EntMSCS A/P DB Cluster

ClusterNode 1

ClusterNode 2

Nimsoft Unified Management Portal

UMPServer 1

UMP Server 2

Nimsoft Aggregation

Hub 1

Nimsoft Aggregation

Hub 2

CustomerHub 1

CustomerHub 2

“PMDB”Historical

PerformanceData

HistoricalAlarms

& EventsDB

Shared f5'sfor Load Balancing

CIBER Mgmt Hub 1

CIBER Mgmt Hub 2

High Level Product Architecture

Communications Resiliency

If there is a network outage, or the upstream hub is unreachable, the local robot(s) will spool all information locally until the outage/server is back online. Once restored, all data will be pushed to the upstream hub.

• The same applies for hub to hub communications. If connectivity is lost, the data spools for forwarding once communications are reestablished.

CustomerRemote

Hub

DatacenterTunneling

Hub

AggregationHub

Robot &Probes

On managedserver

PrimaryHub

Robot & Probe Impact on Monitored Servers

A robot uses roughly 5 MB of disk space, CPU usage of less than 1%, and memory utilization of roughly 5 MB.

• Probe impact on each system is also extremely lightweight, and will vary based upon number of objects monitored and poll frequency.

Multi-tenant Support Out of the Box

No need for additional scripting to perform “customer” level alerting.

By leveraging the customer hub and/or hostname identifiers in the notifications, we are able to direct alerts to the appropriate resolver groups on a per customer basis.

Using this same feature allows us to segregate use access to reports and dashboards.

Customizable Reports and Dashboards

Nimsoft allows for creation of completely branded and customized dashboards and reports as needed to meet customer requirements.

Customer Specific SLA Alerting and Reporting

The SLA engine in Nimsoft Monitor will allow us leverage the QOS data points we gather across the entire set of probes to create the necessary calculations, and provide compliance reporting to our Service Delivery management teams and to our customers.

Enables Accountability & Usage Auditing

Nimsoft Monitor has extensive roles based user control, as well as auditing functionality that allows us to identify who made changes to the monitoring environment.

In addition, the flexibilty in the API’s and ease of use of LUA allows us to export probe configuration for reporting purposes.

• You wouldn’t think this was a big thing, but a lot of “major” EMS products in the industry don’t have a mechanism to allow exporting of their “agent” configs.

Ease of Probe Distribution and Updates

The built in “Archive” feature allows administrators to download the latest BETA or GA modules from the Nimsoft distribution server via the Internet.

By leveraging the “Archive” feature, administrators are then able to easily drag and drop probes to one or many nodes.

Once a “probe” is configured in a fashion you may want to use on other nodes, that probe can be dragged back to the “Archive” and then pushed to other nodes as desired.

Growing List of Probes & Features

With an already extensive list of probes and features, Nimsoft has added several new items in the past 12 months, including:

• Updated Root Cause Analysis engine

• Topology Mapping engine

• iPad/iPhone app for mobile visibility

• Updated VMware probe

• Updated Oracle, DB2, and MySQL probes

• Enhanced CA Service Desk gateway

• New Service Now gateway

• Enhanced SAN support

• NetApp support

• EMC clarion & celerra support

Component Major Update Frequency

Core Infrastructure

Twice per year

Reporting Engines

Quarterly

Probes Constantly developing/enhancing

Integration Points

CA Service Desk

Nimsoft Service Desk

Remedy Service Desk

Service Now

HP Service Desk

Universal CMDB gateway

CA Unicenter NSM

HP Openview NNM

Inbound SNMP traps

Inbound Syslog messages

Inbound e-mail gateway

Outbound GSM/SMS

As an MSP we will sometimes needs to integrate to existing customer owned ticketing or monitoring systems.

This is made easy by leveraging the out of box gateways, which include:

Extensive API Features

How many other monitoring suites provide both a web services integration option plus 5 different SDK’s allowing deep integration and custom monitoring agent creation??

• C

• MS .Net

• Java

• Perl

• Visual Basic

Ease of Troubleshooting

Every probe has a logging level “slider” that allows you to set the logging level. All you have to do then is right click the probe and restart it to get logging started.

Easy to interpret log files, with a “View Log” right click capability for every component.

Rapid Time to ROI & Lower Monitoring TCO

Easy installation of the key Nimsoft components

• We were able to get our development environment running in under an hour.

• Primary Hub

– 2 downstream hubs

• DB server

• Dashboard/reporting server

Simple installation of “robots” on target servers

• The standard Nimsoft install provides a web page that you can pull the “robot” installers from.

• For production we are leveraging the software delivery engine within the CA ITCM (ITCA) suite.

Robot Install Sources Web Page

Rapid Time to ROI & Lower Monitoring TCO

Labor Savings

• Implementation of Nimsoft Monitor is allowing us to move more and more responsibilities from engineering over to our L2 administrators.

• The Integration gateways are helping us reduce labor and licensing costs by allowing for automated incident creation.

• The ease of configuration and ease of configuring “debug” logging is saving us labor as compared to other EMS products.

CIBER’s Tool Ensemble – 18-24 Months Out

Nimsoft Monitor

Spectrum

Oracle Enterprise Mgr

SAP Solution Manager

CA NetQoS ReporterAnalyzer

CA Service Desk & Service Catalog

Team Viewer

Object Planet Opinio

Right Answers

Xtraction

CA IT Client Manager

CA IT Asset Manager

CA ArcServe & XOsoft

CA IT Process Automation

CA Workload Automation AE

Oblicore

As I showed at the beginning of the presentation we are currently using a laundry list of monitoring technologies to deliver comprehensive services to our customer base.

By implementing Nimsoft Monitor we will be able to significantly reduce the number of monitoring solutions we use, and deliver a single pane of glass for our administrators, engineers, and customers world wide.

In Conclusion

The Nimsoft Monitor suite allows us to prescriptively

deliver comprehensive monitoring, historical

performance reporting, and aggregated OS-App-DB-

Network dashboarding in a tiered, cost effective,

consistent manner.