Case Study: BlueCross BlueShield Tennessee on how to Integrate Systems Management from CA Unified Infrastructure Management with CA Spectrum

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Case Study: Learn from BlueCross BlueShield Tennessee on how to Integrate Systems Management from CA Unified Infrastructure Management with CA Spectrum as Part of an Enterprise Command Center Strategy

Dave Moser, Jr.

OCX49S #CAWorld

BlueCross BlueShield Tennessee Architect

2 © 2014 CA. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Abstract

Healthcare organizations have unique requirements like all IT organizations, but

delivering business services is common across all industries. BlueCross BlueShield

of Tennessee (BCBST) has been building a true Enterprise Command Center using

three key CA solutions - CA Spectrum, CA APM and CA Service Operations Insight.

More recently, the BCBST team has continued to evolve its IT operations by

integrating systems monitoring from CA Nimsoft Monitor [now CA Unified

Infrastructure Management] with CA Spectrum. This session will include tips on

how to integrate these two solutions for optimal network management in your

own enterprise.

Dave Moser Jr. BlueCross BlueShield of Tennessee

Enterprise Monitoring Engineer II


Agenda

CA SPECTRUM 9.4 OUT OF THE BOX INTEGRATION TO NIMSOFT 7.6 OR CA UIM 8.0

EASY TO SETUP <10 MINS, IMMEDIATE VALUE

ENHANCE SYSTEMS MONITORING WITH RICH VARIABLE BASED ALARM TITLES

1

2

3


Value Proposition of the Integration

The integration provides holistic view of the server availability in the environment

Drives root cause and impact analysis across networks and systems, end-to-end

Use best of both worlds – Network Management and L2 capabilities from CA Spectrum and systems from CA Unified Infrastructure Management (UIM)

Allow superior correlation between the two tools driving better value for the end customers


Reduce System Admin Cycles and Overhead

Moving away from – Immediately SystemEdge

– Virtual Assurance Infrastructure Management (VAIM)

– Down the road eHealth


Enable CA UIM Integration


CA UIM Node is Populated

Expand the CA UIM Node

Organized by OS

Each host CI is a model in CA Spectrum


L2 Connections Are Rediscovered

CA Spectrum automatically rediscovers the L2 connections of new models

CA UIM discovered CI’s are displayed with unique icon


Immediate Benefits

Website/link availability: we saw this within 5 mins…even though we have Application Performance Manager (APM/Wily) you don’t really want to install this across all of your applications in your environment based on the amount of overhead…just isn’t realistic they way most monitoring team resources are built

What CA UIM showed us that we can monitor hundreds of websites/link in minutes. We immediately saw those alarms funneled directly to the single pane of glass CA Spectrum. This is a realistic approach for those apps that you are concerned about their availability but might not have the cycles or man hours to completely configure it.

The value of process and service monitors and log scraping


Capabilities Available with CA Spectrum 9.4 Discover CA UIM Managed Server Elements

– Synchronize the inventory periodically

Show CA UIM Managed elements in the CA Spectrum hierarchy and topology

Display key metrics for operating systems in CA Spectrum OneClick sub-views

Assert alarms from CA UIM onto the appropriate model in CA Spectrum OneClick hierarchy

Bring the CA UIM alarms/devices under the purview of Root Cause and Impact Analysis

Launch in context, into CA UIM Monitor UI, for advanced metrics, trends


Configure CA UIM Integration

Step 1 Enable/Disable integration

Step 2 Test the connection to CA UIM server

Step 3 Enable virtualization to disable VHM Manager


Configuration – Sync with CA UIM


QoS Metrics for Servers

OC views reflect

the Dynamic

metric data from

CA UIM

Select host and

view the CPU,

Memory and Disk

metrics


Alarms

Alarms are generated on CA UIM Servers based on traps received from CA UIM

Existing CA Spectrum alarms are suppressed

Alarms from CA UIM will participate in fault isolation

CA UIM alarms get suppressed if root cause of the fault is at the upstream router


Alarms


Launch into UMP with Context

For more details, launch in context into UMP

Each model will have a new menu items to launch into UMP for details


UMP view of the Model

UMP provides lot more details of the selected model from CA Spectrum

Drill down for model detail and also history & trends


How this Benefits BCBS of TN The Enterprise Command Center (ECC) is chartered to correlate alarms across

systems and to manage cross-functional troubleshooting, remediation, and

communications processes.

Utilizing CA Unified Infrastructure Management, CA Application Performance

Management, CA Network Flow Analysis, CA ADA, CA VAIM, and CA eHealth and

pushing all alarms into CA Spectrum allows the ECC to achieve these goals.

Using CA Spectrum at the top layer allowed the team to better correlate alarms

and identify the root cause of problems while providing trend analysis to help set

more meaningful and actionable alarm thresholds.


Summary A Few Words to Review

Results

CA UIM with it’s superior Systems Monitoring capabilities due to the

140+ monitoring Probes and easy Robot and Probe deployment and

customization. In combination with CA Spectrum's L2 topology mapping,

root cause analytics and out of box workflow to dive deeper into the

alarms will provide decreased MTTR and easier System Monitoring then

ever before.

Appendix


Probes Used

cdm (CPU, Disk, Memory)

processes (Process monitoring probe)

ntservices (Windows NT services watcher)

Ntevl (Windows NT event log watcher)

Logmon (Log monitoring probe)

dirscan (File and directory checking probe)

ibmvm (IBM Virtualization Probe)

Primary CA UIM Probes

url_response (Monitor URL response time)

ntp_response (Network Time Protocol Response)

ldap_response (LDAP response watcher)

Webservicesmon (Monitor webservice URLs)

ad_server (Active Directory Server Monitor)

ad_response (Active Directory Response Probe)


What probes do we use it?

mysql (MySQL Server monitor)

sqlserver (SQL Server Monitor)

netconnect (Monitor TCP Port)

xenapp (Citrix Xenapp Probe)

xendesktop (Citrix XenDesktop Probe)

pvs (Citrix Provisioning Services Probe)

websphere (WebSphere Monitoring Probe)

Primary CA UIM Probes

exchange_monitor (Monitor MS Exchange Server)

Various Storage probes

jdbc_response (Monitoring SQL queries response)

cisco_ucs (Monitor Cisco Unified Computing)

sybase (Sybase DB Monitor)

ntperf (Windows Performance Monitor Probe)

Future CA UIM Probes


For More Information

To learn more about DevOps, please visit:

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For Informational Purposes Only

This presentation provided at CA World 2014 is intended for information purposes only and does not form any type of warranty.

Content provided in this presentation has not been reviewed for accuracy and is based on information provided by CA Partners

and Customers.

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Case Study: BlueCross BlueShield Tennessee on how to Integrate Systems Management from CA Unified Infrastructure Management with CA Spectrum