CA aims for iPad and Android fans with monitoring dashboard

LAS VEGAS: CA has unveiled Executive Insight for Service Assurance, a monitoring dashboard which translates IT data into business language and can run on mobile devices.

Announced at this year's CA World show in Las Vegas, Executive Insight offers interactive dashboards and real-time metrics to help business users stay up to date with what is going on in the organisation.

The tool splits data into indicators and categories, such as number of games purchased or music downloads for an entertainment or retail firm, and users can add annotations to the information to offer further insight for colleagues.

Mike Sargent, general manager in CA's Service Assurance Customer Solutions Unit, explained that Executive Insight lets IT teams provide business users with real-time access to the health and performance of key services.

"Doing more with less isn't the right formula. To really have an impact, IT must do what matters most to the business," he said.

"This features self-service to let executives be in control of the views they care about. It doesn't require IT hand-holding."

Sargent added that CA's approach is different to traditional business intelligence products, where the large upfront cost and resource can outweigh the benefits.

The categories are created by IT to suit the needs of the business, and individual users can choose to display only their favourite indicators.

The tool is designed to run on iPads, iPhones and Android devices, although it will run on any HTML5-compatible browser. CA said it has not yet certified BlackBerry and Windows Phone devices to run Executive Insight, but has plans to do so in the future.

The good news for companies interested in using Executive Insight is that they can get five licences free of charge and the tool is available as of today. The catch is that firms must already be CA Application Performance Management (APM) customers, and additional licences cost a hefty $1,000 per named user.

CA also launched additional new functionality for APM users at the conference.

Organisations using private clouds will now be able to identify whether incidents are due to the underlying hardware, the hypervisor or the virtual machine, according to Jeff Cobb, CA distinguished engineer.

CA APM can also now manage any application using TCP as the transport layer, and has built-in support for Adobe Flex.