This month sees the release of CA Cross-Enterprise Application Performance Management, a mainframe application monitoring product designed to collect information on the mainframe and integrate it with CA's own APM suite. The lengthily named new release, also known as CA CE APM to its friends, aims to monitor application transactions in a "single pane of glass" across mainframe, distributed, and the cloud.

"Our clients are focusing on how IT can be more strategic to the business by providing decision makers and IT staff with timely information about IT services, and how their predictability and availability impacts business outcomes," said Dayton Semerjian, general manager of mainframe at CA Technologies. "This new release of CA CE APM offers IT staff more real-time visibility into the customer experience to help them optimize customer-facing applications and services, no matter where they reside."

CA suggests that with the rise of virtualization and cloud computing and the complex mix of mainframe and distributed platforms in the evolving data center, IT staff needs to perform real-time "application triage" to quickly diagnose and fix problems that can impact the customer experience. By providing a 360˚ view of all customer transactions, organizations can better understand the health, availability, and business impact of critical business services to prioritize problem resolution and help assure that service performance meets SLAs.

New capabilities in CA CE APM and its integration with CA APM include over 90 metrics for DB2 for z/OS, end-to-end IMS for z/OS, and the mainframe network to provide data faster. There is also information about network traffic across mainframe and distributed platforms that helps pinpoint problems affecting the performance or availability of an application or service — plus, information on how well SaaS vendor-delivered applications are performing for end-users.