CA Technologies’ Application Performance Management 9.5 adds the ability to detect and analyze unusual performance metric patterns in near real time. APM does this by comparing current and past performance metrics to create a score indicating how much it deviates from normal traffic patterns. This can be used to detect the beginnings of a denial of service attack, failing hardware, or a rouge application.
CA APM is a transaction-based monitoring suite. Rather than looking at each component (e.g. routers, middle tier servers, databases) in isolation, it follows transactions from end-to-end. This allows it to correlate information in ways that are unavailable to most performance analytics products. With APM 9.5, this capability has been extended to also include the browser. This is enabled via automatic JavaScript injection. APM also includes support for monitoring CDN performance.
Also new in CA APM is the user interface. A web-based UI replaces the installed tools needed by previous versions of CA APM.
An interesting feature of CA APM is its ability to feed data into test environments. When combined with a product like CA Lisa Service Virtualization, you’re simulated services emulate production response times, allowing for a more accurate test.