Imagine the experience of driving today’s car without any dashboard. No speedometer, gas gauge, trouble lights or temperature controls. That’s the example that unified monitoring software company CA Technologies Inc. likes to use when describing the challenge facing network administrators who must manage an increasingly complex cloud and hybrid-information technology infrastructure.

“The IT team needs that visibility, that end-to-end unified view just like in a modern car to avoid any blind spots. You expect a unified view,” said Umair Khan (pictured), principal product marketing manager at CA Technologies.

Khan visited theCUBE’s Palo Alto Studio in California and spoke with John Furrier (@furrier), host of theCUBE, as part of the CA Technologies’ Cloud & Hybrid-IT Analytics for Digital Business event. They discussed the company’s unified monitoring solution, how it helps improve issue resolution and the deployment of applications across the hybrid stack. (* Disclosure below.)

Achieving a unified view of an entire IT operation is no easy task, but CA Technologies has introduced a product — Unified Infrastructure Management — to provide a single analytics-driven solution for IT monitoring. With intelligent analytics and an open, extensible architecture, UIM is gaining traction among Fortune 500 companies looking for a viable monitoring solution, according to Khan.

“The [head of IT] needs a modern approach to get that end-to-end picture and make sure there are no blame games happening among different groups and resolve issues proactively,” Khan said.

Reduced time to resolve issues

Resolving issues quickly is one of the pain points in many IT operations. CA Technologies was called into one Fortune 500 retail company that was spending an inordinate amount of time on issue resolution. The implementation of UIM brought mean time to repair down by 35-50 percent, and intelligence monitoring tools played a key role in the improvement, Khan stated.

“I need to be resolving that issue before the service desk ticket is issued,” he said.

Effective infrastructure monitoring can positively impact the external customer experience as well. As more businesses rely on mobile apps that run in the cloud for product ordering, it adds to the enterprise challenge of being able to track performance and respond to problems quickly. A transaction might start in the cloud but finish in an actual store with a different network where the product is picked up.

“We want to monitor all of these technologies and give them end-to-end views,” Khan explained. “If the experience is slow, a user would be telling them on social media that they can’t order [a product].”

When companies originate in a cloud-based infrastructure, they often find that the monitoring approach is more suited to traditional models. This can lead to problems, especially when deploying applications which require monitoring configurations, according to Khan.

“UIM helps operations deploy configurations a lot faster through out-of-the-box templates in a unified approach across hybrid stacks,” he said. “Typically, in hybrid infrastructures, we win there.”

To watch the complete video interview, visit the event page (registration required). (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for CA Technologies’ Cloud & Hybrid-IT Analytics for Digital Business event. Neither CA Technologies Inc., the event sponsor, nor other sponsors have editorial influence on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE