eHealth r6.0 provides greater insight into network performance, behaviors and trends by leveraging a powerful reporting engine that allows users to create, schedule, run and customize web-based reports about the health and performance of network resources. These reports can include "what-if" queries to answer specific questions—such as the effect on performance if the number of users in a branch office doubles. They also can document service level agreement (SLA) compliance to line-of-business managers. Service providers can use these same reporting capabilities to document SLA compliance to their customers.
The new release also simplifies eHealth administration by extending its user interface to provide concurrent, multi-user access to capabilities such as managing group lists and web user accounts.
"The new reports we can generate with CA's eHealth will significantly enhance the way we both manage our network and document our support for the business," said Chris Perez, senior network technician at Raymond James Financial, one of the largest financial services firms in the U.S. "In addition, the latest user interface enhancements will reduce the time we spend on administration—allowing us to re-allocate resources to more strategic tasks."
eHealth helps ensure the availability and reliability of IT services across complex, heterogeneous network environments by monitoring network performance, identifying important trends and providing alerts when network behavior deviates from normal patterns. These proactive management capabilities enable IT organizations to readily address potential network performance issues before they affect the delivery of critical business services to end-users. The insights eHealth provides also enable customers to better understand capacity usage trends, make smarter network bandwidth buying decisions and optimally allocate network resources.
Through its integration with CA's Unicenter NSM (Network and Systems Management), eHealth can deliver network performance data to a central management console, giving IT operations staff a single view into the health of their entire IT infrastructure. eHealth integrates with SPECTRUM, CA's network fault management solution, to provide a complete network fault and performance solution, enabling broader service level support across complex networks.
eHealth also integrates with HP OpenView Network Node Manager and Micromuse Netcool, enabling network managers to access relevant real-time and historical data in context. It also can retrieve configuration and performance data for ATM and Frame Relay connections from Cisco WAN Manager, Cisco IP Solution Center, Lucent, Alcatel and Nortel.
"Our customers rely on eHealth to ensure the reliability of the networks on which their revenue and relationships depend," said Michael Marks, vice president of product marketing at CA. "With its new features, eHealth r6.0 provides customers with even greater value by allowing them to be more effective and efficient in their support of the business. Our continued integration with third party tools also enables customers to protect and extend their existing IT investments."
CA obtained eHealth through its acquisition of Concord Communications in 2005. By continuing to invest in and integrate acquired technologies, CA is helping its customers better manage their enterprise networks.
"IT organizations need to rigorously maintain the performance levels that the business requires, but also limit the resources it needs to invest to monitor and respond to performance issues," said Roy Illsley, senior research analyst, Butler Group. "The integration of eHealth with the larger Unicenter solutions portfolio is enabling CA customers to fulfill these twin requirements-despite the complexity and heterogeneity of their enterprise computing environments."
