CA Releases Wily Manager for CA SiteMinder

Provides real-time view into CA SiteMinder-related applications and transactions

• By James E. Powell
• 02/27/2007

CA today announced the release of an extension to its flagship product, Introscope, an online business application management tool. Wily Manager for SiteMinder Web Access Manager gives its customers the ability to see if performance issues are related to login or authentication progress of their online business transactions.

Wily Manager for SiteMinder provides a real-time view of the performance of the SiteMinder Web server agents, application server agents, and CA TransactionMinder agents, offering IT insight into how long a transaction takes to check resources, identify users, and authenticate users to access protected resources. According to Michael Battat, product manager at Introscope, Wily Manager for SiteMinder enhances Introscope’s ability to help IT avoid “play the blame game” when a problem arrives. “That’s been the Introscope story in general. If a customer complains about a problem, they can use Introscope with application servers and .NET servers, but now we’ve extended it to SiteMinder so we can diagnose that further or [determine] if it’s something else. We can examine historical data, and we can tell you by drilling down into individual transactions and see which component took how much time.”

Said Mike Malloy of CA’s Wily technology division, “We watch the transactions as they come to your application, trace them to a fine degree so the application team can find where the bottlenecks may be, and see if the login or authorization process is encountering a problem in the application, a problem with resources or with a connection to a background system, or is due to some other cause. We isolate where the problem might be, and give more specific data to the application data manager to pinpoint the exact problem.”

The program lets IT better understand the impact of authentication on Web applications and so operations are smooth. The program can monitor a variety of performance metrics, such as average response time for login; successes, failures, and errors per period; and socket availability for SiteMinder processes. Wily Manager for SiteMinder identifies the slow transactions and displays them alongside metrics from SiteMinder. In addition, Wily Manager for SiteMinder can monitor metrics from SiteMinder Policy Server, including version, port, cache availability, and cache size for the Policy Server and individual SiteMinder agents.

Pricing begins at $1,500 per SiteMinder agent CPU. Additional information on the product can be found at http://www.wilytech.com.