CA Technologies announced a new version of CA Network Flow Analysis that leverages Cisco’s next-generation technology to provide IT organizations with application-centric insights to better spot anomalies, improve service levels and reduce operational costs.

CA Network Flow Analysis automatically recognizes more than 1,000 applications—quickly giving network managers deep visibility into application traffic patterns and behavior. The solution also makes it easy for network managers to create profiles for their organization’s custom applications.

This insight empowers IT to pinpoint active or potential issues with service delivery, plan and validate resource needs for new applications, optimize utilization of network resources, and avoid unnecessary infrastructure costs.

CA Network Flow Analysis complements these capabilities with patented anomaly detection that learns about the network over time and automatically detects and creates alarms for a wide range of anomalies that can impact performance and create security risks. This empowers IT to proactively safeguard critical service levels while reducing the cost and headaches associated with network troubleshooting.

“Enterprise IT organizations that don’t aggressively evolve their ability to manage their networks from an application-centric perspective will inevitably wind up throwing too many staff-hours at service-level assurance and getting too little in return,” said John Smith, GM, infrastructure management, CA Technologies. “With CA Network Flow Analysis, customers achieve far superior results with less work—significantly enhancing IT’s overall ability to deliver more value to the business.”

CA Network Flow Analysis leverages Cisco AVC (Application Visibility and Control) and NBAR2 (Next Generation Network-Based Application Recognition) technologies to simplify and integrate the detection and analysis of application-specific traffic. It also harvests data directly from network devices—making it more cost-effective to deploy, maintain and upgrade.

CA Network Flow Analysis has received Cisco's Interoperability Verification Test (IVT) certification, validating its support for AVC.

"Network performance management no longer means simply reporting top talkers and top traffic loads by port and protocol," said Jim Frey, vice president of research, Enterprise Management Associates. "Network managers must now be able to relate ports and protocols to specific applications, understand response times for those applications, and apply analytics to reveal potential issues on a proactive basis. The latest release of CA's Network Flow Analysis makes progress on all of these fronts."

CA Network Flow Analysis embraces CA Technologies application-driven network performance management model for managing IT infrastructure, applications and services.