Introduction

The r12.6 release of CA Asset Portfolio Management (APM) was subjected to a series of stress and performance tests prior to its GA release. The following is a summary of the results that will help an organization plan an implementation of APM to obtain optimal performance.

Hardware and Configurations

APM performance testing has been conducted on 4 similar environments most of which have been configured using ESX virtual technologies. Detailed testing environment specifications appear in the appendices at the end of this paper.

Additionally these environments break down into 2 types of configurations.

1. (Virtual) - Environments in which all application servers and database servers are hosted on ESX virtual sessions. See appendices: 1, 2, & 4.
   
   
2. (Mixed) - Environments in which all application servers are hosted on ESX virtual sessions and the database is hosted on a physical server. See appendices: 3.

The following CA products were installed to support various APM integration testing requirements:

1. CA Asset Portfolio Management r12.6 0001 English Only (APM)
   
   
2. CA IT Client Manager r12.5- English, French, German, Japanese (ITCM)
   
   
3. CA Business Intelligence for Windows r3.2 0311 (CA BI)
   
   
4. CA Process Automation 3.0 ( ITPAM)

Section 1: APM User Interface

UI Test Case scenario

The most relevant real world testing scenario is one that simulates a typical user's daily activity. The following user interactions have been used to evaluate performance of the APM Web UI application starting from 1 user up to 100 users adding 1 user every 30 seconds. Each user added is doing the same type of activities over a 2 hour time period.

Please review the examples below. UI testing was done for a single web server configuration supporting 100 users. If a customer needs to support more than 100 users per APM installation then web farm and load balancing configuration technologies are recommended. Limit user load to 100 users per APM web instance.

APM 12.6 UI Performance tests

All tests were conducted with a 100 user load over a 2 hour time period. Automated testing tools were used to generate user load in a single web server environment. Tests simulated the following typical APM user interactions:

1. Asset Saved Search - user selects a customized asset search and executes the search
   
   
2. Create Asset - user creates an asset and saves
   
   
3. Search Assets - user selects standard asset search
   
   
4. Search Contacts - user select standard contacts search

Section 2: ITAM Data Importer

ITAM APM Data Importer Test Case scenario

These tests simulate a typical user attempting to create a large block of owned assets. The following ITAM Data Importer tasks have been used to evaluate performance of the APM Data Importer via owned asset on-boarding activity using a Comma Separated Value (CSV) file dataset of 100,000 records as the data source. The APM Importer executable is launched from APM Application server for the purpose of scalability. Multiple Importer tasks can be executed at the same time from the APM Application server or any other server where the user has implemented APM Data Importer. The Asset Load task creates owned assets and various related supporting records, than registers owned assets through the Common Object Registration API (CORA) registration process.

The Contact Load task shows similar on-boarding activities and has been used as another example of Importer operations. Please review the examples provided below.

APM 12.6 ITAM Data Importer tests

1. Asset Load - creates owned assets along with their relevant supporting records
   
   
2. Contact Load - creates contact records along with their relevant supporting records

Asset Load

The Asset Load test is a single tenant import of 72k assets using a single ITAM Data Importer instance.

Note: A single APM application server was used to execute load through APM Importer UI.

Contact Load

The Contact Load test is a multiple tenant import of 20k contacts for 5 tenants using multiple ITAM Data Importer instances.

Section 3: Hardware Reconciliation

APM Hardware Reconciliation Test Case scenarios

This testing simulates several activities a typical user may attempt in order to reconcile owned assets against discovered hardware. Reconciliation is also able to perform updates to various fields on the owned asset record based on rules the user has created.

In the test results referenced below, these tests attempt to make changes to the owned asset when the discovery process has stored values which don't match the owned asset values.

APM 12.6 hardware reconciliation tests

1. Asset Converter - Creates XML files to be processed via ITCM collector. This is a utility which allows user to map various discovery data sources into an XML formatted file which ITCM Asset Collector can consume, and then populate that information into the CA MDB. This is an example of an on-boarding activity in which the customer discovery tools are unknown to the CA MDB. The Asset Converter provides a method to load the data.
   
   
2. ITCM Asset Collector - Processes XML files created through the Asset Converter and populates the CA MDB with specific hardware/software records so APM can reconcile. The Asset Collector has two sets of information: Alpha, data loaded for the first time, and Delta, records which are already present but have changed some of their values, for example number of CPU's, RAM, or disk size.
   
   
3. APM Reconciliation - the reconciliation process takes place in two parts:
   
   
4. Match process - matches owned assets to their discovered hardware counter-parts
   
   
5. Change process - changes owned asset field values to match their discovered hardware detail when the data is different on the discovered hardware records.

Note: Reconciliation has been tested in 2 phases, an Alpha pass and Delta pass.

Asset Converter

Converts a single CSV file with approximately 86K rows of data into XML files for ITCM Asset Collector consumption and processing. The CSV data file is used to create ca_disovered_hardware and inv_generalinventory_item records.

ITCM Asset Collector

Consumes and processes XML files generated from Asset Converter. Loads hardware data into the MDB. Note: There is one ca_discovered_hardware record and anywhere from one to hundreds of inv_generalinventory_item records for each hardware record generated.

Hardware Reconciliation - Alpha Match-Change Processing

Evaluates matching rules and modifies records between ca_discovered_hardware and ca_owned_resource records. Alpha load refers to the primary reconciliation.

Hardware Reconciliation - Delta Match-Change Processing

Delta change represents updates to hardware asset records coming from discovery of changes to hardware.

Appendix 1:

ITAM QA Performance (Virtual) lab environment

MS SQL 2005

Appendix 2:

ITAM QA Performance (Virtual) lab environment

MS SQL 2008

Appendix 3:

ITAM QA Performance (Mixed) lab environment

MS SQL 2008

Appendix 4:

ITAM QA Performance lab environment

Windows Oracle 11.x