Application Performance Monitoring Data Analytics Solution RFI

This is not a bid solicitation. This RFI will not necessarily result in any procurement action. A contract will not result from this activity.

The Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) is seeking feedback from the vendor community on the availability of a Data Analytics solution to augment application performance monitoring capabilities. Vendors are requested to provide specific responses to the product questions outlined herein. Vendors are requested to provide product whitepapers if available.

The objective of this Request for Information (RFI) is to gather the most current information possible from industry on the different Data Analytics solutions as it relates to the CRA’s application performance monitoring (APM) requirements.

The key objectives of the RFI include:

1. Receive responses from the vendor community about available solutions; and
2. Get a better understanding of the current and future trends; and

3. Vendors who establish via their response to the RFI how their products(s) meet the detailed solution requirements may be invited to provide an interactive demonstration and discuss in detail how their solutions meet the listed requirements.

Introduction

The Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) Strategic Engineering & Technology Integration

 (SETI) Division in the Information Technology Branch is the Agency’s lead for investigating a comprehensive, effective and efficient data analytics solution for the Agency that can seamlessly integrate with CRA’s distributed and mainframe platforms and application performance monitoring products.

Objective of Request For Information

The purpose of this Request for Information (RFI) is to determine if there are vendors who can provide a suitable application performance monitoring Data Analytics solution (or subset) that can meet the CRA’s business requirements.

The CRA is exploring the possibility of acquiring application performance monitoring data analytics tool(s) to improve our ability to detect and analyze complex events through analysis of log data and to proactively monitor all components of the user experience. Mainframe and distributed APM related information must be integrated to provide a unified picture providing measures for applications with the ability to guide developers through the analysis. The solution should provide sophisticated end-user path analysis in addition to providing log analytic capabilities aggregating information from multiple sources, indexing, complex searches and data visualization from multiple information sources captured on the mainframe and distributed environments. It should also be capable of correlating unstructured data with identified events.

The solution must integrate with, and augment the capabilities of, existing application performance monitoring products in use at CRA. The solution should be able to efficiently and continuously correlate events across applications, software and environments for analysis, and be able to present information in text and in a visual manner. A highly configurable rule based event notification capability is required. The solution should provide users with the ability to define an event criteria, based on the occurrence of complex string patterns/expressions and trigger the desired actions to be taken as a result of the event being realized. These capabilities will facilitate rapid root-cause triage of performance issues while providing insight into the components along the path and provide the capability to proactively identify and address degradation of services before they escalate into an incident.