Application Performance Monitoring 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 an Application Performance Monitoring (APM) Solution. 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 Application Performance Monitoring (APM) Solutions as it relates to the CRA’s business 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 application performance monitoring solution for the Agency that can seamlessly integrate with CRA’s current on-premise distributed and mainframe platforms with the ability to be expanded to include future cloud implementations.

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 cross platform application performance monitoring solution that can meet CRA’s business requirements.

The CRA is exploring the possibility of acquiring a fully integrated application performance monitoring suite to improve our ability to perform end-user path analysis, transaction tracing, application health monitoring and log analytics. The solution will proactively monitor and provide diagnostic insights into applications across webpages, distributed components and mainframe components to identify degradation of services before they escalate into an incident. The solution must facilitate rapid root-cause triage of performance issues with the ability for deep dive drill down.

A suitable application performance monitoring solution will be able to efficiently and continuously capture comprehensive business transaction performance metrics for analysis, generate alert notification for application health degradation and be able to provide execution path tracing in a visual manner from an application page down through all components to the lowest level.

The solution must provide sophisticated end-user path analysis and related metric information to provide a better window into the user experience. Mainframe and distributed application performance information must be integrated to provide a unified picture of the end-to-end user experience. The unified picture would support tracing of the path of a transaction through the distributed and mainframe components (e.g. EJBs, CICs regions, COBOL programs, etc.), while providing access to performance metrics of the components in the path.

The solution must provide log analytic capabilities facilitating log ingestion/aggregation from multiple sources, indexing, complex searches and data visualization. It should be capable of correlating unstructured data with application performance events. These capabilities will support trending analysis, facilitate rapid root-cause triage of performance issues and provide the capability to proactively identify and address degradation of services before they escalate into an incident.