CA Technologies released a new version of its performance monitoring software that includes support for software-defined wide area network (SD-WAN) architectures built on Cisco’s IWAN, and which will also soon include capabilities from Viptela.

“At CA Technologies, Viptela and IWAN are treated as distinct SD-WAN architectures in our SD-WAN monitoring, said Tim Diep, director of product management at CA Technologies. “We can support both technologies in a multivendor agnostic fashion, giving our customers a consistent experience monitoring any vendor infrastructure.”

CA Performance Management is big data software for managing both traditional and software-defined networks (SDN), network topology, network faults, device metrics, flow, and packet analysis. A dashboard with health indicators and visualizations enables IT staff and engineers to troubleshoot SD-WAN infrastructures.

Specifically, CA’s analytics can provide insight into the performance of cloud workloads and correlate SD-WAN performance to application performance. It can monitor the traditional IWAN underlay devices, the overlay network, and the application-based control plane, Diep said.

“As SD-WAN intelligence and automation increases, the need for deep visibility into both the intelligence (control plane) and application traffic (data plane) increases, while the complexity of monitoring and correlating the underlying technologies should decrease,” according to a CA blog post.

CA competes with other companies in the network and application performance monitoring space like New Relic, Solarwinds, SevOne, LiveAction, Infovista, Datadog, Dynatrace. However, SevOne and LiveAction are the only other ones that also offer monitoring for SD-WAN services, Diep said.

It’s interesting to note that Cisco picked CA Technologies to handle the monitoring capabilities of its IWAN when it recently acquired performance monitoring company AppDynamics for $3.7 billion.

However, AppDynamics really focuses on monitoring applications at the application-level, wrote IHS Markit Analyst Cliff Grossner in an email to SDxCentral. “CA Technologies allows for monitoring of network elements — more relevant for IWAN monitoring and visibility.”

Earlier this month, Cisco announced that it intended to acquire SD-WAN vendor Viptela for $610 million in cash. At the time, Cisco said it would combine Viptela’s cloud-first network management, orchestration, and overlay technologies with its own routing platforms, services, and SD-WAN capabilities.

This is CA’s first introduction into SD-WAN monitoring, said Diep. However, throughout the year, the company will be introducing enhancements for new partners in SD-WAN monitoring.