MODIFICATION
D -- PBGC Application Performance Monitoring
- Notice Date
- 6/27/2018
- Notice Type
- Modification/Amendment
- NAICS
- 541511
— Custom Computer Programming Services
- Contracting Office
- Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation, Chief Management Officer, Procurement Department, 1200 K Street, N.W., Washington, District of Columbia, 20005-4026, United States
- ZIP Code
- 20005-4026
- Solicitation Number
- PBGCApplicationPerformanceMonitoring
- Point of Contact
- Giorgiana Chen, Phone: 202-326-4000 ext.7496, Patrick McFarlane, Phone: 20232640003334
- E-Mail Address
-
chen.giorgiana@pbgc.gov, mcfarlane.patrick@pbgc.gov
(chen.giorgiana@pbgc.gov, mcfarlane.patrick@pbgc.gov)
- Small Business Set-Aside
- N/A
- Description
- 1.ISSUED BY:Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation (PBGC) Procurement Department 1225 I Street NW Suite 330 Washington, DC 20005-4026. 2.FOR INFORMATION CONTACT: NAME: Giorgiana Chen, Contracting Officer PHONE: (202) 326-4000 Ext. 7496 FAX:(202) 326-4162 E-MAIL:chen.giorgiana@pbgc.gov Alternate Contact: Patrick McFarlane, Contracting Officer Phone: (202) 326-4000 Ext. 3334 FAX: (202) 326-4162 E-MAIL: mcfarlane.patrick@pbgc.gov 3.QUESTIONS: Questions regarding this RFI are to be submitted by email to Giorgiana Chen, chen.giorgiana@pbgc.gov and Patrick McFarlane, mcfarlane.patrick@pbgc.gov on or before June 14, 2018 by 9:00 A.M. EST. 4.RFI DUE DATE/TIME: July 9, 2018 by 9:00 AM EST. 5.SUBMISSION OF RFI: Interested Contractors shall submit one (1) electronic copy of the response to this RFI using the specific format described below and shall be limited to 8 pages. 8.5 by 11-inch paper 11 pitch print, Arial or Times New Roman style font 1.25-inch left hand margin,.75-inch right hand margin and 1-inch margins at both the top and bottom for each page all pages single spaced every page sequentially numbered; and page numbers shall be centered in the bottom margin. The RFI is not an RFP, may be canceled at any time, and may not result in the issuance of an RFP or award of a contract. This is a Request for Information ONLY and does not constitute a solicitation for proposal or any obligation on behalf of the Government. A response to this RFI is not an offer and cannot be accepted by the Government to form a binding contract. This RFI is issued solely for information and planning purposes-PBGC is not currently seeking proposals and will not accept unsolicited proposals. Respondents are advised that the Government will not pay for any information or administrative costs incurred in response to this RFI. All costs associated with responding to this RFI will be solely at the respondent's expense. All submissions, detailed below, become Government Property and will not be returned. Failure to respond to this RFI does not preclude participation in any future RFP, if any such request is issued. Proprietary information and trade secrets, if any, must be clearly marked on all materials. All information received that is marked Proprietary will be handled in accordance with applicable regulations and statues. All personnel reviewing RFI responses understands their responsibility for proper use and protection from unauthorized disclosure of proprietary information as described in 41 USC 423. The Government shall not be held liable for any damages incurred if proprietary information is not properly identified. To the maximum extent possible, please submit non-proprietary information. The information provided will not be used for any purpose other than for market research. Please note: some respondents may be asked to provide a demonstration of their solution to PBGC for market research purposes. 6.PURPOSE: This Request for Information (RFI), as defined in Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR) 15.201(e) is being issued to gather information relevant to Application Performance Monitoring (APM) solutions that are currently available. The Government will use any information submitted as market research to better appreciate the capabilities of the industry. PBGC seeks information to address pain points and issues encountered with PBGC's current Application Monitoring solution which consists primarily of the following HP products: •Universal CMDB (UCMDB) •Business Availability Center (BAC) oDDM oHP Sitescope oBusiness Process Monitor (BPM) oReal User Monitoring (RUM) (active monitoring) oEnd User Monitoring (EUM) (passive monitoring) oBusiness Service Level Management (BSM) Dashboards •Network Node Manager (NNMi) •Oracle Enterprise Manager (OEM) While the PBGC currently has the above tools, we are looking for an integrated and cost-effective toolset. This RFI is to bring together both the IT infrastructure and business application performance monitoring requirements, assess market availability and best practices. 7.SCOPE: The Government is seeking to understand the system and APM capabilities that are currently available. PBGC is conducting market research to gain input on the following: -Identification of viable alternatives/scenarios (e.g. enhance current solution, acquire new solution, on-premise, cloud, open-source etc...) -Alignment of solution to Business, Federal Enterprise Architecture and Security -Ability to meet both the business applications and IT Infrastructure requirements -Integration of APM solution to existing PBGC infrastructure and business applications 8.RFI RESPONSES/QUESTIONS: This RFI seeks the following information. In addition to addressing the questions below, please be aware that you have the option of providing additional commentary pertinent to your qualifications. Please note that the inability of your firm to respond affirmatively to each question will not preclude participation in any future RFP, if any such request is issued. The RFI Response should describe your system and APM solution to include the following: •A brief overview of the solution(s) to be considered •Estimated implementation timeframe/range which could be represented in phases. •Alignment of system/solution(s) to PBGC's general requirements. PBGC is interested in what aspects of the requirements the solution can support with minimal customization. 1)Company Information a.Company name, address, web page b.Business Classification/Socio-Economic status, NACIS Code, CAGE Code, DUNS Number c.Point of Contact name, phone and email address d.DCAA or other approved accounting system 2)Describe how you have supported IT Systems with the types of functionality and technology stacks listed in the "additional information" section? 3)Have you implemented your system and APM solution at other Federal agencies or private companies? If so, please describe your experience and ability to provide the capabilities required by that agency or company (implementation date/ current version number). Provide a list of the Federal agencies and private organizations, and names of referenceable customers for us to contact. 4)Describe the largest active user base (company, number of users, and implementation date) of an implementation of your solution. 5)Describe advantages and challenges in engaging with Federal government agencies due to regulations to which they must adhere. 6)Describe your system and APM solution capabilities as they pertain to technology trends and describe how you continue to mature to avoid obsolescence. 7)Describe the reporting functionality available from your system and APM solution with particular focus on dashboards, standard reports, and the ability to create ad hoc customized reports. 8)PBGC handles a large amount of Personally Identifiable Information (PII) data and tax information that must be safeguarded appropriately. Describe your ability to handle and protect PBGC data. 9)Describe your ability to use artificial data for development and test work. 10)Provide the following information on related services: Integration (including applications, databases, etc.), Configuration, Data Migration, Testing, Transitioning, Training, Updates, Maintenance and User Support Services. 11)Complete Capability Survey (Appendix A). 9.FOLLOW-ON INFORMATION: Depending on the industry feedback, the Government may seek further conversation with respondents and possible demonstrations with respondents. 10.ADDITIONAL INFORMATION:. A)Pricing and Licenses: Please share the following description and "rough order of magnitude" or budgetary estimate on the solution pricing. The Government is not requesting competitive quotes rather commercial list pricing models and estimates for integration into the environment described: Your license packages and its costs. Enterprise license cost model. Standard license cost model. Name user, per seat or concurrent seat license. What is included in your license cost? (i.e. help desk support) Any cost for required equipment for implementation of your solution beyond what is described in this RFI. Support services included in licenses Maintenance costs as a percentage of acquisition cost Your product warranty, including all conditions, exclusions, etc. The average frequency of new releases and upgrades. How often you release major releases. Cost of Training options and cost model. What training is provided with the core product, and what is the pricing model for additional training. What is the rough order of magnitude for related services for implementation and configuration of your solution and other related support services. Appendix A: Capability Survey: Please fill out the survey below with "Yes" or "No" response. YES/NOREQUIREMENT Strategic Goals Proactively identify problems during development and operations that could impact the delivery of PBGC services. Reduce operations cost, as opposed to managing separate tools that provide separate functions. Support agile delivery of on-premise and cloud infrastructure, which increases return on investment (ROI) for IT investments. Adhere to agile principles through initial and continuous monitoring. Availability vs Performance Monitoring Enhances visibility into the behaviors of distributed systems/subsystems and dependent systems. Correlate past observations with current operations to identify and predict various incidents Reduces the time to first alert for a performance or capacity incident Provides performance monitoring capability across transport protocols and Java/.NET platforms Availability is increased by monitoring performance changes, but also significantly by monitoring resource utilization of capacity The solution should support applications that are externally hosted, or Cloud based Resolving Application Incidents and Outages Enables efficient tracking and resolution of performance and capacity issues Provides separate responses for availability and degradation incidents Allows more effective use of the monitoring tool infrastructure, through active capacity reporting and planning Improving Application Software Quality Confirms accuracy and utility of load testing during development, and decreases overall time-to-implementation for new software systems Improves production experience based on a consistent set of key performance indicators (metrics) Pre-production Readiness and Deployment Validates low overhead of agent and transaction definitions Supports definition of the monitoring dashboards and reporting using the same tools in development that are used in production operations Managing Service Level Agreements (SLA) Enhances relationships with business owners via meaningful dashboards and access to a common set of tools Enables definition of reliable transactions that are defined and focused Provides accurate and rapid performance and capacity forecasting Enhancing the Value of the Monitoring Tool Investment Decreases time-to-implementation schedule Allows for optimal use of existing and proposed monitoring technology Helps evolve skill sets and competencies of technical staff by focusing on the standard set of tools Proactive Monitoring Achieves proactive management by catching performance problems during development and operations for quality assurance (QA) and user acceptance testing (UAT) Enhances triage of performance problems Enhances overall software quality from the operations perspective Trending and Analysis Increases value and use of the monitoring environment Establishes comprehensive capacity management planning practices Establishes more capable triage technical practices Application Performance Baselining and End-User Experience The solution will support Real User Monitoring (RUM) and Synthetic Transaction monitoring. The solution must be capable of discovering and mapping application interdependencies. The solution should separate the real issues from the noise by learning the application's normal behavior at all levels of the IT Stack, as a set of dynamic baselines. (Baseline Normal). In other words, the tool measures and establishes performance baselines automatically, rather than administrators setting manual thresholds. Track and Trend Application Baseline Behavior. Load, new capabilities, and systems change over time, the tool shall track baseline performance trends to continuously update the Baseline as expected due to system changes and capacity requirements. The solution should provide metrics, timings and baselines in terms of Business Transactions that encapsulate application and/or cross-application flows relevant to the end users from the end-to-end view and perspective, rather than the older OIS bottom up instrumentation and monitoring methodology. Confirms accuracy and utility functional, regression and load testing during development and test cycles (Dev and Test Environments), to decrease overall time-to-implementation for updates and changes to existing systems and new software systems. The solution must be capable of establishing baseline performance levels for the IT infrastructure hardware stack to include Network bandwidth, CRC errors, throughput, local disk I/O, local and virtual disk space, performance of load balancer, peak load, requests per second, average response times, peak response times, uptime, database performance, server response (physical and virtual), Web service response time, report load time and response, number of users at peak, application availability, application request metrics, thread count, availability of network drives, availability of Active Directory, Cron jobs (starting, finishing, errors, not starting), account password expiration. Availability and Performance Monitoring of Specific Infrastructure and Application Components to include at a minimum: local disk I/O, local and virtual disk space, performance of load balancer, peak load, requests per second, average response times, peak response times, uptime, database performance, server response (physical and virtual), Web service response time, report load time and response, number of users at peak, application availability, application request metrics, thread count, availability of network drives, availability of Active Directory, Cron jobs (starting, finishing, errors, not starting), account password expiration. Events and Alerts Alerting (notifications) and Remediation (scripts, workflows, ITSM.) shall be driven from the baselines to enable proactive issue identification & resolution. Robust notification utility, sending both email and text/voice. Alerts should be configurable, so that the alerts are sent to the necessary POC/team(s), utilizing Active Directory and/or the ServiceNow Service Desk Incident and Alerting system. Integration with and alerts for Security Incident Response (IR) should also provide alerts, artifacts and data for IR security monitoring tools e.g. Splunk, SCCM/SCOM, and BigFix etc., Appropriate response actions based on Deviation from Normal. Thresholds for selected processes or system information easily set by application and infrastructure administrators and system owners, and/or other stakeholders. The solution should have the ability to schedule/turn off alarms/nonfictions (like during COOP when the primary systems are down). The solution should provide multiple methods for integrating with ticketing and/or issue management systems, such as HP Service Manager, ServiceNow, BMC Remedy, JIRA, etc. The methods should include automated emails/SMS, HTTP request templates, ability to run custom scripts on remote hosts, etc. The solution should enhance agile workflows and provide multiple methods for integrating with CI/CD, configuration & release management systems, such as Jenkins, Chef, Puppet, Git, SVN, etc., to enable true agility and feedback loops within a DevOps environment. The solution should have the flexibility to classify notifications (Warnings vs. Errors/Outage). The system should be able to be configurable to look for certain types of errors (like 5xx SQL errors) and events logs and alarm if thresholds are exceeded (x alarms/events in a period of time). Fault Isolation and Root Cause Analysis Must support Java,.NET, web browsers, Apache, PHP, Node.js, C/C++, Python, Windows, Linux and Unix servers, oracle e business suite, etc. Support all databases (Oracle, Postgres DB, MySQL, MS SQL Server, etc). The solution should fully support the required database components, including the ability to view historically the following: sessions, wait states, slow queries, locks, tablespace, execution plans, etc. The solution should fully correlate transactions from the middle-tier into the database for deep, end-to-end root cause analysis. Support complete root cause analysis at all times, by capturing deep, code-level granularity, even during times of high application load, in order to ensure complete visibility during times when issues occur. Tool should store raw performance data in a manner that allows for a deeper dive into data to troubleshoot performance issues and perform Root Cause Analysis (RCA). Implementation, Operation and Maintenance The solution platform components should be simple wizard-driven installations with self-contained components. Solution should be web-based application. On-premises components should be able to /upgraded in-place with a single script without requiring manual reconfiguration. Set-up should be very minimal, use and maintenance of the solution should be very easy for application and operations team. The solution should be able to monitor the application, its code (method, classes etc.), underlying infrastructure and calls to backend components. This should be accomplished without requiring code changes or application redeployments and provide simple implementation such as wizards or jar-files. The solution should be a complete and self-contained platform that can be deployed within PBGC's internal networks with the option to push the platform to a public or private cloud-based infrastructure without having to re-architect or redeploy agents. The solution should be able to scale quickly and easily to support all PBGC's applications and sites, with the ability to grow that footprint as necessary. The solution should have the ability to scale to thousands of agents for a single Controller platform, without any need for intervening collectors or additional aggregators lying in between agents and Controller. End users of these applications should not experience any additional delay or performance degradation due to the solution being turned on at all times. The solution should be fully implemented and always on in production to get complete, relevant metrics on the health of PBGC's applications 24x7. The solution should maintain a very low overhead of network bandwidth, less than 10 megabits/second for a large-scale deployment (1000+ agents). The solution should not reduce granularity of performance data captured during high-workload periods. The solution should ensure all agent-controller traffic traverses using the SSL/TLS encrypted protocol to secure HTTPS ports, without requiring decryption of traffic at any point in the platform. The tool should be capable of monitoring traffic that is encrypted with strong modern cypher suite including file transfers to and from external Federal Agencies and Commercial entities including but not limited to SSC, CBO, IRS, Treasury, SSA, DOL, etc.). The solution should be available in all environments (PROD/COOP, CDEI, CDET, ITC) (ie to support regular automated regression testing in non-production environments and correlate data between environments. Should be low training LOE required for Administrators, Developers, Testers, and End-Users to get quick ROI from the tool(s). Reporting The solution should allow all visualizations, dashboards, configuration, analysis, collaboration, etc. within a single, browser-based user interface that is controlled by role-based access. The tool shall be flexible enough to create Business Level views, e.g., overall application health and availability (Red, Yellow Green Light), and technical views that provide granular details of application transactions throughout the entire IT Stack. The tool should have the ability to integrate with standard visualization tools (e.g. Tableau) to allow for multi-layer custom dashboards and custom reports. The solution should have robust reporting capabilities (hourly, daily, monthly, annual, trending for a given timeframe. (Historical Data The solution should have a community of fully-supported extensions, connectors, API's or SNMP Trap capabilities which can ingest metrics from third-party components, such as F5 load balancer, VMware hypervisor, etc. The metrics ingested should follow the same baseline/trending approach as metrics collected by native agents. Should be able to integrate with other standard performance monitoring tools to provide a holistic view of application performance. NOTE: The RFI response due date has changed from June 28, 2018 by 9:00 AM EST to July 9, 2018 by 9:00 AM EST.
- Web Link
-
FBO.gov Permalink
(https://www.fbo.gov/spg/PBGC/CMO/PD/PBGCApplicationPerformanceMonitoring/listing.html)
- Record
- SN04970794-W 20180629/180627230950-aba7675f8a23fdcadd435e846d22c35f (fbodaily.com)
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