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Application
Management
What is Application Management?
Application Management (AM) provides a methodology and
tools that offer visibility into real-time metrics that
help manage the key aspects of applications. With our
solution, application components are monitored for
Availability, performance of key business processes, and
service-level agreement compliance.
A
successfully implemented AM solution will enable system
administrator’s application administrators, DBA's, as
well as business and executive management to:
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Obtain real-time Availability and performance metrics
of an enterprise application and its related
components
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Show
metrics on what application users are experiencing
when using the application
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Assist in root-cause analysis when application
performance is degraded
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Provide proactive alerting and notification based on
application service-level agreement (SLA) compliance
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Provide audience-specific metrics on application
Availability, including real-time performance
dashboards that give visibility into service-level
compliance for business, user, and systems performance
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Conform to IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) framework
for IT service management (ITSM) using a federated
configuration management database (CMDB)
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Conform to SOX requirements for service management
processes
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Automatically detect changes to applications and
infrastructure using Application Mapping technology
Application Management in Practice
As
information technology has become an integral part of
everyday activities, applications and services that were
once considered a rare convenience are now commonplace
parts of the key operations and the competitiveness of
every company.
Today,
there's no way that a major company can function without
critical enterprise-level software. A company that does
not appropriately manage the Availability of its key
software applications cannot remain competitive, and
business suffers when enterprise applications do not
perform as expected: lack of Availability costs money.
Utilizing OPTEC's enterprise-tested APTTM methodology,
along with Mercury's industry-leading Business
Availability Center (BAC) offering, appropriate
application management Availability and performance
metrics are provided to all application stakeholders:
system administrators, database administrators, IT
management, and business management.
OPTEC
Application Management takes a user-centric approach
using a top-down method. We measure a user's experience
with a business process when interacting with your
enterprise application and help our clients react
accordingly. This ensures that service-level agreements
are met, users are satisfied with their experience, and
application administrator’s sleep better knowing that
applications and business processes are being monitored
and performing as expected. Using Mercury's Business
Availability Center solution for measuring user
experience, raw application performance and Availability
metrics, and end-to-end business process monitoring,
administrators and management can be assured that a
user's experience is constantly monitored.
OPTEC's Application Management Offerings
OPTEC
has a wide array of Application Management offerings for
commercial enterprise-class applications, including all
major ERP and CRM packages, and custom-built and
proprietary software applications. Some of our most
successful clients have utilized our application
management offerings to manage and monitor Availability
of:
When
systems are working at optimal levels, they have gone a
long way toward ensuring that business value is
delivered to the enterprise. But since these systems are
dynamic and integrated throughout the enterprise, they
are always in danger of getting out of sync. We offer
monitoring services that cover all aspects of our
clients' systems to ensure that if errors do occur, they
will be identified and fixed as quickly as possible. We
operate on a 24x7 basis so that our clients can be sure
that uptime will be maximized.
In
addition to this "round-the-clock" monitoring coverage,
we use our Near Shore facility in
Monterrey,
Mexico
to help our clients maintain their system's integrity
while reducing their total cost of ownership. With a
Near Shore strategy, our clients receive the benefit of
easy communication in their time zones with immediate
response times to issues as they happen while also
reducing their cost structure. There is no other
solution that can deliver higher quality maintenance
with instant resolution of problems as they arise.
Companies today may have hundreds of complex
applications ranging from custom applications based on
J2EE and/or .NET. Global enterprises may have as many as
30,000 changes a day to their production environments,
ranging from simple software patches to complex
application updates to end-users who download new
software. These challenges make application management a
daunting task.
What's needed is an approach that delivers the Ability
to see across application silos to understanding how IT
elements support any given IT service. For example, a
specific IT service could include application component
management, system management and network infrastructure
management. Mercury's Business Availability Center (BAC)
maps monitored systems information to the BAC dashboard.
BAC application mapping component includes role-based
analysis and business process correlation. The discovery
(or "mapping") process is agent-less, using more than
100 spiral discovery techniques. Discovery crosses all
seven layers of the OSI model, and incorporates the
unique IPs, networks, routers, switches, etc. in the
Network Discovery layer, server farms and clusters,
processes, OS, CPU, memory, disk, interfaces etc. in
Hosts Discovery, and applications such as SAP, Oracle,
PeopleSoft and Siebel across J2EE and .NET
architectures. Further, the BAC data model is open, and
supports 3rd party integration. Collectively, these
features allow BAC to discover, map, define and
understand the complex relationships that characterize
today's sophisticated applications. Mercury's approach
is to:
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Provide visibility into business services from an end
user perspective
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Manage by business-centric service levels
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Discover an map application and infrastructure
dependencies
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Automatically monitor relevant infrastructure elements
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Proactively resolve problems with topology based
diagnostics
This
approach improves service levels, manages business
impact, and minimizes customer downtime.
OPTEC BAC Engineers have designed and implemented these
solutions for diverse application environments. We help
you design solutions that meet your needs and your
budget. Most customers are up and running in the first
10 business days, and have the solution fully
implemented within a month. OPTEC also offers a hosted
application management service that takes all of the
risk and responsibility out of your organization's
hands.
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