protecting your application investment white paper 0908 2

White Paper

Protecting your Application Investment

with Service Oriented Monitoring

Document version: 1.2

Document date: July 2008

Introduction As an IT executive you’ve undoubtedly made recent decisions to invest in applications such as building or buying an ERP, a CRM, or a Supply Chain application. Perhaps you decided to do extensive modifications for GUI front ends or web enablement. In any case, your people are busy dealing with change. Lots of time and money will be spent to get things working just right.

• You probably thought about the hardware. What do you need to support the application? Will it have enough disk space and memory?

• You undoubtedly thought about the services and training needed to start everything moving along.

• You probably thought about Disaster Recovery plans. Is this application important enough to require a Hign Availability system with redundant hardware to ensure our data is always available?

• You probably also thought about the ROI for the project and had to convince someone else that this is the right thing to do for your business.

But, have you thought about how you’re going to protect that new investment?

• How can you ensure that all aspects of the application are available and functioning properly?

• How are you going to ensure that your end users (and customers) are always having a good experience?

• How will you accurately measure the service levels you are providing?

• And most important, how will you know what improvements need to be made in order to maintain that service level in the future?

Applications are what makes your business function. Users don’t interact with the hardware, they interact with applications. Applications today are more complex than ever with many more points of failure to monitor and manage due to web interfaces, mobile devices, and applications talking to other applications on different platforms,.

Yes, hardware is fully involved in supporting applications and services, but today hardware is often not the cause. Too often, the problems are at the interfaces with devices and between platforms. We have heard many times about problems where users are having trouble and can’t do their jobs, but the hardware seems to be working fine. The problem is somewhere in the software or architecture of the application or service. How can it be found?

How can your people get vision into all of these connections? Tango/04 believes that the only answer is to monitor from an Applications or Services point of view.

This is Service Oriented Monitoring.

© 2008 Tango/04 Computing Group of 8

What is Service Oriented Monitoring? Service Oriented Monitoring is an approach used to relate technical elements (firewalls, routers, switches, servers, databases, interfaces to other applications, SOAP calls, etc…) to a particular IT service (order processing, billing, inventory control, logistics, etc). It’s about understanding which technical elements support just one critical service and understanding the impact of those elements on your business.

The diagram below best illustrates this point:

If your current monitoring tools only work within each of the “technical silos” in your IT organization, they will not be able to relate (model) all the elements that support a Service. How can you elevate your IT staff’s vision by using these narrow tools? You really cannot. Of course, you can rely on your team and their acquired personal knowledge of how things work to ensure that the $50,000 problem is solved before the $50 problem. But how can you be sure they’ll always make the right choice? If the person with the knowledge is sick or on vacation, what can they do? Low level operators don’t really know which elements support which services. As you can see, without employing a solution that gives each member of the team clear visibility into the application you’re taking a huge risk.

If you model the elements that make up a Service, then anyone can readily understand which elements are a part of which services. If you monitor services as opposed to technical elements then you gain greater visibility into your infrastructure from a business point of view. If you understand the impact of a technical failure on your business, then you can solve the problems with the greatest impact first. Service Oriented Monitoring also gives IT management the ability to more accurately measure service levels and improve the most common points of failure.


The Blame Game Has this ever happened in your organization? There’s a problem with an application (or critical service), which means users are not able to do their jobs effectively. Your entire IT team scrambles to pinpoint the source of the problem. Everyone knows there’s an error or disconnect somewhere, but according to each group, their technical area is working just fine.

• The Windows server team has checked each platform with their monitoring solutions and everything is fine on their end as well. “It’s not us! It must be the network.”

• The network team has checked their monitoring solution and everything they control is doing fine. “It’s not us! It must be the mainframe.”

• The mainframe or midrange platform servers are also doing just fine. “It’s not us! It must be the application.”

• The application team hasn’t changed anything from the day before, so they know it’s not their issue. “It’s not us!”

• But there is a problem. What could be causing it?

Why does this happen? Most often it’s because nobody has a single place to go to look at Services and all of the elements that support them. Organizations usually have monitors that look deeply into each area, but nobody has the big picture view of the Service that they really need to figure out today’s complex problems!

A common IT problem today

IT is not meeting their

SLAs!

The business cannot take

this!

My main application is

down!!

Nightly order processing

did not complete!It’s not the

Network

Network

My systems are all working

fine!

Windows Admin

Everything is under control

here

DatabaseAdmin

Whose fault is it?

iSeries

Everything is OK with iSeries


Protecting your Application Investments If protecting your application investment is important to you, then you need to take into consideration how to achieve this. Applications are expensive and poorly performing applications are costing your business money.

More and more companies around the world are turning to a Service Oriented approach as they realize that it is increasingly difficult to manage their complex IT infrastructures. Aligning IT and business is management to the business services being supported.

Industry experts agree that by concentrating on the service impact instead of on isolated technical issues, there are many benefits:

• IT personnel can be more effective because they know the problem source and the impact on the business

• Service levels are improved

• IT operational costs can be reduced.

• Wiser decisions can be made regarding future IT investments

Tango/04 Computing Group has developed its core technology and competencies to support Service Oriented Monitoring requirements. Our systems model the services that support a business, revealing information about status, availability and performance. Technicians drill down to obtain the real-time details and the infrastructure information they need to make prompt and accurate technical fixes.

With the Tango/04 solution in place IT executives can easily obtain management information such as compliance rates of service level agreements, mean-time to resolution, and the most common service problems. They can also observe real time graphical views of the status of several business services which are projected via internal websites.

When is the best time to implement the Tango/04 monitoring solution? And how painful will it be? Our typical implementations take between two and six weeks. We need to discuss the project in detail with your applications and operations people, but our experienced consultants will lead the project and do most of the work. Our software enables us to model complex environments and provide for custom requirements in weeks, not months. Before we begin, a detailed implementation plan would be submitted for your approval, so the time commitment is defined in advance.

So when is the best time to implement Service Oriented Monitoring? There will never be a better time than “soon”. We suggest that you do it before your next big project. That way we can help all of your support people to understand the new changes as soon as they go live. Why risk significant downtime while everyone tries to figure out new problems?


The Benefits of Service Oriented Monitoring

Service Oriented Monitoring reduces downtime by helping the IT department focus on solving first, those problems that pose the highest risk of affecting the organization's ability to do business successfully.

Improved communications between IT and business managers. Provide real-time information to business executives and department managers about the critical services that they depend on.

Helps IT operators prioritize their tasks by immediately indicating the business impact of all failures. Service Oriented Monitoring models the entire complex technical structure of applications. This reveals all dependencies on technical elements and helps reveal the real business impact of an outage or a slowdown This helps IT staff to prioritize tasks according to real business needs—in real time.

IT gains credibility. IT better understands your business and can demonstrate results in business terms. Applications run more smoothly. Users see fewer problems.

Predictability is also improved IT needs to know how new changes in technology will impact the business, and how new services may impact the IT infrastructure. An important benefit regarding new IT projects is decreased time-to-market for new services.


End-user satisfaction is improved which leads to higher corporate efficiency, and to higher customer attraction and retention rates. Results like these nicely augment the real return on investment in a service oriented monitoring solution.

Measure and improve applications availability. Create ITIL compliance reports on the most critical components that support an Application. Knowing which components have failed and at what frequency enables you to focus on the most important issues and quickly make needed improvements.

Service Oriented Monitoring allows for the creation of premium or differentiated services that can have a different internal "pricing" (or chargeback) based on service levels. For enterprises positioning the IT department as a profit center (or outsourcing companies) this is extremely relevant to justify the price differences and increase business opportunities.


The cultural change of evolving into a service oriented enterprise implies several added benefits, including making the overall company more flexible and responsive to changing market environments. A Service Oriented Monitoring approach helps to obtain a greater return on past investments in system and application management solutions, since it can leverage them and generate unified views.

The benefits of Service Oriented Monitoring are many:

• Higher quality IT services • Improved service availability • Increased user satisfaction with IT • Implementing continual improvement • Demonstrating the business value of IT • Using IT to obtain competitive advantage • Achieving and demonstrating proper IT governance • Developing IT and business relationships and partnerships

Service Oriented Monitoring is a great asset in IT’s overall efforts in making a company more adept, more competitive and more able to be profitable in a tough business environment.


protecting your application investment white paper 0908 2

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