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SAPApplication Service
Management
Linh Nguyen ITConductor.com 1
10 Ways to Enhance your Application-Centric Availability and Performance Management
IT
Executives
Transport Requests
New Rollouts
Monitoring / CCMS Alerts
Access Requests
Background Jobs
Upgrades/Support Packs
SLA & Performance Reports
Trouble Tickets
IT
Managers
End-Users
The Nagging Problem of Availability & Performance Management
SAP
Team
Linh Nguyen ITConductor.com 2
It’s Tough to Manage the growing demands of SAP Environment• Technology is changing fast and knowledge management
along with resource demands are growing
• Daily repetitive and manual tasks are growing burden that takes time away from expert resources
• Project demands to meet new business requirements run as parallel streams and requires dedicated effort
• Company mergers, acquisitions, divestitures, regulatory requirements may mean additional application environments
• Outsourced IT services blur the lines of responsibilities, deliverables and accountability
• Move to cloud and/or service oriented architecture may introduce private, public and/or hybrid virtual layers that require additional effort to manage, including migration and life cycle management tools
Linh Nguyen ITConductor.com 3
Grow Smarter with Application-Centric Service Management & Automation10 ways to Automate towards Smart Application Management
Linh Nguyen ITConductor.com 4
(1) 360-degree view of Application Environment
(2) Availability and Performance Monitoring
(3) Root-cause Analysis
(4) Time-synchronized
Troubleshooting Context
(5) Service Impact Awareness
(6) Automated Admin Scripts and
Jobs
(7) Self-healing Automated Recovery
(8) Digitized Complex IT Processes
(9) Synthetic Transaction
Management
(10) Dynamic Service Level Management
(1) 360-degree view of Application Environment
Linh Nguyen ITConductor.com 5
Hosts
Databases
Workflows
Security
Cloud
Storage
Middleware
Applications
Network
Services
1. 360-degree view of Application Environment
Think of your applications as part of a service providing features and functions that together complete business tasks or workflows
Top down application-centric view of your technology components that make up the services, e.g. SAP Functions/modules, mobile services, application layer, database layer (though with SAP HANA – these could be combined), storage, network, security, integration/interfaces
Linh Nguyen ITConductor.com 6
Availability
Performance
(2) Availability and Performance Monitoring
Linh Nguyen ITConductor.com 7
2. Availability and Performance Monitoring
Availability probe for as many layers as practical starting with the app down to components such as DB, Hosts
Event management with logs collection, filtering and analysis such as syslogs, database logs/alerts, workflow event logs
Performance monitoring with metric collection (also known as performance counters). Collect only what are relevant at smart intervals, follow best-practices for the technology stack. SAP literally has thousands of metrics, most of which don’t significantly impact performance or availability. Those of lesser impact, if really needed – say for capacity planning, should be collected in larger intervals
Linh Nguyen ITConductor.com 8
Root-cause
Events / Alerts
Metrics
Availability
(3) Root-cause Analysis
Linh Nguyen ITConductor.com 9
Expert knowledge
3. Root-cause Analysis
Availability, Events/Alerts, and Performance metric are just data. They must be able to fit into context to enhance root-cause analysis. Think of them individually as puzzle pieces, but without context they are more noise and doesn’t really help.
Service or Application-centric monitoring enhances the ability fit data into context and thus provide useful information of where, when and how they fit into the bigger picture. Seeing where the alert or metric originate in a service tree greatly helps the contextual analysis.
Linh Nguyen ITConductor.com 10
(4) Time-synchronized Troubleshooting Context
Linh Nguyen ITConductor.com 11
Serviceavailability
4. Time-synchronized Troubleshooting Context
Contexts can be related or correlated if the data are time-synchronized. If services are comprised of many components then the data collected from those components should be available in the same time series
Visual correlation: the human eyes and mind are naturally the most powerful analytical tool so when data are aligned, they can provide useful information
Statistical correlation: time series data normally form a good basis for any number of statistical analysis such as averages, spikes that can indicate deviation and root-cause more easily
Benchmark & baselines: comparisons between different periods, hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, etc.
Linh Nguyen ITConductor.com 12
(5) Service Impact Awareness
Linh Nguyen ITConductor.com 13
5. Service Impact Awareness
Service-centric monitoring allows the top-down as well as bottom-up propagation of events that impact related components
Flexible service definitions can assign relationships as well as rules/weight how one should impact the other, e.g. if a server is busy and unable to service requests for 10 minutes, then change its status to critical and propagate the impact to the overall application service as warning – the overall service may still be available but degraded as other load balanced servers can still service other requests.
Role-based subscription determines who should get notified depending on what’s being impacted & severity
Linh Nguyen ITConductor.com 14
(6) Automated Admin Scripts & Jobs
Linh Nguyen ITConductor.com 15
App Jobs
OS Scripts
DB Scripts
6. Automated Admin Scripts & Jobs
Centralize system administration scripts for systems, databases, and applications
Cross-platforms
Manage batch execution schedules
Monitor execution logs
Linh Nguyen ITConductor.com 16
(7) Self-healing Automated Recovery
Linh Nguyen ITConductor.com 17
Monitor threshold
Exception detection
Notification
Policy-based recovery action
Check execution results
Repeat or escalate if needed
7. Self-healing Automated Recovery
Pro-active execution of house-keeping tasks for best practices problem prevention
Monitored thresholds can invoke auto-recovery actions using known fixes for common issues, or simply notify the associated person to execute those actions
Corrective actions should be logged for audit purposes
Linh Nguyen ITConductor.com 18
(8) Digitized Complex IT Processes
Linh Nguyen ITConductor.com 19
8. Digitized Complex IT Processes
Knowledge is power, IT processes are should be captured in runbooks for documentation or automation
Complex environments are non-linear so workflows are best used to capture processes and dependencies
Workflows should be repeatable, monitored and managed down to the individual task level
Linh Nguyen ITConductor.com 20
(9) Synthetic Transaction Management
Linh Nguyen ITConductor.com 21
MaintainDeployPlan
RecordSynthetics
Analyze
&
Recommend
Monitor
&
Report
Adjust
&
Optimize
Analyze
&
Recommend
Define
SLAs
Baseline
Adjust
&
Optimize
Monitor
&
Report
Baseline
Assess
9. Synthetic Transaction Management
Test critical processes on a frequent basis to ensure the availability and performance service levels for them are constantly monitored
When possible, simulate end-user experience from various points of entry to the service or application using robots or scripts that can be triggered centrally but executed remotely
Baseline performance during different time periods got trend-analysis and exception-based alerting
Transaction-level monitoring
Integration with Performance Load Testing
Linh Nguyen ITConductor.com 22
(10) Dynamic Service Level Management
Linh Nguyen ITConductor.com 23
Flexible Dashboard
with Drilldown
Service Level Monitors
Service Level KPIs
10. Dynamic Service Level Management
Dashboards should support operational service level monitoring and compliance
Service Level Agreement & Operational Level Agreement should be proactively managed for compliance
Automated and flexible report generation and delivery
Service desk integration with notifications and interactive charts
Linh Nguyen ITConductor.com 24
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For More Information on How to Automate Application-centric Service Management
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