10 Ways to Better Application-Centric Service Management

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


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


Grow Smarter with Application-Centric Service Management & Automation10 ways to Automate towards Smart Application Management


(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


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


Availability

Performance

(2) Availability and Performance Monitoring


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


Root-cause

Events / Alerts

Metrics

Availability

(3) Root-cause Analysis


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.


(4) Time-synchronized Troubleshooting Context


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.


(5) Service Impact Awareness


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


(6) Automated Admin Scripts & Jobs


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


(7) Self-healing Automated Recovery


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


(8) Digitized Complex IT Processes


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


(9) Synthetic Transaction Management


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


(10) Dynamic Service Level Management


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


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