Eyes Wide OpenIn this age of cost consciousness, proactively monitoring and managing strategic business apps is fundamental
by Ron Beck Continued from Page 1 In fact, Gartner Group has proposed a "services investment" model, based on the various factors that cause downtime. For example, under this model, committing 20 percent of available IT funds toward service contracts, monitoring, and redundancy can provide the business with an insurance policy to protect it from loss of revenue. (See Figure 1.) SLAs include terms and conditions of services including specific metrics, responsible parties for service delivery, exceptions, financial adjustments, termination clauses, and general objectives. If SLAs aren't well defined, they can create disagreements between the parties that develop into failed delivery, contention, refunds, or disagreement on terms of service. To prevent these problems, you should discuss SLAs with your legal staff for external service providers and with internal executives for internal services. The business or stakeholders of the service should be part of the contract negotiations. If multiple business stakeholders are involved or associated with the same SLA, they should also be involved in all aspects of the contract negotiations to validate their interests are represented accordingly. The Technical ChallengeNext, your organization must start with a basic framework to identify the standards, such as using the SNMP protocol, against which the applications will be monitored. The framework process starts by bringing the appropriate technology managers together. Many organizations use outside firms to facilitate this process as they can provide expertise in specific areas (hosting systems, legal services, industry regulations, and so on). When assembled, the team must determine the key elements of the framework, such as whether there will be common processes across the enterprise applications or common protocols and data formats, ultimately deciding on a set of common processes/protocols for the framework. The discussion must take into account not only the applications, but also the infrastructure where these applications reside (including internal and external networks and systems). Furthermore, three key items must be discussed as part of the framework: how to monitor systems without incurring significant additional costs, measure the downtime with respect to cost, and diagnose problems in a common manner across the enterprise. The framework must take distributed applications into account and how to correlate events when external partner networks or applications are involved, when databases residing in different geographic regions exist, and disparate systems are interfaced. These complexities must be reviewed as the data elements that are captured for end-to-end monitoring are discussed. This review is imperative, because without appropriate data, root-cause analysis will be impossible. When this committee has agreed on a framework, the process of selecting a set of tools to monitor the strategic business applications and enterprise can begin. Ultimately, a central repository for the data must be the goal of this phase. Here are the steps involved:
When a tool is in place to efficiently monitor your strategic business applications, the next step is to build subprocesses in which these tools communicate with the organization's problem and change management system. This approach closes the loop and builds the foundation for more proactive communication across the business - now your enterprise help desk is contacting your CRM team when disk thresholds are exceeded in the system or subsecond responses are exceeded on the network communication to the ERP system. When a monitoring framework has been developed and the tools are selected and implemented, you're ready to go to the business to promote the end-to-end monitoring environment. Review Your ApplicationsIf you find yourself reading this article and thinking about Band-Aids or stop-gap measures to get some insight into the health of your strategic business applications without building frameworks, creating committees, or designing SLAs, stop right there: You're in luck. It's possible to improve the monitoring of such apps without deploying tools and enterprise frameworks. If you've recently started your position as CIO or have been put in charge of providing health and performance information for your strategic business applications, put on the tactical hat and start prioritizing. Determine your risk and exposure based on the level of financial importance your applications carry in the organization. When you're done, determine if you should pick off the low-hanging fruit first and how and when you'll get back to planning your enterprise monitoring strategy. In the short term, utilize your current tools and put manual processes in place to monitor your applications. It's not imperative that you invest in a full monitoring and management strategy for your organization the first day on the job. However, you must be cognizant of the fact that you will spend more in the long run if you don't invest in a strategy and build a foundation for your organization to effectively manage and monitor all systems within your organization. Put Your Feet UpIf you've designed and implemented your management and monitoring strategy, you should now be able to sit back and put your feet up. Congratulations: The result of your new monitoring strategy for these strategic business applications will be savings for your organization. What's more, you probably saved your job for another day. Ron Beck [rbeck@tallan.com] is a director of design and development for Tallan, a technology solution provider based in Hartford, Conn., for software development, infrastructure implementation, and creative design services. RESOURCESRelated Article at IntelligentEnterprise.com: "Perpetual Motion Enterprise," Jan. 14, 2002, describes the important role of storage infrastructure in disaster recovery.
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