Reining in the 4 Ds of Spiraling Application Support Costs

Reining in the 4 D’s of SpiralingReining in the 4 D s of Spiraling Application Support CostsMarie Hoch, Director of APM Solutions, SL Corporation

© 2012 SL Corporation. All Rights Reserved.

© 2013 SL Corporation. All Rights Reserved.1

The 4 D’s of Spiraling App Support Costs

• Disparate data

• Dysfunctional systems

• Demanding processesDemanding processes

• Divined planning



Disparate Data

• Financial services organizations have multiple layers of information– Infrastructure– Middleware– Application performance

• Various application support teams are creating their own monitoring solutions or using their own tools



Disparate Data Case Study: Large U.S. Investment Bank







• Eliminated Sev 1 application performance outages, quickly detecting root cause of the application problem to meet 15 minute SLAsroot cause of the application problem to meet 15 minute SLAs

• Implemented summary and in-depth dashboard views to monitor:– Cuts across monitoring silos for more than 100 apps across different

b i itbusiness units– every layer in their IT landscape– proactively detect problems

• Business & technical users:Business metrics

App Performance

Infrastructure Performance



Dysfunctional Systems

• Increasing reliance on experts• Junior support engineers need greater visibility in order

t b ff tito be effective• Systems are not able to provide the necessary

information for early notification, analysis and resolutioninformation for early notification, analysis and resolution of issues

• Inability to reduce the noise and focus on issues that i h b iimpact the business



Dysfunctional Systems Case Study: Another Large U.S. Investment Bank



Demanding (and Repetitive) Processes

Takes an inordinate amount of time for app support team members to go out of the monitoring environment to do the manual checks or reparative actions when errors are discovered.

There are costs associated with initial and ongoing training to understand how these checks and fixes should be performed.



How to Rein in Cost of Demanding Processes

Automate manual processes such as:• Health checksHealth checks• Digging through log files

Implement command & control functions such as:• starting and stopping processes

t UNIX h ll d• system or UNIX shell commands



How to Rein in Cost of Demanding Processes



Divined Planning

• Inability to understand state of transactions and utilization off of command line administrative utility

• Too many data points to extrapolate meaningful information and make good decisions – “Crystal Ball”

• Lack of historical trends• Lack of historical trends



Divined Planning

31,500 Data points for 1 hour – Too much!



How to Rein in Cost of Divined Planning

• Get historical metrics over a period of time to understand usage

• Gain meaningful, correlated views without having to go to the operations teams

• Leverage trend graphs• Leverage trend graphs




How many orders are in the queue?

How many exceptions are in the queue?

How many orders are in the retry queue?

How fast are orders flowing out of the queue?

How fast are orders coming into the queue?




Are we there yet?



Thank you for your time!For more information or to set up a demo, please visit SL in booth #1513, or contact me at [email protected] or at +1 415-927-8510.



Date post:	11-Nov-2014
Category:	Technology
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Reining in the 4 Ds of Spiraling Application Support Costs

Technology