For any enterprise to be successful, every business service, process, and technology should be user centric – but this is easier said than done.

Gartner has stated that 80 percent of outages impacting mission-critical services will be caused by people or process issues, and that 50 percent of those outages will be caused by change, configuration, or release integration, and hand-off issues. An infographic released by CSC states that by 2020, data production will be 44 times greater than it was in 2009, while the 2015 HDI Desktop Support Practices and Salary Report,notes a 45.2-percent increase in ticket volumes from 2014 to 2015, due to the growth of new apps and systems.

Dealing with these issues (and their growing volume) requires adoption of agile monitoring strategies, which provide a complete picture of IT infrastructure to quickly detect and troubleshoot issues, and optimise user experience. But in the event of an application failure, how do you determine why and where the issue occurred, before the application downtime affects business?

One method is application dependency maps. Automated and up-to-date application dependency maps essentially have built-in knowledge of critical applications, helping to visualise relationships among all the components (application servers, web servers, and databases) salient to any given business process. Reports based on the analysis of the discovered components are shared, thus enabling those responsiblee to take prompt action in the event of a fault.

Key benefits of adopting application dependency maps include:

• Hassle-free release management – Using application maps, teams can ascertain if critical services will be affected in the event of an update, aiding in streamlining development and production schedules.
• Risk elimination with automated auditing – Performing a manual infrastructure audits is expensive, time-consuming, and risky. Dependency maps can perform an automated audit of the environment and provide actionable insights about all the elements and their interdependencies. When faults occur, maps save troubleshooting time by detecting the root cause.
• Optimise business continuity – With the documentation produced by dependency maps, it is easy to assess which applications, if unavailable, will cause financial impact. This aids in drawing up a disaster recovery plan.
• Achieve operational excellence – Using application maps, teams can reduce operational costs by determining unused assets, identifying single points of failure for quick resolution, and dynamically allocating resources as changes occur in the environment.

ABOUT PRITIKA RAMANI//

Pritika Ramani is a marketing analyst at ManageEngine.