SOA Management

Data Virtualization at Pfizer: A Case Study

Tue, 06 Dec 2011 09:30:00 EST

Pfizer Inc. is a biopharmaceutical company that develops, manufactures and markets medicines for both humans and animals. As the world’s largest drug manufacturer, Pfizer operates globally with 111,500 employees and a presence in over 100 countries. Worldwide Pharmaceutical Sciences (PharmSci) is a group of scientists responsible for enabling what drugs Pfizer will bring to market. This group designs, synthesizes and manufactures all drugs that are part of clinical trials and toxicology testing within Pfizer. For this case study, we interviewed Dr. Michael C. Linhares, Ph.D and Research Fellow. Linhares heads up the Business Information Systems (BIS) team within PharmSci. BIS is responsible for portfolio and resource management across all of PharmSci’s projects. This involves designing, building and supporting systems that deliver data to executive teams and staff to help them make decisions regarding how to allocate available resources – both people and dollars – across the overall portfolio of over 100 projects annually.

Service Design Patterns: Fundamental Design Solutions for SOAP/WSDL

Tue, 15 Nov 2011 10:00:00 EST

I have been a fan of the Martin Fowler Signature Series for a long time. This book fit into the series great and filled in a missing link in the series. One of the things I liked seeing was that the author does not think web services are a silver bullet. Right off the bat he warns that web services should be reserved for situations which out-of-process and cross-machine calls "make sense". The book is broken down into seven chapters, an appendix, and a nice glossary. The chapters include From Objects to Web Services, Web Service API Styles, Client-Service Interactions, Request and Response Management, Web Service Implementation Styles, Web Service Infrastructures, Web Service Evolution, and an appendix Reference to External Patterns.

The New ROI: A Return on Innovation, and Using Data to Do It

Tue, 15 Nov 2011 07:00:00 EST

What does American Express, Foursquare, Etsy, and NYC OPEN Government all have in common? They all need to innovate through data...and they need to go outside to do it big. At first glance one cannot help take note of the almost impossible task of merging the words "American Express" and "hackathon" under one event umbrella, but Scott Roen of Amex OPEN Forum did just that. He suspected before the hackathon that innovation could in fact come from the outside, even if the "outsiders" (aka developers) break a company's long-held views of what innovation even looks like. CIOs and CMOs should both take notice. Innovation is possible once again, though admittedly it takes thick skin to run a hackathon at a Fortune 500. You might not like what developers and data partners say about your brand and relevance in the digital space.

End-User Experience Management Drives ROI

Wed, 02 Nov 2011 06:00:00 EDT

Enterprise CFOs are taking an increasingly active role in managing the IT decision making process. As a result, IT professionals need to be prepared to quickly show how innovative technology investments equate to real business value. According to a recent industry report, only 5 percent of CIOs have the power to authorize IT investments. That same study reports that IT departments are now, more than ever, reporting directly to the CFO (42 percent) as opposed to the 33 percent reporting to the CEO. A company can’t stay competitive and productive without the right tools, technology and infrastructure. And, today’s CIOs and IT leaders need the approval of the finance department, which means technology investments need to be more tightly coupled and aligned to company goals and business value.

Common Web Application Security Vulnerabilities and Mitigation

Wed, 12 Oct 2011 06:00:00 EDT

Web applications are vulnerable to multitude of security attacks. This exposes the underlying businesses and the consumer data wide open to public view.However for the internet application multiple programming practices need to be followed to prevent such attacks. This paper details in brief the various security vulnerabilities web applications face and how they can be mitigated

Project Management Tools for Project Managers

Thu, 29 Sep 2011 14:18:48 EDT

A well-done project management is one of the keys to a project's success. I'm pretty sure every one of us manages projects using some kind of tools. But the right project management tool does not replace the knowledge and experience of a project manager. It only helps him in the process of managing a project. Why do certain projects succeed while others fail? Clearly, it is not about luck although that might also help, it is not about the tools that are being used to manage the projects and certainly it is not only a matter of budget and dedication. The most important factor is the project manager, its experience, training and skills but research shows that projects which are designed and planned with care have a much higher success rate. So through effective project planning software there are better chances to reach projects success.

Deploying Oracle Databases to Amazon AWS (EC2, RDS)

Thu, 29 Sep 2011 13:35:00 EDT

Amazon recently added Oracle database hosting capability to its RDS service offering. You can rent an Oracle database in pay-as-you-go fashion now. We are going to explore if corporations should be utilizing Amazon RDS, how it should be used, where possible savings are and what potential trouble points are. With services like Amazon RDS it does not matter where your hardware and software physically is - it could be in a room next to you or in some other country. It is also much easier and cheaper to procure new servers. You swipe your credit card and get an Oracle database server up and running in half an hour. Sounds like magic, especially if you compare it to weeks and months it normally takes to procure an Oracle database server in an average enterprise today.

Can ‘Big Data’ Prevent Major Service Outages?

Wed, 21 Sep 2011 15:22:00 EDT

If Amazon, Bank of America and Microsoft can’t contain service outages before they become colossal PR problems, the rest of us mere mortals have much to fear. It's a safe bet that some time in the next 60 days, another major consumer Internet service will make the headlines for melting down. Given the potential losses, one might think that the IT organizations at these high profile companies would be bullet proof. But they’re not. Despite countless millions in management investments, the state of the art is still unexpected outages with recovery times that seem to be a minimum of 4 hours and maximum of 2 or 3 days. The evidence suggests that the same holds true for most of the Global 2000 enterprises and similarly sized service providers and government organizations. Multiple escalated incidents a week with one or two showstoppers a year, keep our IT experts tied up for an average of 4 hours per incident.

Crowdsourcing - A Best Practice or a Worst Practice?

Wed, 07 Sep 2011 10:00:00 EDT

I am neither pro-crowdsourcing nor anti-crowdsourcing. Some projects are crowdsource-appropriate, and some are not. How do you tell the difference? What are the advantages and disadvantages of crowdsourcing? For the record, I am neither pro-crowdsourcing nor anti-crowdsourcing. For purposes of this article, I'm going to assume that we're talking about software development; however, crowdsourcing could be just as appropriate for situations as diverse as architecture, graphical design, PowerPoint slides or even developing a great pizza recipe. There has been some criticism of the crowdsourcing model on ethical grounds - for example, that it is unfair to the participants. For the most part, I'm going to stay out of that controversy. Though, if the rules are made clear and are posted up front, then each party can decide on their own whether to participate. To me, that makes it fair. If someone is cheated, that's a different story, and there are other (legal) remedies for that.

Why Energy Companies Like Data Virtualization

Tue, 23 Aug 2011 09:00:00 EDT

Four of the top five global energy companies rely on data virtualization to provide the diverse information required across a range of strategic initiatives and business-critical IT projects. Discovering new upstream sources, smoothly delivering products through downstream distribution channels, and complying with extensive regulations are keys to success in the energy business. And information is the fuel that enables these successes. Unfortunately prior IT investments have resulted in numerous data silos and significant complexity that is making it harder than ever to turn information into business success.

Software Product Line Engineering Resource Kit

Tue, 16 Aug 2011 07:15:00 EDT

Product Line Engineering Resource Kit is a kit of reusable assets made for use with SPARX EA on Software Product Line projects. I recently decided to update the Product Line Engineering Assets I reuse from project to project. In the past I reused a baseline project that contained a folder structure and the UML stereotypes needed to do Use Cases, Feature, and Static Modeling. For those of you who are not familiar with PLE, below is a context diagram I use to explain it and some links. I also put some of the better books on the topic at the end of this post.

REST-Based SOA: an Iconoclastic Approach

Sun, 07 Aug 2011 09:00:00 EDT

It came as no surprise to us when an organization contacted us and let us know that they are taking the REST-based SOA approach we discussed, and that it actually works. We recently spoke with the US Coast Guard (USCG) about their SPEAR (Semper Paratus: Enterprise Architecture Realization) initiative. The SPEAR approach to SOA centers on document-centric, event-driven, loosely coupled, asynchronous, message-based Business Services.

How I Became a REST 'Convert'

Sun, 17 Jul 2011 15:00:00 EDT

Representational State Transfer, commonly known as REST, is a style of distributed software architecture that offers an alternative to the commonly accepted XML-based web services as a means for system-to-system interaction. Many of you know me as one half of the ZapThink team – an advisor, analyst, sometimes-trainer, and pundit that has been focused on XML, web services, service oriented architecture (SOA), and now cloud computing over the past decade or so. Some you may also know that immediately prior to starting ZapThink I was one of the original members of the UDDI Advisory Group back in 2000 when I was with ChannelWave, and I also sat on a number of standards bodies including RosettaNet, ebXML, and CPExchange initiatives. Furthermore, as part of the ZapThink team, I tracked the various WS-* standards from their inception to their current “mature” standing.

The Importance of Unit Testing in C++

Fri, 15 Jul 2011 09:15:00 EDT

Unit testing is a best practice in any modern methodology, including Agile development. With automatic unit testing in place, if we introduce a bug into the software, one or more tests will fail and we'll know about it immediately. We've been writing in C++ for almost 30 years now, and we use software development tools, which improved over time. Yet, because of the intricacies of C++ and its different variants, testing tools did not become as advanced as Microsoft's Visual Studio .NET tools, or Eclipse for Java. For example, the testing tooling for C++ in Visual Studio lags behind the tools for the other languages supported in Visual Studio.

Why Life Sciences R&D Teams Like Data Virtualization

Tue, 05 Jul 2011 05:15:00 EDT

Discovering news drugs and devices is key to success in pharmaceuticals and biotech. To help achieve this goal, life science companies look to IT. Unfortunately, the large IT investments have already been made have resulted in data silos and complexity which slow down future projects. To overcome these silos, life sciences companies are seeking new ways to integrate their extended enterprise data.

Why Response Times Are Often Measured Incorrectly

Sat, 25 Jun 2011 13:00:00 EDT

Response times are in many – if not in most – cases the basis for performance analysis. When they are within expected boundaries everything is ok. When they get to high we start optimizing our applications. So response times play a central role in performance monitoring and analysis. In virtualized and cloud environments they are the most accurate performance metric you can get. Very often, however, people measure and interpret response times the wrong way. This is more than reason enough to discuss the topic of response time measurements and how to interpret them. Therefore I will discuss typical measurement approaches, the related misunderstandings and how to improve measurement approaches.

Columnar RDBMS, Gourmet Fast Food and Santa Claus

Wed, 22 Jun 2011 08:00:00 EDT

Boris Evelson of Forrester recently published a blog post titled It's The Dawning Of The Age Of BI DBMS. I took note that in this post he classified Vertica, ParAccel and Sybase IQ in a category he named ‘Columnar RDBMS’, and that started off a friendly email exchange as to what the heck that really means. I said: “RDBMS is tabular, by definition.” ...and Boris said: “To me if I can access something via SQL, it’s relational.” Who’s right is a matter of perspective, I suppose. But technically, defining RDBMS by the existence of SQL access is incorrect. According to Wikipedia, the short definition of an RDBMS is a DBMS (Database Management System) in which data is stored in tables and the relationships among the data are also stored in tables. The data can be accessed or reassembled in many different ways without having to change the table forms

Data Centers: The Next Wave of IT Innovation

Tue, 14 Jun 2011 11:16:53 EDT

Data center facilities are poised for the next wave of IT innovation as enterprises look for competitive advantage beyond racks and stacks and begin running out of space in their existing facilities. The data center is the factory of the new cloud economy and is a major inflection point for enterprise profitability. Those who deliver the most apps, services, etc. per kilowatt/hour have a competitive advantage. And with data centers accounting for close to 1.5% of electricity consumption in the U.S., increasing energy efficiency in the data center is becoming a strategic business and community imperative. Since before the dotcom era, enterprises have built their own data centers with a keen focus on availability, or uptime. Many of those data centers have now outlived their usefulness and are substantial burdens on their IT teams. As new data centers are built, uptime considerations need to be combined with efficiency considerations. They must be addressed together.

Application Performance & Architectural Problems You Can Find in an Hour

Thu, 05 May 2011 10:30:00 EDT

When we get engaged with prospects that are interested in our performance management solution we walk them through a Proof of Concept. We let them install dynaTrace on their own prior to the actual POC. During the POC we ask them to exercise typical use cases on their application that show performance problems. We walk them through the different analysis options and add the findings to a final POC Presentation. In this blog I want to share some screenshots and findings of a typical Proof of Concept recently done in a heterogeneous .NET/Java Environment.

TOGAF Foundation Level Certification – Another Practice Test

Sat, 02 Apr 2011 11:00:00 EDT

As I had mentioned earlier, there is a paucity of free sample questions for the TOGAF 9 foundation or the part 1 test. I had created one set earlier and there are two other set available for free. Here is another set of 40 questions. Entire business group or corporation comprising of all local and international main and sub offices, divisions, subsidiaries, and departments

TOGAF Foundation Level Certification – Practice Test

Fri, 01 Apr 2011 10:00:00 EDT

If you plan to appear for a TOGAF foundation level certification or part 1 exam, one of the difficulties you will face is a lack of free sample questions. Some questions are provided as a part of the study guide, but if you want to more practice then you will have tough time locating anything freely available on the net. This lack of practice multiple choice questions prompted me to create my own set. I have gone by the advice of Chris Eaton to create this paper before I take the test to avoid any issue that these questions copy the official exam questions.

Enterprise Architecture’s Quest for Its Proper Identity

Sun, 20 Mar 2011 09:45:00 EDT

Enterprise architecture ought to be about the entire enterprise, because that’s what the name implies. If it’s really about IT, it ought to be called enterprise IT architecture. It is my impression, from what I read and hear in many enterprise and business architecture blogs and forums, that the enterprise architecture (EA) community comprises multiple factions, and which faction you are part of depends on how you answer two questions. These are fundamental questions that I suspect many in the EA community (present company excepted, of course) have not asked themselves explicitly, or, if they have, considered why they would answer them one way or the other.

A Glimpse into the Future of BI - Through the Israeli Market

Fri, 18 Mar 2011 08:45:00 EDT

The Israeli BI market, or 'the Pond', as it is referred to by the locals is a good example of how the BI market looks like in most parts of the world. A few months ago, I wrote an article about the relationships between business intelligence platform vendors and their distribution networks, and where these relationships are headed. The key message in that article was that Value-Added Resellers (VARs) must understand that self-service business intelligence is where the market is headed – and adjust their business models accordingly. A company selling BI solutions based on another company’s BI platform will need to provide real added value to the customer in order to stay in business. In the not-too-distant future, this value will almost certainly come from industry-specific professional knowledge and experience (as opposed to purely technical expertise). More and more potential customers will no longer accept lengthy projects and, with the new software and technologies now emerging, it is no longer justifiable.

Innovation and CyberOverload

Thu, 24 Feb 2011 12:30:00 EST

Are you giving 100% at your job? 110%? If you said yes, you’re depriving yourself, your business, or your employer of your creative potential. Manufacturing facilities are not intended to run at 100% capacity all the time; plant managers understand the risk of trying to run at full capacity, and face it, you are human, not a machine. For knowledge workers, running at 100% capacity or more creates a different type of risk – an innovation and creativity deficit. So what can we do to fix that?

A New Era of Post-Production Data Management Software

Wed, 16 Feb 2011 06:00:00 EST

Nearly every small, medium or large organization is heading down the path of adopting disk-based data protection as a way to solve their legacy problems of backup to tape. But what many of these organizations have yet to recognize is that as they adopt disk to store these post-production copies of data, a new opportunity is presenting itself. They now have the option to manage and leverage post-production data in ways that were never possible when on tape but now lack the tools to do so. Nearly every organization is somewhere on the journey towards implementing disk-based backup. But that does not mean every organization is implementing it in the same way or using the same technologies. Some are introducing disk in lieu of tape as a backup target. Others are using disk-based snapshots while still others are using some form of replication. Some are even using a combination all of these forms of disk-based data protection.

Defining Requirements – The TOGAF Way

Thu, 10 Feb 2011 05:15:00 EST

If you are new to TOGAF, you may be wondering how this process is different from what you do in a typical “Requirement Analysis” phase of software development. Once I tell you that the many of the techniques recommended in TOGAF are what you are already using, like UML modeling techniques like Activity Models, Use-Case Models and Class Models, you may think why bother with TOGAF? What you really do differently in TOGAF is that you take a much wider perspective of the requirement. There are three important things that you need to do:

Information Security from a Business Perspective

Wed, 09 Feb 2011 06:00:00 EST

As enterprises struggle to remain profitable in an ever-changing risk environment, the current economic crisis has elevated the need for effective business risk management. Information security is a key parameter that affects business risk. The academic definition of information security is the “preservation of confidentiality, integrity and availability of information.”[1] Confidentiality is the preservation of secrecy of information (e.g., business reports, technical designs or financial projections) by ensuring that viewing is conducted solely by authorized people. Integrity is ensuring that information is accurate and consistent and has not been manipulated. Availability ensures that information is accessible to authorized people when needed.

Case Study: Open Source + Business Intelligence

Tue, 25 Jan 2011 11:30:00 EST

Data-driven businesses are facing some tough challenges in today’s rapidly changing information landscape. As decision cycles continue to shrink, companies need to act on information within hours and minutes rather than weeks and days. At the same time, the volume of data that needs to be analyzed is growing exponentially. Business intelligence (BI) approaches that might have made sense a decade or even five years ago may no longer be the best fit for organizations that must quickly and affordably make sense of terabytes of incoming data that shows no sign of slowing down. For my company, MX Force, speedy data analysis is not simply a “nice to have,” it’s critical to our business. As a cloud-based provider of email security for organizations of all sizes, we need to identify the origins of spam, viruses and other potential threats for our clients, fast. But as our business has grown, so has the volume of email log data that we must store, filter, search, analyze and report on. Recently, we were challenged to find a database that could reliably enable quick and efficient ad-hoc queries on up to a year’s worth of email log data. Our staff uses this data to analyze and report on statistical information, and we also give our clients the ability to query their own logs to diagnose mail delivery issues. It was important to find a database that could deliver the high performance we required, but affordability and ease of administration were also of vital concern. These considerations prompted us to seek an open source solution.

What Makes Agile Agile?

Tue, 25 Jan 2011 05:45:00 EST

Silly question – or is it? How do you judge if a methodology can be classified as agile methodology? Can Iterative or Spiral development methodology be classified as agile? What about Six Sigma or Lean process? On what basis will decide will you decide? If you go by the Forrester classification, Iterative or Spiral development methodology is not agile where as Six Sigma and Lean is agile. In the survey report Agile Development Management Tools, Q2 2010, Forrester classifies Scrum, Agile Modeling, Feature-Driven Development, Test-Driven Development, eXtreme Programming, Lean Development, Microsoft Solution Framework for Agile, Agile Data Methods, Adaptive Software Development, Six Sigma, Crystal, Behavior-Driven Development and Dynamic System Development Methodology under agile methodology but classifies Rational Unified Process, Iterative Development or Spiral under Iterative Development.

Providing Extensible and Scalable SOA Infrastructure

Sun, 02 Jan 2011 03:30:00 EST

The XC10 and XI50 Integration is compelling. The idea behind the XI50-XC10 integration is to enable faster look-up of cached data and reduced processing at back-end tiers, with use of XC10 as a general purpose caching appliance. The XI50-XC10 integration has opened up many possibilities to economize on infrastructure costs and further leverage XC10s caching mechanism to speed up XI50 Authentication process. In simplest terms this integration amalgamates the better of two breeds of appliances. This integration speeds the look-up and processing done by XI50, by extensible and scalable cache enabled by XC10.

Ten Things IT Should Be Doing to Manage Unstructured Data – But Isn’t

Tue, 14 Dec 2010 08:45:00 EST

When it comes to protecting unstructured data, such as spreadsheets, documents, images and other data on file servers, most organizations acknowledge that their existing processes and risk profiles are less than ideal. Unfortunately, IT personnel – rather than data owners – are typically the ones making many of the decisions about permissions, acceptable use, and acceptable access review. And because IT personnel aren’t equipped with adequate business context around the growing volumes of unstructured data, they can only make a best effort guess as to how to manage and protect each data set. Until organizations shift the decision making responsibility to business data owners, IT carries the burden of enforcing rules for who can access what on shared file systems, and for keeping those structures current through data growth and user role changes. IT needs to determine who can access unstructured data, who should and is accessing it, and what is likely to be sensitive.

Business Intelligence Vendor Websites – How to Read Between the Lines

Thu, 02 Dec 2010 11:43:53 EST

This article is going to help you discover some key differences between vendors based on what they share on their Websites – and what they don’t. Read between the lines while looking at BI vendor Websites to quickly figure out which business intelligence vendors are probably right for you, and which ones aren’t. If you've begun looking for a business intelligence solution, you probably noticed very quickly that there are quite a few business intelligence vendors out there. Narrowing the overcrowded field of vendors in order to come up with your own business intelligence short list will usually start with a review of the vendors' Websites. Armed with your short list, you can begin contacting vendors to receive proposals. This article is going to help you discover some key differences between vendors based on what they share on their Websites - and what they don't. Read between the lines while looking at BI vendor Websites to quickly figure out which business intelligence vendors are probably right for you, and which ones aren't.

Effective Execution of Enterprise Architecture

Tue, 23 Nov 2010 10:09:26 EST

As architects, we spend far too much time debating the type of framework that we may want to use in order to deliver the business value or build the enterprise architecture. However there is an intrinsic assumption that we all make about the qualities of people involved in executing Enterprise Architecture. This article explores some of those key qualities...! Executing Enterprise Architecture is linked with the people who perform the task. The quality of the output is directly proportional to the quality of people who are involved irrespective of the framework that is being used. If an organization is setting its course for transformation, Alignment or Innovation agenda, it is very important to understand and acknowledge the qualities of people involved in defining the architecture roadmap.

Six Tips on How to Implement a Successful Channel Strategy

Thu, 18 Nov 2010 10:15:00 EST

The goal for any company is to create value for their customers. Selling through the channel can be an important sales strategy for any vendor if harnessed and prioritized correctly. While this approach can drive additional revenue and open up new sales opportunities, working in the channel can pose unique challenges as well. Creating a symbiotic relationship between the vendor and reseller is crucial. In order to put a solid channel strategy in place, there needs to be tight integration between each of the channel partners, VARs, systems integrators, distributors, and vendors. To move that forward, here are six tips that vendors should adhere to in order to develop a fruitful union.

From OLAP Cubes to ElastiCubes – The Natural Evolution of BI

Wed, 20 Oct 2010 15:13:35 EDT

Since the inception of BI and consequent entrance of OLAP technology into the space, the need for BI has been rapidly growing. Recognizing that OLAP-based solutions were (and still are) hard to introduce into a wider market, thought leaders and visionaries in the space have been since then trying to bring BI down to the masses through technological and conceptual innovation.

In-Memory BI Is Not the Future, It’s the Past

Thu, 07 Oct 2010 10:25:37 EDT

The hype surrounding in-memory BI has caused BI consultants, analysts and even vendors to spew out endless articles, blog posts and white papers on the subject. However, the concept of in-memory business intelligence is not new. So why all the hype now, what are the pros and cons of disk-based versus in-memory databases and what does the future hold? In recent times, one of the most popular subjects related to the field of Business Intelligence (BI) has been In-memory BI technology. The subject gained popularity largely due to the success of QlikTech, provider of the in-memory-based QlikView BI product. Following QlikTech’s lead, many other BI vendors have jumped on the in-memory “hype wagon,” including the software giant, Microsoft, which has been aggressively marketing PowerPivot, their own in-memory database engine.

New Internet Innovations

Mon, 04 Oct 2010 13:19:05 EDT

More and more knowledge is required to make sense of it all and seeking knowledge is a must in order for you to improve your skills to reach new goals and new horizons. How to widen internet borders? Nowadays, everyday reality dictates its own rules and demands in the way we operate and behave in our lifestyles. More and more knowledge is required to make sense of it all and seeking knowledge is a must in order for you to improve your skills to reach new goals and new horizons. So, the question is the following. What else can we add to that which we already know and how can help ourselves to find it? Many spheres of the newer high technologies always strains the mind to understand what is necessary, what is needed to be developed and deployed, again and again we have to ask ourselves this question.

Using Application Ratings to Foster DevOps

Mon, 27 Sep 2010 08:51:57 EDT

Last week I had the opportunity to have a hallway conversation with a CTO of a large software company about how the interactions between development and operations teams are changing. I asked his opinion on measuring the benefit of that collaboration. He noted while they did not have direct metrics for their teams, they found that having a rating system for applications under development did effect how developers approached their projects. Their rating system incorporated the expected operational characteristics of an application. For example, applications that must be as resilient as possible had a different set of ratings than applications with asynchronous or long running transactions. He said that once their developers understood the rating system, operational requirements were considered more throughly during the design phase. Additionally, they were more receptive to using existing operational knowledge as they were building the application. The system helped operations teams because it clearly prioritized the business importance of specific operational characteristics, which enabled better proactive problem analysis and prevention.

Measuring the Positive Impact of Devops

Thu, 09 Sep 2010 10:20:02 EDT

Fostering application collaboration between development and operations should be a cornerstone any business agility strategy. The amount of rework developers have to do to fix deployment rollbacks and application performance problems determines the upper limit on business agility. The more deployment and production problems your developers must fix the less time they have to develop new applications. One way to drive down the amount of developer rework is to improve how applications are designed and engineered for the production environment. This improvement is also a key motivation driving the culture of collaboration that permeates the devops movement. But how do we measure the benefit of that devops collaboration? More specifically how do we measure the devops benefit in terms of business agility and business outcomes?

Monitoring Web Applications Using Hyperic

Wed, 08 Sep 2010 00:46:00 EDT

Monitoring applications is an important aspect of IT industry. Huge investments are made in setting and maintaining the IT infrastructure be it cloud or physical. To ensure maximum performance across your business, problems have to be identified and resolved before they affect the users. Monitoring enables us to anticipate the issues and hence resolve them before they start appearing as problems to users. We need to have visibility into IT infrastructure to identify the issue origin. For example, by monitoring the applications proactively, we can figure out the root cause whether its poor performance is due to the problem at resource level or at application level or at any other place and take action before it starts impacting the user. It gives us more control and confidence on the application and hence helps us in meeting the service quality requirements.