Do you feel helpless when there is an application upgrade in your enterprise? Are you equipped for the triage that follows, when production applications fail? Many enterprise administrators share the same problem. Enterprises depend heavily on IT to drive their businesses. Frequently changing business processes and a heterogeneous application infrastructure make it even more difficult for operations to maintain business critical web applications. This results in unplanned downtimes and poorly performing web applications, which affects business.
The job of IT Managers becomes more difficult as there are different stakeholders in the whole application management scenario. Given that the primary goal for application management in enterprises is to improve business productivity and efficiency, what enterprises need today are relevant and cost effective solutions to ensure that the IT personnel and other participants get relevant information to meet their unique needs.
Some of the common problems faced by SMBs are:
Why Administrators dread Application Management solutions?
Are your pages rendered completely?
You need to monitor whether your web pages show the full content. Some web pages may be accessing data from a database. If the database connectivity is lost, the content may not get fully rendered. This could be easily monitored if you are able to check the percentage change in page size every time the web page is requested.
There is an additional benefit if the percentage change is regularly monitored: Webmasters are warned when important web pages are modified by internal or external factors.
The trend of business applications moving away from the traditional mainframe to web enabled applications using AJAX, J2EE, .Net, JSP, PHP etc. have thrown more challenges to application administrators. With a heterogeneous application infrastructure to support, application management products need to equip administrators with the right tools so that they gain more insight into these applications.
Consider the case in point:
A pharmaceutical company had trouble servicing their customers 08:30 AM: Calls flood their help desk with enquires to make purchases. Conclusion The application server farm could not withstand the increased load. ASA decides to add an extra server to the cluster. The problem was present all the time but got magnified due to increased user access on that particular day. The incident resulted in lost customers and unknown amount of money in sales. |
Siloed Management Strategy adds to the woes
Lack of visibility between management silos does not help as they just give a sense of false security about the IT infrastructure.
On an individual level, specialists like application server administrators, database administrators and server administrators, may not be able to help resolve problems that affect a business application in quick time. They need all-round knowledge and tools that provide insight into the various applications in the server farm.
Traditional Systems Management Tools are not enough
You need tools that help you gain insight into your tiered web infrastructure. Traditional systems management tools could probably say applications are running but fail to give the needed insight on the quality of service. These added insights would help complement existing system management tools and add value to the IT team.
Application Management solutions need to provide a single console to manage the heterogeneous IT infrastructure. They should help add the much needed business application context to IT resources. This would equip operations with the needed insight to help understand what business processes get affected when resources fail and also to help take proactive measures.
Typical management solutions should have:
ManageEngine Applications Manager dashboards provide insights into the web application infrastructure and all its supporting systems such as Servers, Web Servers, Application Servers, Database Servers and custom applications. Supplemented by out-of-the-box solutions and an agentless approach, IT administrators can easily manage their business critical applications.
ManageEngine Applications Manager constantly keeps track of resource availability and performance so that end-users are not affected due to poor quality of service. IT operators and administrators can view the critical status of resources and be notified of any problems in real time. With this, real-time monitoring of data centers and IT resources become easy.
Enterprise administrators face a new challenge with complex web infrastructure. They need affordable tools that will help them gain more insight and proactively manage their business critical applications. ManageEngine Applications Manager provides intuitive dashboards and helps add a business context to their heterogeneous application infrastructure. With its simple approach, ManageEngine Applications Manager offers SMBs the option to put in place a comprehensive Application Management solution at an affordable price.
For more details on ManageEngine Applications Manager and how it can help manage your applications and servers, please contact sales@manageengine.com or our website www.appmanager.com.
