“App-Hugger” report

10 Senior IT Executives On the Challenges of the Application Age www.JumpSoft.net JumpSoft “App-­‐Hugger” Report Summer 2014 “hybrid IT…”
“…application
level visibility”
“transparency…”
“…application
automation”
10 SENIOR IT EXECUTIVES GIVE THEIR UNVARNISHED VIEWS ON THE SHIFT FROM THE INFRASTRUCTURE-­‐CENTRIC WORLD TO THE APPLICATION-­‐CENTRIC WORLD Enterprises are recognizing the realities of an increasingly application-­‐centric world, such as achieving the right level of visibility and control at the application level and the ability to provide transparency to internal customers regarding application status. www.jumpsoft.net 10 Senior IT Executives On the Challenges of the Application Age www.JumpSoft.net About this Series JumpSoft publishes these “App-­‐Hugger” briefs and reports as part of its founding mission: To increase application uptime by integrating visibility and automated control at the application layer—and by reducing the chaos and confusion typically associated with enterprise Application Management. Application Hugger: Someone who recognizes that “applications equal business” and is therefore obsessed with application availability, particularly from the end user perspective—in the same manner that the “server hugger” focuses on infrastructure monitoring. 10 Senior IT Executives On the Challenges of the Application Age www.JumpSoft.net 1.
About this Report This report summarizes one-­‐on-­‐one interviews with ten senior IT executives on the challenges they face around the topics of application visibility and recovery. The interviews were conducted during Winter 2013 by London, Ink, a marketing consulting and research firm that was engaged by JumpSoft, an Application Management software company. Why Did We Do These Interviews?
JumpSoft believes IT is quickly moving past the “Infrastructure Age” into the “Application Age,” and we wanted to learn what CIOs and other senior IT executives believe are the implications of this shift. What is the “Application Age”?
For years, organizations have had plenty of effective ways to monitor and manage servers, databases and networks. The “Application Age,” is the new, app-­‐centric era where Applications = Business. The IT department runs the application and certainly the infrastructure, but the business owns the revenue, cost-­‐savings and user experience that the app must deliver. Why is JumpSoft Publishing The Results?
The interviews yielded insights, context and depth regarding the challenges facing senior IT executives related to application and system uptime. We hope that sharing this information with others in the IT community—particularly those responsible for operations and application management—will provide them with information they can use in planning their IT strategies and budgets. Observations and Insights
Because of the small number of interviews (ten), the information contained in this report is anecdotal—and obviously not statistically significant. As such, we are presenting this information as observations made by your peers rather than conclusions based on quantifiable data. Who Did We Interview?
The interviewees requested that their names and organizations not be named so that they could speak candidly about their priorities and challenges. • CIO, Global Research Foundation • CIO, IT Consulting Firm Serving Private and Government Sectors • CTO and Co-­‐Founder, Enterprise IT Consulting Firm • Chief Architect, IT Solutions and Consulting Firm • CEO & Founder, SaaS Company and Former CIO for Fast-­‐Growth Company • CEO & Founder of Managed IT Services Firm • Executive Vice President, IT Infrastructure Solution Provider • Senior IT Project Leader, Fortune 1000 Company • Project Leader, Outsourced Software Development Firm • Enterprise Software Consultant, Large Government IT Services Firm
10 Senior IT Executives On the Challenges of the Application Age www.JumpSoft.net 2.
What We Heard An unprecedented set of challenges face today’s IT management. It’s no longer just about keeping servers, networks and databases up and running. IT executives must meet SLAs that span a complex new “hybrid” infrastructure that integrates virtual machines, the cloud, SaaS and legacy apps as well as custom and web applications. Adding to these significant day-­‐to-­‐day operational challenges is an increasing demand from internal customers for not just better performance—i.e. “Google and Dropbox never go down, why do we?”-­‐-­‐
but also more visibility into the applications that have become the revenue and cost-­‐saving engines of the business. In fact, it’s widely accepted that for most companies, the application is the business. Automation of key processes at the application level is increasingly important to achieving performance levels within limited staffing and budget constraints—so long as it is intelligent enough to alleviate concerns about automating critical applications. What it Means Recognizing all of these challenges, senior IT executives responsible for application performance and management are looking beyond the piece parts of their network (servers, routers, switches and drives) and focusing on the application layer itself in an effort to better manage and understand what’s happening in real time. They will need solutions native to the application layer with the visibility and control that legacy solutions gave them 20 years ago at the network layer. The next generation of application management tools must go beyond runbooks and runbook automation to provide intelligent automation that can predictably and reliably manage critical processes such as automated application recovery. IT executives must also have tools that provide appropriate levels of application visibility to internal customers—without giving them access to the applications themselves. This next generation of tools should more closely resemble the simplicity and ease of use that is found in the world of consumer applications. Enterprise applications need to deploy fast, require minimum amounts of training and demonstrate an ROI in weeks and months, not years. 10 Senior IT Executives On the Challenges of the Application Age www.JumpSoft.net 3.
What IT Executives Told Us a. IT Operations Has Evolved From Back Office Issue to Boardroom Challenge
Senior IT executives still grapple with the same issues they’ve faced for years: Chief among those is the ability to prevent—or quickly detect and remediate—issues before their users experience downtime, hang-­‐ups and sluggish performance. But as senior IT leaders know all too well, the stakes have now been raised: as applications have become engines of revenue generation and cost savings, the responsiveness of IT to business drivers and the impact of downtime are being scrutinized more carefully by those outside of IT, including business owners (internal customers) and CXOs across all business functions, executive management (CEO, COO and CFO) and in many cases boards of directors and investors. All of this happens in the face of increasing pressure to deliver more code changes more frequently—with limited staff counts. Representative Quotes “The problems are at the application, hardware and bandwidth levels. These applications support core business processes-­‐-­‐procurement, document management and engineering. Our customer was asking ‘what’s going on?’ but no one knew what was going on. The project owner ends up screaming in frustration.” “From an IT perspective, we have to keep expanding infrastructure to be nimble enough to support multiple customer types. We have to be able to set up an office near a customer within a few days of signing a deal.” “Global expansion presents challenges in different areas such as data privacy and getting suppliers stood up, even where there’s limited infrastructure.” “How do we help make business processes be more efficient? How do we make systems responsive?” 10 Senior IT Executives On the Challenges of the Application Age www.JumpSoft.net b. The “Hybrid” IT Environment Mixing Legacy, Web and SaaS Systems is the New
Norm
IT executives are dealing with the real world issues presented by a sometimes chaotic mash-­‐up of legacy, custom and new applications, infrastructure and tools developed or purchased over the last decade or two. This is very different from the homogenous modern enterprise depicted by analysts and marketers who describe a neat and glossy cloud-­‐based environment that promises to alleviate the myriad operational challenges of “old IT.” This “hybrid” IT environment appears to be a fact of life that is not going away any time soon. Representative Quotes “In the old days you had stovepipes that controlled everything. If it broke, you controlled it. Now, this web site or software needs a tax calculator you get this web service, integrate it with FedEx via an API. Now you’re tying together multiple services from internal and external sources to build an application-­‐-­‐across multiple data centers.” “It used to be just monitor the CPU and bandwidth. Now that healthy server could be tied to a web service that’s down. There are more moving parts that we don’t own within our applications. And with virtualization it’s even harder to tell where the problem is.” “We run 400 applications, from Citrix to web-­‐based to client-­‐server to pure desktop, some are 25 years old.” “We run a hybrid environment with multiple COTS packages. All on premises with plans to move to the cloud in 1-­‐2 years.” “Historically IT had been decentralized and fragmented—each line of business had its own IT department, and we had a large R&D facility with its own IT. Each one had different virus protection, staff and help desks-­‐-­‐lot of complexity to manage. Our charter was to centralize—to create efficiencies through technology to help the lines of business be more process efficient and effective.” 10 Senior IT Executives On the Challenges of the Application Age www.JumpSoft.net c. Managing the Hybrid IT Environment Increases Complexity—and Reactivity
Despite investments in tools and processes to deliver high service levels via proactive and preventative support, IT executives’ day-­‐to-­‐day mode can still be crisis-­‐driven and reactive. Additional layers of anecdotal or incidental feedback as well as “optical” or subjective input contribute to the reactivity. Representative Quotes “Applications were failing and nobody knew. When they did know, 20 people sat in a room passing the buck pointing fingers. Just everyone looking at their own bit and saying ‘it looks OK to me.’” “It’s more complicated now; there are more layers. First it was just desktop, then server, and then shared resources, now all these layers. The customer is saying ‘what’s going on?’ No one knew what was going on. As a customer it’s very scary.” “The project leader is screaming, ‘we need this back up.’ Lots of frustration.” “Even when the immediate issue gets resolved, we fear repeat because we didn’t know what happened. So the underlying issues weren’t fixed. We sometimes live in perpetual fear that it might happen again tomorrow.” “We send and receive lots of email and go to lots of meetings. You’d think by having quarterly reviews with business owners you’d know the hot buttons-­‐-­‐but you’d be wrong. It’s the crisis du jour and how that impacts the technology plans.” “In launching a new financial services client we needed to set up new reports, tie into the trading desk, address benchmarks and compliance. But as it turns out, the executive in charge at the client had an issue: The pictures on the web site didn’t look right. Optics were what counted, unfortunately.” “In our business there are still too many ambulance drivers and not enough people investing in a plan.” “The part we still struggle with is anecdotal. How do we capture this information and make it actionable? We have 5,000 transactions a month and 1 or 2 each month are negative. Unfortunately those are what you hear about in staff meetings.” 10 Senior IT Executives On the Challenges of the Application Age www.JumpSoft.net “The trend is that everyone is marching toward a virtual environment when pieces of an app may run on public cloud, data center and private cloud. They all need to be tied together and management will be a nightmare without the right tool.” d. IT Knows It Must Increasingly Provide Transparency to Internal Customers,
Including Business Owners and Executive Management
As noted above, the tighter link between applications and top and bottom line business success has caused business owners and executive management to demand more visibility into the health of applications in real-­‐time. This creates the challenge of providing those outside of IT operations with a high-­‐level, user-­‐friendly (i.e. non-­‐technical) view depicting applications’ “up or down” status—without giving direct access to the underlying components. Some IT leaders embrace this open approach, while others believe it would only be a headache for IT executives “who operate more of a black box,” or “have something to hide.” Representative Quotes “Businesses are going towards transparency-­‐-­‐IT is reluctant to do it. It used to be, ‘just trust us’—a black box.” “IT doesn’t like to be held to account in my opinion. The business side is pushing for more transparency—it is an expectation. It is about consumerization—they want it and want it now.” “For some CIOs the real scare is whether they have a lot to hide.” “My direct reports would be resistant because they don’t want to open the kimono. It would have to be a mandate from the CIO.” “If there are customers that have critical apps, they need to see their health. But the CIO would have to be transparent and willing to give access.” “Some IT executives would say ‘wow, I want that visibility myself. It makes my life easier, and I can see how the environment is performing.” “I’m confident I do a great job, and I want to show customers how I’m performing.” “As a new CIO, I would need visibility because I don’t know what’s going on. This kind of visibility can help find out where bodies are buried and be useful vehicle to justify funding.” 10 Senior IT Executives On the Challenges of the Application Age www.JumpSoft.net e. Requirements Always Increase; Budgets Never Seem To
IT executives have stopped bemoaning the fact that they have to “do more with less,” and are actively seeking ways to drive down costs while maintaining performance and service levels. These challenges are intensifying as the number and pace of applications being developed and deployed increase—driven by business owners (customers) responsible for top and bottom line improvements. Representative Quotes “You do capacity planning every year. Your client base is increasing, but the CFO doesn’t want you to spend more money. So you say, ‘how can we spend the minimum and deliver to internal and external clients.’” “The comparison points for performance have changed. In the old days, everyone benchmarked against internal applications. Now internal customers are looking outside and comparing to services like Google, Amazon.com and Dropbox-­‐-­‐which never seem to go down. The expectation of uptime has increased because of ‘consumerization’ of IT.” f. System Performance Management Tends to Focus on Infrastructure and Requires
Multiple Tools
Strategies for ensuring system performance focus on the various infrastructure layers. Some IT executives strive for near “carrier grade” uptime by over-­‐investing in infrastructure and redundancy. Some have invested in multiple monitoring tools for different levels of infrastructure—physical servers, networks, virtual servers, cloud, databases and other software layers. Representative Quotes “We are very hands on in terms of application performance. We use WhatsUp Gold and Solarwinds for monitoring. For network monitoring we use OpNet, which was purchased by Riverbed.” “We run two data centers with redundant dark fiber, two ways. We have six pipes in each direction—and replicate data between the two data centers. We set up clusters in wide setup—VMware and storage are set up on both sides and mirrored. Every app exists both places so there’s failover.” 10 Senior IT Executives On the Challenges of the Application Age www.JumpSoft.net “In addition to the redundancy, we have some custom monitoring tools to see if services are running and give us alerts. But some of the older apps (like web sites) use outside services that ping external properties—they are scripted to hit different parts of external web pages so we know within a few seconds whether response time is slow or it is not working.” “We have a total of 200 apps so the environment isn’t that complex. Attacking the problem with highly skilled people and the right tools gives us an effective level of monitoring. For internal monitoring, VMware has tools to monitor performance and alert us if there’s a problem. We don’t have a consolidated dashboard to monitor everything” “Orion from Solarwinds was used before-­‐-­‐infrastructure and server monitoring, but no dashboards, metrics or KPIs-­‐-­‐nothing on apps or from an end user perspective.” “SiteScope is open on every tech person’s desk. If it went yellow you stopped everything and fixed it before it went red.” “We used BMC Patrol and Sitescope. If you got a Patrol alert on server in your stack, you drop everything.” “There’s no single tool that will do everything we need it to do, so we cobble it together ourselves.” “Unicenter, Tivoli, Patrol, Openview. All are so focused on individual metrics instead of application performance mgmt. It is very difficult to do.” “If there’s a problem with a particular transaction, where would I go to find and fix it? Where are the top 10 places to look? Trying to do a runbook for the sys admin on the night shift can get really hairy and nasty.” “We looked at Gartner and found OpNet, OpTier, Nebula and HP. But the big challenge is that we struggled as to how to use them. With million-­‐dollar software you have to know how to use it or it’s a waste. You can monitor data but how do you interpret and use it?” “Projects have their own IT function. Some have been forced to develop their own monitoring with scripts—web pages with the green arrow up, etc. Developers will build what they need just to get the job done.” 10 Senior IT Executives On the Challenges of the Application Age www.JumpSoft.net “We monitor at the infrastructure, database and application levels-­‐-­‐all are points of failure. We monitor each layer separately. We use different tools for each level-­‐-­‐
optimized for each level.” “To a large extent, the IT department has various tools to monitor server health and application health. Regarding apps themselves, the monitoring tools typically show that things appear to be working-­‐-­‐servers are responsive, responding to various health checks. But application performance and responsiveness go beyond what automated tools can always detect. Tools may say the site is healthy but users can’t accomplish the task.” g. Heavy Skepticism Exists Regarding a ‘Single Pane of Glass’ Across All
Infrastructure
“Silos,” “stovepipes,” and “finger pointing” are a fact of life in IT departments now more than ever, as today’s typical “hybrid” IT environment is a complex blend of multiple legacy systems, custom applications, SaaS services and web-­‐based apps running on various operating systems, databases and/or software stacks and residing on a wide range of platforms from cloud to virtual hosts to on-­‐premise servers. There is a vast array of tools for server, network, storage, OS and database monitoring. Some vendors have added functionality to monitor applications. But after years of hype about the “single pane of glass,” no single tool can provide one view across all infrastructure, networks, databases and applications. Representative Quotes “We had one primary screen. If you had a problem you went to another and another. If you had different problem you had to go right to the server.” “A single dashboard doesn’t work no matter what a vendor says. We have dozens of monitors—this one is for the backup team, this one is for the web team, this one for the trading team, etc.” “So many IT departments are in what I call the ‘CPU ghetto’ of CPU, disk and network. They get info but no insight.” “It’s easy to say ‘single pane of glass,’ but how do you get there? You peel back the onion and it needs too much customization.” “You can cobble together pieces but there are no tools out there today able to do it.” 10 Senior IT Executives On the Challenges of the Application Age www.JumpSoft.net “When a vendors says ‘single pane of glass,’ I say, ‘Oh that’s so cute, go back to your cubicle.’ CIOs have been burned because solutions take time to implement and maintain. Beware of someone who comes in and says they’ve got this figured out.” “At a previous job, we had an area in the data center where the sys admin to server ratio was 1 to 1. Because these things were so lovingly handcrafted and tuned, the only person who could run it was the person who built it.” h. Integrated Visibility and Action at the Application Level Would Be of Significant
Value
While plenty of excellent tools exist to monitor piece parts—individual system building blocks, including servers, networks, databases and specific applications—IT departments do not have the necessary visibility and control at the application level. Even if individual elements are working, no one can answer the critical big picture questions: “Is the application up or down?”; “If it’s down, why?”; and “When will it be back up?”. Representative Quotes “I like the idea of focusing on the app behavior itself—that would be unique. I could monitor but also do something about it because we would be aware of the dependencies that enterprises have like the web app depends on SiteMinder, which is integrated with the authorization platform, which is tied to LDAP and databases.” “I like the ‘data aggregator’ idea-­‐-­‐no matter what the source. I don’t need to go to each tool to get the data. My team can use just one dashboard, then they can drill in.” “Everyone else’s products-­‐-­‐Tivoli, IBM, Nagios-­‐-­‐were event network monitor tools going into the application space. Oracle Enterprise Manager was built to manage Oracle apps. They’ve tried to extend it to be app neutral.” “OpenView and EMC are network focused-­‐-­‐layer 4 and below-­‐-­‐maybe layer 5. It’s very ‘kluge’ to extend to anything beyond its own code.” “We absolutely had a pain point of not being able to look at things holistically-­‐-­‐all applications.” “We had a number of apps. It would be good to show relationships between them. We were not that mature from an IT perspective—we did not have mature interfaces between systems.” 10 Senior IT Executives On the Challenges of the Application Age www.JumpSoft.net “At my previous company we had a dictionary or control document that showed interfaces between different apps-­‐-­‐what one app would send to another so they could talk.” “Network management and monitoring tools are great for the network level. They’re good at telling me state of the network, but not fixing the state.” “I need to be able to manage things and do something about them.” “A dashboard across systems—sounds interesting. The question is, if you gave the tool to an individual, would they have the expertise to drill into specific pieces and parts and do something meaningful?” i. Automated Application Control is Inevitable Due to Necessity of Driving Down
Costs—But Can Seem “Scary” to Some
IT executives believe that automation holds promise-­‐-­‐and will inevitably be embraced—as a way to drive down costs, particularly for functions like automated or “push-­‐button” application recovery. Automating these processes would reduce reliance on inefficient, hard-­‐to-­‐manage scripts as well as the need for precious, high value resources to perform manual, repetitive tasks. For some IT leaders, automation raises concerns about compromising control and security—although they see it as instrumental to achieving bottom line goals. Representative Quotes “To have a piece of software programmatically tell you there are issues and where those issues are and then reboot based on business rules can get really scary. You have to get there once they’re comfortable.” “How do you fix problems in the middle of the night? Rebooting server normally requires access via the server admin. But if you can program the resolution process in business rules you could instruct someone to press that button.” “We do restarts all the time and it almost always solves problems. It actually puts a balm on it. We don’t automate the restart because then we can’t figure out what the problem is. If you were to automate restarts you would need order of operations. We script stuff to do this ourselves.” “Automation—such as automated resolution—is interesting. Although it sends a shiver down my spine. It’s scary to let a script go off and do it. At some point the industry will 10 Senior IT Executives On the Challenges of the Application Age www.JumpSoft.net have to become more comfortable with this. You’ve already scripted the action—now you want the option to invoke or trigger that script when something happens.” “Automation is definitely not scary. For me it is run of the mill. We do automated builds and use scripts to perform steps necessary for version control—to build components in a particular order so that dependencies are preserved. We use the same tool for deployment.” “Currently we do not do automated resolution. In a large enough environment, where you can take individual pieces down without taking down entire system, rebooting servers are no problem. In a system where there may be an intermittent issue, my personal preference is to find the root cause and fix that. “To resolve automatically would be very useful. There are specific things that need to happen: take the database offline, put up a maintenance page, the load balancer needs to redirect traffic, run a command against the virtual machine to increase memory and bring the database back up online. Automating that would be incredibly useful.” j. Complexity Around Integration and Deployment Are Biggest Fears Regarding
New IT Platforms
Partly due to over-­‐promises and under-­‐delivery by vendors—and hype by trade publications and analysts regarding new technologies—IT executives are understandably skeptical about investing in new enterprise management tools and technologies. While many tools have ultimately delivered value, the process has been fraught with delays, surprises, unexpected requirements and customization and additional complexities, resulting in delays and cost overruns during deployment. Added to this are the challenges IT executives face in getting buy-­‐in from their own teams to implement, use and maintain these tools. Representative Quotes “How much effort is really going to be required to install and configure this? You always need to tweak this, tweak that.” “Internal process wise, we would need huge a culture change in how people work. ‘OK, now you have to work with this tool.’ Even if it makes their life easier it doesn’t always get implemented.” “Tivoli and Unicenter are too complex. Big cost and time to get value. It doesn’t give you sense of value for the effort expended.” 10 Senior IT Executives On the Challenges of the Application Age www.JumpSoft.net “One of the ones we like but the staff was resistant to using it was Appnet. Because it required some effort—it was not that easy to use. We used it for one year to diagnose and address all the problems, but we didn’t renew because it was a couple hundred thousand dollars.” “The only thing with any new tool or implementation: if I couldn’t get my staff to buy in they’re not going to update it. Then it will fail.” “You need to know what a tool’s built-­‐in capability is to discover what’s out there in your environment—to have a library of modules to give insights without the effort to customize.” “People are over complexity. They seek out non-­‐complicated solutions. Big software, big ticket, big negotiation, big install time and complexity are over. The days of making IT confounding and intimidating are over.” “Software can be complex but it should not be complicated.” “Consumerization is hitting enterprise IT in a big way in things like utility and productivity software. But core applications are still big and heavy.” 10 Senior IT Executives On the Challenges of the Application Age www.JumpSoft.net About JumpSoft
JumpSoft is a n ext generation provider of Application Management software. JumpSoft’s flagship product, JumpCenter, is the first application-­‐ and p latform-­‐
agonistic Application M anagement software that delivers three important breakthroughs to help alleviate the chaos and confusion of managing a portfolio of diverse applications running on d ifferent platforms: •
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Visibility across any and all of an enterprise’s applications regardless of type or platform; The ability to recover any application with the p ush of a button; and Rapid, lightweight integration and implementation–in minutes not weeks. Learn more at www.jumpsoft.net.