Jean-Pierre (JP) Garbani of the analyst firm Forrester recently wrote a research paper titled “Technology Spotlight: Automate Application Performance Management – Automate Your Incident Management Process With Run Book Automation“. In this paper JP discusses the fact that IT must embrace automation if they are to be successful moving forward. He goes on to describe Run Book Automation (RBA) and how it applies to Application Performance Management (APM).
One of the most interesting parts of the research note is a graphical depiction of the intersection between APM and RBA. While I can’t show that image in this blog post I can say that it is a spot on depiction of how RBA works within AppDynamics. For those who are not familiar, AppDynamics decided to lead the APM industry in a new direction by listening to our customers and making RBA an important and fully integrated part of our product.
If you take nothing else away from this blog post or from JPs research paper you need to understand this key insight… The reason APM based RBA works so much better than traditional RBA is because APM understands exactly which application nodes are impacted at any given time and can perform run book remediation on those nodes without any input from a user.
The Old Way
Traditional RBA requires that you write tests to act as triggers for run book workflows. You would run these tests against pre-defined sets of infrastructure and application components when there is a problem so that your runbooks can fix any known issues. If your application and infrastructure change you need to manually modify the list components that are getting tested. This manual update process has been the downfall of RBA and other technologies (CMDB anyone?) as people have come to realize the time investment required to keep everything current. This problem is amplified by todays dynamic application technologies like virtualization and cloud computing.
Process flow and timeline of classic RBA.
The New Way
Forrester and AppDynamics agree that the answer to the traditional RBA problem described above is by using APM to dynamically track the current state of application and infrastructure components as well as identify problems that trigger run book workflows for resolution. Identification of issues from within the application and in real time is a giant step forward from the pre-determined interval testing of traditional RBA. And when you combine this capability with real time business metrics you get a new capability that enables the business to react immediately to problems that have nothing to do with IT.
Process flow and timeline of APM based RBA.
Application run book automation can be used by any organization large or small. If there are issues within your environment that have known fixes then you can use application RBA to automatically detect and remediate those problems within seconds. Stop wasting your time doing repetitive tasks and try AppDynamics for free today. If you’d like to read the Forrester research paper in its entirety you can download it for free by clicking here.
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