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Let AI Manage your infrastructure
Let AI Manage your infrastructure

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Businesses may have the most sophisticated apps, but the application itself and the infrastructure running it can let them down. Every business has experienced this – and this lack of performance has a cost attached. A survey in 2020 across 22 nations found that the hourly cost of downtime for high-priority applications was $67,651 per hour. The cost of downtime for normal applications came to $61,642 per hour. Of the businesses polled, 95 percent said they experienced unexpected downtime.[i] One popular mitigation strategy is to use highly available cloud infrastructure. However, this still does not guarantee that an application will not run at a sub-optimal level. There are many reasons for sluggish application performance and quick issue identification and resolution can prevent business loss while ensuring that user experience and satisfaction are not affected.

Most businesses spend millions of dollars monitoring their applications. Entire armies of agents spend endless hours, 24X7, going over troubleshooting checklists, pinging URLs, logging issues and updating monitoring reports, and doing an infra-level activity.

However, here is what typically happens: A user of, say, Salesforce, cannot access their account resulting in the user logging a ticket which can take hours to resolve. The resolution may require an L2 or an L3 engineer to intervene. Or CPU usage of a server may be high, slowing down applications. By the time the problem is flagged, and an engineer kills a few processes on the server, hours of productive time can be lost. The solution lies in automating the process and using pro-active application monitoring, basic root cause analysis, auto-remediation, and reporting.

This solution, WatchDog, for example, can pro-actively monitor over 100 URLs to ensure application uptime was maintained and user experience did not deteriorate.

The WatchDog has several outstanding features:

It can be utilized to keep an eye on tickets created by end-users and act on them. The bot picks up the service request from the ticketing tool and starts performing actions based on defined keywords. It can, for example, assign infrastructure to a new user, provision computes power at a data center through machine-readable definition files, or resolve outages. Auto remediation of tickets results in saving MTTR and improves infrastructure and application uptime.

It can perform advanced activities such as disk clean-up and software package push.

It can re-start processes and do basic checks, identify the root cause of the problem, and, as mentioned earlier, trigger auto-remediation processes

What has happened is magical: The application monitoring and performance management system went from reactive to proactive within 6 weeks (time taken to implement the solution) The bots have been integrated with Power BI. This allows the business to generate daily, weekly and monthly reports. In addition, the business leadership has access to an intelligent and interactive dashboard for real-time updates and visualizations. The end result, this is a technology-driven process that is not people-dependent; it is attrition and shrinkage proof; it eliminates the need for complex knowledge transfer when people change; the business can run tighter with more frequent 24X7 checks on its applications.

WatchDog can go beyond automated and intelligent application monitoring and performance management. The bots can simulate users' actions or paths on a site, application, software and even hardware then monitor their performance (functionality, availability, and response time). The bots can test applications 24X7 or test new applications before going live. This is a handy capability that can be combined with passive monitoring to provide visibility on application health during off-peak hours when transaction volumes are low.

Application health is of primary importance today, as businesses become technology-dependent. Pro-active and automated application monitoring has become a basic business need. Using automation, businesses can get a handle on root cause analysis and trend lines enabling faster resolution and improving user satisfaction.

This solution meets all the criteria for a modern, automated, application management system. It is also highly scalable. This is a major advantage as businesses keep adding new applications all the time. All that needs to be done is add URLs to the master list and an automation tool takes over. There is no third-party software to purchase, install and maintain. Or agent hiring, training, and retention, to worry about. The solution can also be integrated with logs and analytics tools (like Splunk) to execute a variety of processes when required.

Furthermore, this technology exists to deliver and roll out the solution in a remote, zero-touch model. Application monitoring and maintenance have never been as simple, inexpensive, fail-proof, or easy to acquire.

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Reference: [i] https://rcpmag.com/blogs/scott-bekker/2020/06/application-downtime-costs.asp

 


About the Authors:

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Hitesh Joshi
Lead Consultant,
Automation, ITC Infotech

 

Hitesh is a Lead Consultant for the Automation Service Line of ITC Infotech. In his current role, Hitesh interacts with global customers to understand and address the Automation requirements. Furthermore, supporting them in numerous ways, like finding out the Automation scope, setting up the Automation pipeline, feasibility analysis, complexity assessment, ROI calculation, design, documentation, and development. He has been with ITC Infotech for about three years now. Hitesh focuses on technologies that can enhance the end-user experience, improve productivity, and result in cost takeout.

 

 

 

 

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Saurabh Srivastava
Senior Project Manager,
Infra, ITC Infotech

 

 In his current role, Saurabh manages the development team, customer-facing, solution designing, RPA - Consultation, and is responsible for end-to-end management of projects from initiation phase to delivery. He is skilled in establishing and implementing ‘best practice’ processes across the organization to ensure effectiveness resulting in reduced costs and improved service delivery.

 

 

 

 

Author image
Himanshu Gauba
General Manager &
Service Line Head,
ITC Infotech

Himanshu is a seasoned Service Delivery professional with 22+ years of overseas & domestic experience in leading Service Delivery Organizations and managing large size Services teams to meet client business goals.

He has extensive experience in Agile, Dev Ops, Automation, Cloud, Program Management, Vendor Management, Project Engagement, and Client Relationship Management. Leading, managing complex development (System Integration) programs across various technologies and also leading and managing large Application Management programs. Experienced in delivering services to multiple Fortune 500 clients across various industries. Has a great reputation in global delivery management, building great client relationships, managing a large delivery portfolio, excelling in cross-sell/upsell, team growth, and Business Operations.

 


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ITC Infotech is a leading global technology services and solutions provider, led by Business and Technology Consulting. ITC Infotech provides business-friendly solutions to help clients succeed and be future-ready, by seamlessly bringing together digital expertise, strong industry specific alliances and the unique ability to leverage deep domain expertise from ITC Group businesses. The company provides technology solutions and services to enterprises across industries such as Banking & Financial Services, Healthcare, Manufacturing, Consumer Goods, Travel and Hospitality, through a combination of traditional and newer business models, as a long-term sustainable partner. ITC Infotech is a wholly owned subsidiary of ITC Ltd. ITC is one of India’s leading private sector companies and a diversified conglomerate with businesses spanning Consumer Goods, Hotels, Paperboards and Packaging, Agri Business and Information Technology. For more information, please visit: http://www.itcinfotech.com/

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