Why application and infrastructure logging helps in achieving great things?

More information is always a good thing—especially when it is about maintaining and monitoring your application’s performance. And one sure-fire way to gather more information is to leverage application information along with environment data. In-context information generated and logged by the application itself can be invaluable when trying to diagnose and resolve anomalies during an application’s lifecycle. But, how do you leverage that effectively within your organization? The answer is simple—let’s automate!

Why log data is the mother of application maintenance?

In our daily practice, we see that log data is everywhere and that we need to utilize this data more often to bring value to the business and also to our delivery. By structuring and centralizing this gathered data we can leverage it in an efficient matter. The centralization is done through a log management tool which helps your problem and incident management process in various ways:

• First, if we face an issue, we can find the cause much faster because we utilize all the data that has been logged
• Second, if there are multiple issues detected, it helps in connecting the dots for advanced root cause analysis, even before these issues all together become a real problem.
• Third, notifications can be set when an anomaly is detected so that the issue is resolved proactively before it impacts the end-user experience

And besides these reasons, there are visualization in the form of metrics that helps in interpreting the data and make it easier, readable, and more importantly, understandable.

Say Yes to a higher customer satisfaction with application log management

Logs have been an essential part of troubleshooting application and infrastructure performance. They help provide visibility into how applications are running in each of the various infrastructure components. Leveraging the expertise of our AMS team and the different Capgemini experts, we reduced the amount of tickets with 40% on a monthly basis and we decreased the mean-time-to-resolve with an astonishing 95%. In a nutshell, application and infrastructure logging helps you in achieving:

• Optimization of the incident and problem resolving process
• Getting more comprehensive insights in how the applications and their infrastructure are behaving, how the technical teams can improve the delivery and how these teams can resolve incidents and problems proactively.
• Zero downtime deployments, better delivery according to the Service Level Agreements, and increased customer satisfaction, e.g. through faster problem resolution and less unforeseen outages.

Log management as a business enabler

One of the main advantages of implementing log management is the support it provides to the development and operational teams in identifying the real deep root cause analysis during a certain application issue. However, when you think from a business perspective, log management helps CIOs in having a more stable and enhanced process and could even help in achieving a higher conversion rate from the application by analyzing the data.

Being a global organization, using our On/Off and Rightshore^® capabilities and the value of our business-focused ADMnext portfolio, we have the experience, expertise as well as use cases to prove that application logging actually helps clients in utilizing data and getting the maximum out of this data. We can help our clients to be future-ready and agile to cater to dynamic business needs. Moreover, they can leverage the power of our log management offer as an ongoing project, as a ready-to-use offering, or even as a service.

May the power of automation be with you!

Relating business KPI’s to application and infrastructure metrics can be done manually, but is ad-hoc, expensive, and unreliable. No longer just a word, automation has today become a major requirement in both our customers’ businesses and our own. Automation helps in gathering and structuring all the data from the different server applications to a central point and translating that automatically into readable metrics, thus reducing a lot of human effort.

Automation is often perceived as a moving and hard achievable target. But that’s not the case. You can start from anywhere and scale up along the way. Application logging is one of the starting points that you can use as your point of departure for automation.

So, how do you plan to leverage automation effectively to optimize the performance of your organization? Which structured approach should be followed to start the journey? How do you know where you are in your automation journey and how do you measure your progress?

Driving innovation with disruptive business models is one of the key imperatives of our ADMnext portfolio and automation is one of the core techniques that we use to optimize and secure application landscapes. Ultimately, ADMnext allows you to excel in the fundamentals of ADM and expand your capabilities to be fully digitally ready, and innovate like never before. Start your automation journey, now!

And if you’d like to discuss more, please drop a note to me and I’ll be happy to help!

Author

Jaap van Arragon Continuous Improvement Manager, Automation Lead, Capgemini Netherlands View my profile