Managed Service Providers have a big task these days. A few years ago applications were much less complex and understanding those application architectures and dependencies before on-boarding was much more simple. These days we have applications that combine classic architecture, service oriented architecture, cloud architecture, big data components, etc… On-boarding a new customer application can be risky and if it goes wrong can leave a bad taste in your new clients mouth.
The risk alone is cringe worthy so to minimize that risk most MSPs seek out and pay top dollar for experts that know about the particular type of application they need to on-board. This is a pretty effective solution from a risk perspective but from a cost perspective this takes away from the MSPs bottom line.
Reduce Risk Without Driving Up Cost
Some of the best MSPs out there have figured out that there is a way to substantially reduce on-boarding risk, time and cost. Here is the secret recipe these MSPs have discovered:
- Automatic discovery and rendering of all application components (Figure 1)
- Automatic discovery and correlation of application dependencies (Figure 1)
- Automatic detection and identification of application problems (Figure 2)
- Automatic discovery and correlation of application load and resource consumption. (Figure 3)
The recipe above is all about letting the right tools collect, analyze, correlate, and visualize the important application aspects that every MSP needs to know before they attempt to on-board a customers application. The alternative is spending a bunch of time and money trying to manually piece together this information from tribal knowledge, log files, shell scripts, trouble tickets, etc…
Figure 1: Application components, flows, and dependencies.
Figure 2: Automatic detection and identification of application problems.
Figure 3: Capture and correlation of resource consumption.
Verification and Validation
An awesome side effect to using a tool for all of those tasks above is that you can use the same tool to prove to your new customers that you successfully moved their application onto your platform. Verifying the architecture, response times, stability, and dependencies is critical to calling any application move a success so if you use the same tool for your before and after analysis you are way ahead of the game.
All of the functionality mentioned in this blog post is available today in AppDynamics Pro. If you plan on moving an application you need to see for yourself how much AppDynamics Pro can help. Click here to begin your free self-service trial of AppDynamics Pro today.
