9 Signs You Have an Application Availability Problem

You’ve heard the saying “recognizing a problem is the first step in solving it.”  But, many small, medium, and surprisingly, even large enterprise businesses aren’t aware that their application availability isn’t what it should be.

Read on for these nine signs that you still have an application availability problem:

1. You spend more time restarting an application than using it

Application crashes may be a fact of life, but if your application is down more often than it is up, that is a problem.

2. You’ve started to snooze through the alert storm in your inbox or control center

You have deployed alerts for application or server downtime, but the alert storm has so overwhelmed your inbox that you have silenced them all.

3. You have one data center for all your critical operations

A single data center for operations may sound convenient, but one well intended but misdirected construction crew has been known to turn single data centers into costly unavailability zones.

4. Your idea of data protection involves backup retrieval and archives

Your data protection strategy is critical. Data replication technology and site to site, region to region replication has become a mainstay, so if your replication or data protection strategy is non-existent or involves a lengthy jog to the vault this could be a big problem.

5. Your recovery procedures always require manual intervention

Manual intervention itself is not a problem. Some events are so difficult and complex that some amount of manual effort could be required.  But, if manual intervention is always the first, second and third order of business after a server or application outage, that is a problem.

6. Your RTO is measured in days not hours or minutes

How are you measuring your recovery time objective (RTO)? Do you measure your RTO in days or hours instead of minutes per month?  True, every business has a tolerance level for their RTO.  However, your RTO should not be a function of server rebuilds and gross instabilities in your architecture.

7. You don’t know your RPO because your standby is never reliably in sync

You’ve checked the box on reliable monitoring and recovery of your application, and taken it a step further to provide a standby cluster ready system.  Great job.  But, before I let you off the hook, what is your recovery point objective (RPO)? An RPO should be something more accurate than “somewhere between day 0 and last night.”

8. Single points of failure don’t just exist, they are the norm

Where are your single points of failure?  Your budget may not allow you to eliminate every single point of failure, but if you can identify a single point of failure in every major category and every critical component of your enterprise…

9. Your last disaster made local, regional, or national news 

If the last major storm, grid failure, or failure event put a blight on your business due to downtime, then higher availability is the next order of business.

Downtime costs your business in terms of customers, productivity, and peace of mind.  Unaddressed risks have a definite impact on your business and reputation.  If these warning signings are there, you may have an availability problem.  And, if you ignore them you’ll likely have even bigger problems soon thereafter, hence the importance of application availability.

— Cassius Rhue, VP, Customer Experience

Companies that move to the cloud to host their applications understand that while they have outsourced the hosting of their applications to third-party cloud vendors such as Amazon Web Services, they still need to monitor and manage those applications themselves, usually with an Application Performance Monitoring solutions or APM. With yesterday’s client-server computing applications, I.T. departments had almost complete control over the servers, the networks, and the end-user computing environments.  But today’s cloud environments are more complex, with many more moving parts often outside of your control.

Some companies have embarked on digital transformations, pushing customer interactions into critical, web-based applications.  It is now more important than ever to quickly respond to any application performance and downtime issues via an APM automation solution.

How To Select An APM Solution

Many companies turn to Application Performance Management solutions such as those from AppDynamics, Datadog, Dynatrace, or New Relic.  An APM solution should identify any performance bottlenecks in your code, and help you fix those issues before your users are impacted.

Good APM solutions will let you know what happened, why, and how to prevent it from happening in the future.  An APM solution will alert you when the application or systems being monitored meets a certain condition (load, response times, etc.).  Once you receive an alert you should be able to identify why the application is not performing properly.  Armed with this information you can provide your development team with very detailed diagnostics that will allow them to address the issue and prevent them from happening in the future.

But how do you select the right Application Performance Monitoring solutions solution?  A quick search on Google for “cloud APM solutions” returns 5,830,000 results!  That can be overwhelming to anyone unfamiliar with the space.  Thankfully another Google search will also provide you with a lot of advice and resources on how to select an APM solution that is right for you.  You should look for third-party, non-vendor advice to help you frame your requirements and develop a short-list of choices that meet those requirements.  Gartner has been watching this category for a while and publishes its APM Magic Quadrant every year.  It is a good resource when it comes to understanding how to evaluate Application Performance Monitoring solutions solutions and give a good overview of the top vendors.

Add APM automated to your remediation requirements list

Here at SIOS Technology Corporation, we are always working with customers who are migrating their applications to the cloud.  They often want to know how to protect their applications from unnecessary downtime and ask us for our advice.  The choice of how to protect their applications is a function of the criticality of those applications (more critical applications often require failover solutions, etc.).  But we also help them understand why their applications might be vulnerable.

It used to be that backup and data protection was a separate function (one that was needed only if the APM solution identified downtime).  But in today’s complex cloud environments we believe that organizations should look for a holistic approach when it comes to monitoring and managing their critical applications.  If a traditional APM solution identifies when something happens and lets you diagnose why it happened, then why doesn’t it prevent unnecessary downtime where possible?

We believe that automation is the missing ingredient from most cloud APM solutions.  Many of our customers tell us how they are being overwhelmed by receiving too many alerts from their APM solutions, each requiring them to stop and understand what happened and why.  They quickly understand what to ignore and what to pay attention to (and good APM solutions help them do this through machine learning).  And if and when their applications go down, the APM solution alerts them to the downtime and diagnoses why to help prevent it from happening again.  But the APM solution won’t reduce their immediate downtime.

That’s where SIOS AppKeeper comes in. AppKeeper monitors a customer’s applications running on Amazon EC2 and automatically restarts the services on EC2 or even reboots EC2 instances if and when downtime is detected.  Our average customer, with only 3 Amazon EC2 instances, experiences downtime at least once a month.  That is downtime when critical, often customer-facing, applications are unavailable, and when I.T. teams are having to drop everything and respond.

AppKeeper’s APM automation solution is letting customers automatically recover from over 85% of their Amazon EC2 downtime situations.  Here’s a link to a quick video if you would like to see AppKeeper in action.

Through AppKeeper’s API customers are programmatically extending the value of their APM solutions by having alerts from their APM solutions trigger AppKeeper to automatically restart effected Amazon EC2 services or reboot instances if necessary.

Application Performance Monitoring and Automated Remediation.  Better than peanut butter and jelly?

In many cases, AppKeeper customers have easy to manage Amazon EC2 environments, with perhaps less than 8 Amazon EC2 instances.  For them, the native monitoring and automated remediation functionality of AppKeeper are enough to let them sleep soundly at night, knowing that they are proactively reducing downtime if and when it occurs.

But we recognize that many customers have more sophisticated cloud environments, and have already invested in APM solutions, such as those from New Relic, Datadog, Dynatrace, LogicMonitor, or Zabbix.  They have come to expect immediate alerts and the rich set of data to help them diagnose what happened and why.  For this set of customers, we think the addition of AppKeeper’s automated remediation functionality to their APM toolkit gives them the best of both worlds: control over the performance of their applications, and reduced downtime.

Over the course of the next few months, SIOS Technology will be working with several leading APM vendors to provide packaged and certified integration between their APM solutions and AppKeeper.  Using these integrations with AppKeeper, these users will now enjoy a closed-loop system, where they will be alerted to detected Amazon EC2 downtime and the remediation action that AppKeeper took.

So stay tuned for some exciting news.  Meanwhile, if you would like to try SIOS AppKeeper for yourself, please feel free to sign up for a free 14-day trial of AppKeeper. AppKeeper starts at only US$40 per instance per month.

Reproduced with permission from SIOS

You need SIOS Protection Suite (for Linux or Windows) or SIOS DataKeeper Cluster Edition for high availability protection for business critical applications.

UNLESS

1. You prefer free solutions only.

I get it. There are definitely times when I do the same thing when I need to learn a new skill, get a quick tip, drop a few pounds, or set up a quick demo. Rather than signing up for a subscription, purchasing a license, or investing in a combination of the two, I have gone the free route.

However, the saying often holds true, you get what you pay for. Free trials are fine. Permanently free high availability is like gas station sushi – is the risk really worth it? Be sure that free doesn’t prevent you from utilizing the fullness available for optimizing uptime and increasing availability. Make sure you aren’t passing over a reasonably priced high availability solution that is proven to protect your mission-critical applications.

2. Being a single solution shop solution is more important than meeting your HA needs.

We were a “Ford tough” family for decades. Seriously. I understand what it is like to be a one solution shop. My dad owned a Ford truck for work, a Ford Mustang for leisure, a Ford 3600 tractor for the farm, and a Ford minivan for family travel. There was even a season where we received model toy cars with the brandished blue oval as well.

But, when my wife and I were branching out on our own family needs, we broke away from the single solution to address needs that fell out of the Ford wheelhouse (at the time). You may be a single shop buyer, but if your needs have changed and the HA provider or solution hasn’t kept up, consider whether expanding the solution set will eliminate risks, improve success, or be worth the investment in a complementary solution for those new needs. When we needed a reliable, gas efficient, sleek, family friendly, and economical solution for our family, we supplemented Ford tough with a Honda Odyssey. If you are a single stop shop, and you are not worried about vendor lock-in best of luck.

3. You are more of a do it yourself-er coder.

You like coding. You like to write a lot of scripts, and don’t mind pulling out your bash, ksh, perl, python, powershell, batch or command tool kit and wiring things up yourself. You value the joy in flexibility and adding your own tweaks.

I love writing code as well, but there are times when the last thing I want to do is spend time writing a lot of code and scripts for a problem that is solved, proven, and off the shelf ready. For the do-it-yourself admin, off-the-shelf may not be your preference, but consider whether 20 years of expertise and experience should be rehashed and re-architected for your enterprise. But, if you have to get the code writing fix in, High Availability Software SIOS provides the Generic Application Recovery Kit for you to get in a coding fix.

4. You need Ubuntu support (or Solaris).

Your environment is unique. You have customers who’ve cut their teeth on Solaris and are hanging on to it for dear life. Or you’ve got those who have fully embraced the Linux realm and have moved to Ubuntu. In either case, you look at the SIOS products matrix and Ubuntu isn’t currently a match for your SIOS version. Bummer!

While this is true, consider the rich and vast features and flavors of support that are still available. While there are parts of your enterprise that have dug in on Solaris and others that have raced to embrace Ubuntu and newer variants of Linux, it is more likely that you need a solution capable of supporting RHEL, OEL, SuSE, CentOS and possibly Windows as well. Be sure not to single out a high availability solution by what it doesn’t provide and consider the depth of what it does.

5. You don’t run a hybrid of anything in your environment.

I heard it in the middle of a movie last week. The lead character commented on the idea of moving forward with some new idea of an overly excited owner. The classic line: “Sometimes the juice isn’t worth the squeeze.” In your mind you feel that you aren’t running a hybrid environment. Your applications are critical, but not complex. The moving parts are simple- a database, front end and a supporting application. It makes sense that you might not want to “complicate” things with additional processes, products, solutions or services, and you may feel like the juice isn’t worth the squeeze.

Before you make that final decision for a High Availability Software, assess whether a non-hybrid environment is the same as a simple environment. Consider whether or not the moving parts are as simple as you imagine or whether a solution with failover orchestration would be beneficial to reducing your overall RTO and increasing your RPO.

6. Endorsements from HA experts and experience don’t matter.

I bought a set of headphones online in mid-April. As I suspected, I discovered that anyone can do bluetooth headphones. But, not everyone can do them well. Ergonomically, the “new to market” headphones are a nightmare. Pairing was a breeze, but accidental unpairing is a constant battle. The sound quality is amazing, but that amplifies my annoyance when the headphones randomly chirp – loudly and clearly – for system sounds or at the end of a song.

You may believe that high availability and application monitoring can be done by anyone and that experience doesn’t matter. However, consider your own experiences and mine and ask if you’d really want to trust your enterprise environment to a group that just started thinking about the complexities of hybrid environments, or the dependencies and application-centric knowledge needed for the applications you use most frequently.

When deciding the right High Availability Software for your environment, consider carefully whether you want to go without the many best in class features, hardened and tested solutions, knowledgeable experts, broad swath of supported applications and environments, and industry leading experience and decades of insight. Then after careful consideration, choose wisely.

-Cassius Rhue, Vice President, Customer Experience, SIOS

Reducing downtime for WordPress sites hosted on Amazon EC2

Going from ignorance to bliss with SIOS AppKeeper

WordPress is an open-source content management system (CMS) used by millions of companies to create websites, blogs, or apps.  According to estimates, there are over 75 million websites today that use WordPress and many companies are beginning to host their WordPress instances on Amazon EC2. Users love WordPress for its flexibility and the ease with which you can create and modify layouts.  If you are using WordPress for your website, then you are in good company.

With so many users relying on WordPress to power their websites, you can imagine that there is a rich set of third-party tools (plugins and services) designed to meet the needs of those users.  Some of these plugins are to add security functionality, such as scanners to probe for vulnerabilities.  Because more plugins can lead to more vulnerabilities.

Trust, but verify.  Why monitoring WordPress uptime matters.

Deploying a website or application running on WordPress without monitoring it properly would be like leaving your car running outside with the keys in it.  You’ll want to protect your investment.  For companies managing WordPress sites (or any applications, for that matter), there are three primary reasons to monitor:

1. To understand the visitors and optimize their experience;
2. To monitor the speed of the site and ensure that it meets expected service level agreements (SLAs); and
3. To ensure that you maximize uptime.  Downtime can mean (serious) lost revenue for any e-commerce sites running on WordPress.

You believe your WordPress site is working properly, but you really want to know what is going on.  The goal of monitoring should be to know quickly what is going on and why, allowing you to respond quickly to any issues.

There is a wide range of tools available to help WordPress users monitor their sites.  Some are very focused on WordPress, such as ManageWP and JetPack, while others are industry-standard solutions that apply to many different CMSs and applications.  Some go “deep” and are focused on one element of monitoring, such as Google Analytics and its focus on visitor analytics, while others try to go “broad” and address all three key aspects of monitoring.  What you decide to use depends on your budget, your requirements, and your technical capabilities.

Here at SIOS, we believe that the best of breed approach makes sense.  We focus on monitoring applications and ensuring that our customers’ experience as little downtime as possible with those applications.  Many of our customers are using SIOS AppKeeper today to monitor and protect their WordPress sites running on Amazon EC2.

SIOS AppKeeper – simple but powerful monitoring and automated remediation for WordPress sites

Many WordPress monitoring solutions (from free plugins to low-cost freemium services) will tell you when your WordPress site is down.  And depending on the sophistication (and cost) of your monitoring solution, it may tell you why your WordPress site is down.  But will it help you reduce downtime and automatically restart your services or reboot your instances when downtime is experienced?

Many companies host their WordPress sites on Amazon EC2 using either Apache or NGINX webservers.  SIOS AppKeeper is a SaaS service that can be configured to automatically discover WordPress sites or applications running on Amazon EC2 instances and their services, and then automatically take any number of actions if and when downtime is experienced.  So instead of only getting alerts that something is wrong, you get notified that something happened and was automatically addressed.

Downtime matters.  If you are running an e-commerce site using WordPress, then downtime will result in lost revenue.  How much revenue?  Simply divide your annual revenues by 365 days and 24 hours (Annual revenue/365/24) to understand your revenue per hour.  In 2013 Google experienced a 5-minute outage that cost them $545,000 in revenue. Now, you may not be Google, but you certainly do want to eliminate downtime wherever possible.

Now imagine what happens when you receive an alert that your WordPress site is down.  Are you ready to respond immediately?  Do you know what should be addressed to get your WordPress site back up and running?  According to our customer research, the average customer using only three Amazon EC2 instances experiences downtime at least once a month.

SIOS AppKeeper monitors Amazon EC2 and alerts you to any downtime AND takes action to remediate the situation, by either restarting your Amazon EC2 services or rebooting your instances.

AppKeeper addresses over 85% of our customers’ Amazon EC2 downtime issues automatically.  This means that you get notified that a failure was identified and addressed, without you having to drop everything or lose any significant revenue.

Today hundreds of companies rely on AppKeeper to keep their cloud environments running. We invite you to check out the video below see how easy it is to install and use AppKeeper.

Video: Installing AppKeeper and recovering from AWS EC2 failures Demo

And if you like what you see, please feel free to sign up for a free 14-day trial of AppKeeper. AppKeeper starts at only US$40 per instance per month.