November 1, 2020 | SIOS SANless clusters

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

Reproduced with permission from SIOS

Application Performance Monitoring Solutions

APM Automation – The Missing Ingredient For Application Performance Monitoring Solutions

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, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform, they still need to monitor and manage those applications themselves, usually with an Application Performance Monitoring (APM) solution. With yesterday’s client-server computing applications, IT 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 (APM) 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 APM 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 APM 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.

Save yourself from downtime. Talk to SIOS experts about how SIOS high availability clustering software can monitor the entire application stack – server, storage, network, and application layers – to ensure applications are operating. SIOS Protection Suite includes application recovery kits that monitor and, in the event of a failure, orchestrate failover according to application-specific best practices. SIOS clusters uniquely failover across cloud availability zones and regions for disaster recovery.

Reproduced with permission from SIOS