Do Your Apps Have Issues? And if They Do, What Are They Trying to Tell You?

To quote a common saying: “Being in operations is like riding a bike—except the bike is on fire, you’re on fire, everything is on fire, and you’re in hell.”

OK, so usually it’s not that bad, although most of us can tell some horror stories. Keeping up with new demands, dealing with priority-zero issues, and making sure everything is sensibly patched often consumes all the time and resources that we have. Meanwhile, our apps are (hopefully) working away, quietly running more and more of the business, driving more and more of the revenue each year. And although application health and performance might seem like someone else’s responsibility, the nature of operations is that the network is often the first place to which everyone looks when things start to go wrong.

IT’S THE APP, NOT THE NETWORK.

While the Network might still be the Computer (thanks to John Gage and Sun Microsystems for that), the Computer is now the App. In other words, while the effectiveness of a network might very well be determined by the capabilities of the computers connected to it, a computer is now only as good as its apps. As more and more revenue is generated through digital channels, and interconnecting the various parts of a business becomes key to generating new ways to service customers, keeping those complex, multi-component applications secure, fast, and available is more crucial than ever before.

Network operations has a critical role to play, but unless you plan accordingly for this new reality, that bike is going to keep burning.

FIREPROOF YOUR OPERATIONS.

Almost nobody cares a whit about infrastructure until an app starts to have issues—it can’t scale, won’t perform properly, or worse, gets compromised. What this tells you is that you need to refactor your IT delivery around the application portfolio of your organization. If this sounds like high-level vendor marketing-speak, then let’s look at what this might mean in practical terms.

Per-app deployments and infrastructure

Solutions that can deliver per-app deployments and (when needed) per-app infrastructure can give you and your application teams the level of visibility and confidence you need to ensure that your applications keep humming along and remain “un-on-fire.”

Per-app monitoring and visibility

Staying out of the inferno is also about giving the right information and the right visibility to the right people. Application teams can use per-app monitoring and per-app visibility to see request and response statistics, information about client connections, and error code rates. Infrastructure teams can monitor platform health and overall throughput. Role-based access and role-based dashboards display application information to help keep the bike from catching fire in the first place.

It’s this approach which has driven the development of F5 BIG-IP Cloud Edition. BIG-IP Cloud Edition gives you role-based access to build and configure F5’s market leading application services for your apps. And just as importantly, it gives you the right data to effectively monitor and manage those apps. So, application teams get to deploy and manage services, and NetOps teams get to manage templates and infrastructure.

If this sounds interesting, then check out the free trial which will give you the chance to test and explore a fully functioning system.

Learn more at f5.com/cloudedition.

* blogs.gartner.com/andrew-lerner/2014/07/16/the-cost-of-downtime/