The ability to connect the application dots of your mission-critical business applications and associate them with the underlying IT infrastructure to draw a detailed picture of your enterprise has long been the Holy Grail of IT operations management (ITOM).

Why? Because you need that deeper understanding of the relationships and dependencies between your applications and infrastructure. And because when something happens to one, it could affect the other. The ability to quickly zero-in on a cause and achieve fast resolution when there’s a negative event (and there will be) means everyone is happy.

Lacking that detailed picture is a totally different story. When the inevitable occurs and there’s an outage, the longer it takes to figure out the root cause, the more likely it is that the prolonged process of blind trial-and-error problem solving will impact your critical business services. And you know what happens when a service that drives your business is out: customer dissatisfaction, costing you dollars each second the outage drags on.

And is this problem that is affecting your application located in the code or in the infrastructure? By lacking this visibility, you’re wasting time and resources figuring this out. If you’ve ever found yourself in that predicament, it can often feel like the process of locating and remediating the problem might take forever, and the whole world (or at least your customers and potential customers) is watching. The solution? Seeing your entire infrastructure and understanding how it works together.

By integrating the SL1 Platform, our leading (per the Q2 2019 Forrester Wave report on Intelligent Application and Service Monitoring) app-to-infrastructure mapping and monitoring solution, with application performance management tools from vendors like AppDynamics, Dynatrace, and New Relic, among others, we can help you deliver a precise, real-time view of the health and performance of your applications—and the infrastructure they run on. That information informs your IT operations (ITOps) team with the rich, contextual detail needed to quickly isolate and resolve events when they occur.

We do this in three ways.

  1. Enhanced Relationship Visibility

By blending application performance events, data, and relationships with the associated infrastructure events, data, and relationships—and then mapping that information with the relationships between the infrastructure and the apps—ScienceLogic offers enhanced visibility into how the infrastructure impacts your applications.

If a business-critical application is not responding or goes down, this three-dimensional view means you can quickly identify the cause. You might suspect a coding error within the application, but it could be that the virtual machine it’s running on is being overtaxed by a new workload that was recently added by a different business unit/application.

  1. Two Distinct Perspectives With Consistent Data

DevOps (app) and ITOps teams no longer need to have turf battles over who owns or can have access to the various tools your enterprise is using. Instead, they each can focus on their individual missions knowing the other has access to the data needed to keep everything working together—without interfering with the other. DevOps needs deep visibility into the application code; ITOps needs to know when app performance is impacted by the infrastructure so they can prioritize their work.

Both perspectives are distinct and necessary, and both require access to the data that is relevant to them. Two different teams, two different tools, one set of consistent, accurate data that allows both to function at peak efficiency thanks to data that is trusted as the basis for accurate—even automated—decision making. 

  1. Context-Driven Automation

If you are among the 51% of organizations Forrester says are moving toward the ideal of AI-enabled automation, or if you are among the 21% who plan to begin your automation journey within the next twelve months, you need a complete, accurate, real-time view of your data to get there. That requires a real-time, operational data lake with detailed, contextual information that drives intelligent automation and accelerates your mean time to repair (MTTR).

Context-driven automation and remediation enables you to enrich incidents with critical diagnostic information and eliminate costly war rooms where, instead of working together to solve problems, teams often work to prove their innocence. It also enables you to proactively resolve commonly occurring issues before they impact your users or your business.

No one tool can do the job of managing your applications and infrastructure on its own, but by seamlessly integrating SL1 with the application performance management platform of your choice, you have a combination of application performance monitoring and application performance management platforms that work better together.

Find out more about how ScienceLogic can help you get more out of your APM tools>

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