Application Tiering

Application Tiering is a Business Continuity / Disaster Recovery (BCDR) concept: In the event of a failure, how long can the application be down (RTO), and how much data can be lost (RPO)?

For example, Tier-0 apps cannot be down and cannot lose data so Active/Active failover with sync replication is required; whereas, a Tier-2 app may be able to sustain 8 hours down and 1 hr of data loss.

Applications can be added to tiers in IO. When a new application is created in the user interface, the user can select a tier right after choosing a name.

Applications discovered from ServiceNow will have a tier assigned to them based on the Business Criticality value associated with the Business Service. This mapping can be modified in the ServiceNow integration configuration.

Alarms are associated with tiers, allowing you to quickly pinpoint issues affecting your most critical applications first.

Application tiers in IO

Tiers are entities in IO.

Applications are assigned to IO tiers automatically and manually.

There are four default tiers in IO, with assigned rankings from 1 to 4, where 1 is the highest business priority and 4 is the lowest.

IO also includes pre-configured alarms and dashboards that are based on the application tiers.