Applications and Tiering

Application Entities

Application entities are groupings of the infrastructure components that comprise and support the application.

Discovering or creating application entities is of critical importance in achieving the most value from the IO platform.

Application entities provide end-to-end visibility into the infrastructure where the application lives: the compute, network, and storage infrastructure.

Application entities also enable IO to provide monitoring, alerting, case management, and troubleshooting based on the application’s business value and SLA tier.

Finally, application entities enable you to understand how your applications behave and impact the infrastructure.

Application Entity Creation

Applications can be discovered and created automatically from an Splunk AppDynamics, Dynatrace, or ServiceNow instance, or through suggestions populated by IO through the VMware integration, the Host OS integration, and through NetFlow.

The entities that make up the application must already be part of the infrastructure discovered and monitored by the IO probes and integrations.

Alternately, application entities can be created manually using the IO interface or through import using a JSON file.

Manual Application Entity Creation

Note

Application entities are created top-down. Other entity types are created bottom-up, and child entities are created before their parents. If an entity is created before it is populated with children, it shows an empty topology. When you add children to an entity, the metric associated with those children are applied retroactively. This capability is useful for reports and charts because you can see the historical metrics of the child entities after the creation of the parent.

From the Application list in the Inventory module, select New then Application.
Complete the application properties fields.
Select the application components or conversations that comprise the application.
Choose the entity type.
Select named entities by checking the boxes next to their names. Use the drop down menu to view their properties or topology. Move the selected entities to the right panel using the right arrow button. Click OK when you are satisfied with your selection.

Application Entity Discovery

Auto-Discovered Application Entities

The Splunk AppDynamics, ServiceNow, and Dynatrace integrations automatically discover applications. IO application entities are created automatically for these integrations.

IO also interprets Splunk AppDynamics tiering strategies, allowing you to map the Splunk AppDynamics tiers to IO tiers.

Note

Application entities (IP address, Host, ESX VM, Hyper-V VM, and PowerVM partition) must already exist in IO prior to application discovery through the application-related (Splunk AppDynamics, Dynatrace, and ServiceNow) or NetFlow integrations.

Application Entity Suggestions

For the various types of host entities that are discovered by their respective integrations (ESX VM, Hyper-V VM, Solaris Host, Windows Host, Linux Host, and KVM Host), applications will suggested based on lexical proximity (i.e., by entity name) .

Application suggestions are also made based on NetFlow and netstat utility port- and service-related data that are collected by the Windows and Linux integrations. Within these categories, other machine mechanisms are by-process-name, by-top-talkers, and by-port-signature.

A button on the Application inventory page tells you when new suggestions are available.

Drill down on the suggested application to view its properties.

Suggested Application Page

Properties discovered by the integration are displayed under System Properties.

The topology of the suggested application is shown with the ability to zoom in or out. An Infrastructure map is also included to the right. Highlighting an entity in the topology map filters the infrastructure map for that entity.

The sub-entities that comprise the application are shown along with their type and a drop down menu to view more info. You can add or delete entities using the buttons at the top right of the list.

Use the Create Application or Ignore Suggestion buttons at the top right of the page to create the app or ignore this suggestion. The suggestion is no longer shown.

Suggested Application Changes

A button on the Application inventory page tells you when changes have been made to existing applications.

Drill down on the application to view its suggested changes.

Review the suggested changes, then select which changes to apply or ignore all changes.

Resolving Application Overlap with Conflict Management

Conflicts can occur only between a ServiceNow-discovered app and an application discovered by either the Operating System Integration or NetFlow integration. If a conflict occurs between Operating System integration and NetFlow Integration applications, the conflicts are merged into a single suggested application. If a suggested application is ignored, it is ignored for 30 days; however, that time period is configurable.

Click Inventory and then Application.
The Application screen is displayed.
Discovered applications are also displayed by clicking either the <#> New or <#> with suggestions button.
Click one of the Application Discovery buttons.
The <#> New Applications Discovered or <#> Updated Applications Discovered dialog box is displayed. Suggested applications might have missing or extraneous components.
Click the suggested application to be examined for conflict resolution.
Detailed information about the application is displayed.
This information includes system properties, custom properties, topology and infrastructure.
Entity information is also displayed, and entities can be added or deleted.
You can create or ignore a suggested application, apply all or selected changes, or ignore all changes.

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.

Create Tiers

You can create hierarchical tiers that specify the importance of your applications.

Click Inventory and select Tier from the Applications group.
The list of existing tiers is displayed: the four IO-defined tiers are Tier 0, 1, 2, and 3.
Click New and select Tier from the Applications menu.
The create entity screen is displayed.
1. You can create a brand-new tier or clone an existing tier.
2. You can also specify the Tier Ranking.
3. You can add Custom and System Property / Value pairs to the tier, which can then be used as identifying factors: for example Server / Chicago.
4. You can Add Applications to the tier.
Click Save.