Centerity is an AIOps Platform that Delivers Dynamic Service Views and Business Service Level Analytics for Digitalization and Digital Transformation Initiatives to the business constituents responsible for these services. Each Dynamic Service View calculates the performance and availability of a critical business service as shown below.
Centerity Complements APM Solutions
APM solutions like AppDynamics, Dynatrace, Instana, and New Relic trace the execution of business transaction through the custom code that implements these transactions. Metrics like response time, calls per second and error rate are collected for each transaction, tier and application monitored by the APM tool. Centerity complements APM tools in the following respects:
APM tools cannot cover the entire IT stack down into virtualized and physical hosts, networking and storage – Centerity can
APM tools cannot roll up the performance and availability of the entire stack into Dynamic Service Views for business constituents – Centerity does this and incorporates the transaction and application metrics from the APM tools into the DSV’s.
The manner in which Centerity complements the APM tools is shown in the image below. The transaction, tier and application metrics for an application is which part of a business service monitored by Centerity are the top three layers in the Dynamic Service View. Centerity itself monitors the entire virtual and physical infrastructure that supports the applications including the VMware environment, the virtual and physical network and the storage.
Centerity is therefore uniquely able to translate IT infrastructure metrics, and application level metrics from APM tools into value for the business constituents who rely upon the entire IT stack to work correctly in order for the business service to deliver revenue or other business results to the business.
The Layers of a Centerity Dynamic Service View
Centerity is able to build the Dynamic Service Views out of the layers that comprise each business service by having a comprehensive platform that collects events, logs, and relationships from across the entire stack. The platform then builds the relationships in real-time over time and applies AI to automate anomaly detection.
The Centerity AIOps Platform
Centerity Functional Overview
Summary
APM tools are excellent at helping the teams that develop and support custom applications in production ensure that their code is working and performing as it should be, and in pointing to issues in the code when there are problems.
Centerity integrates in with the APM tools, to combine APM metrics with infrastructure metrics into valuable Dynamic Service Views for business constituents.
https://www.centerity.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/AdobeStock_288623191.jpg8001200Marty Pejkohttps://centerity.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/Centerity-Logo-White.pngMarty Pejko2019-10-15 14:54:122019-10-15 14:54:12Centerity Brings Business Value To APM
What is Digital Transformation? Digital Transformation means taking advantage of the fact the software based processes can be evolved and enhanced more frequently to dramatically drive up the business agility of the company, and to gain market share and revenue as a result. This is sometimes stated as “Compete online or die”, but it does not always have to involve people using browsers and mobile devices to access web services. The Imperative to Digitalize Core Business Processes The leading initiative for nearly every CIO (especially the ones who have rebranded themselves as Chief Digital Officers) is digitalization. Digitalization means that the key business processes of the company get implemented in software. This creates the following imperatives:
Drive online business results – revenue, customer acquisition, customer service, customer satisfaction, market share, and reputation
Time to Market – Implement key businesses in software more quickly than both current and emerging competitors
Rapid and Continuous Improvement – Rapidly improve those digitized processes in order to compete and gain market share
Great Customer Experience – Web and mobile experiences must be available all of the time, and offer excellent performance (responsiveness to user actions).
Fast Resolution of Problems – Every online system has issues, but they need to be prevented as often as possible and solved as quickly as possible.
Scale in Response to Demand – If the system is subject to spikes in demand (like online retail), then it needs to be able to response to dramatic increases in load without suffering from reliability and performance problems.
Be Cost Effective – Modern application teams need to be efficient with their time and need to avoid overspending on legacy and expensive toolsets.
In summary, every enterprise must now run like a highly agile, responsive and forward thinking SaaS software product company. The infographic below shows the important Digital Transformation trends for 2019.
Industry Changes caused by Digitalization Digitalization is creating unprecedented demand for the resources (primarily the people) who know how to implement business processes in software (software developers and architects) and the people who know how to operate complex application systems in production with high reliability and performance (cloud and applications operations). The most important architectural change is the shift to a microservices architecture which allows each microservice to be independently enhanced – leading to dramatically shorter application development cycle times, dramatically increased technical and business agility and dramatically increased online competitiveness. The demand to implement business processes in software exceeds the supply of knowledgeable people, which is fueling a set of innovations designed to speed the delivery of software into production, and ease the process by which highly complex, dynamic, and scaled out applications are supported in production. Complex Multi-Cloud Architectures Today the question is not whether to do cloud, but which clouds and how many different ones will be deployed. For most enterprises an on premise private or hybrid cloud based upon VMware vSphere is a reality. For these enterprises going to the public cloud often means adding the public cloud to their environment instead of replacing their on premise or collocated environment. This means that for cloud operations teams, the cloud is a source of increased complexity, not a source of simplification.
Innovation and Dynamic Behavior across the Stack The imperative to digitalize core business processes, and the resulting shortage of people who can do the work is fueling as set of process and technology innovations designed to speed business functionality implemented in software into production. These process innovations (DevOps and CI/CD) and technology innovations (containers, and the dynamic infrastructure upon which they run) are being brought to bear to help development teams be more agile and effective to help support teams deliver better reliability and performance results to the business. These layers of innovation are shown in the diagram below.
The above architectural (microservices), and process (CI/DC) innovations, combined with the diversity in the stack, and the dynamic behavior across the stack create an unprecedented monitoring and management challenge for modern online enterprises. This challenge is compounded by a high rate of innovation which constantly increases the complexity and diversity of the environment. The Problem with Legacy Monitoring Approaches Digital Transformation produces new critical business services which must be monitored and managed holistically. However, ever since the death of the monitoring frameworks from IBM, BMC, CA and HP, monitoring has devolved into a best of breed approach leaving enterprises with between 20 and 200 different tools, none of which give the business the visibility into the reliability and performance of these new critical business services. The Franken-Monitor
Monitoring Challenges with Modern Applications, Stacks and Processes The modern application, development process, and technical stack, combined with dynamic behavior across the stack, create the following new and unprecedented challenges for monitoring solutions:
Modern apps are highly scaled out (many things to monitor – hundreds and thousands of microservices in production)
Modern apps are highly dynamic (high rate of change in scale and new versions – multiple releases of new software into production every day)
Modern apps are very diverse (many different languages and stacks – with the need for developer productivity driving ever more diversity)
Business services are often comprised of not just the modern applications, but previously developed N-Tier application, monolithic applications and purchased applications.
As stated above, the environment spanning the on premise private cloud and the new public clouds is more complex than ever and more dynamic than ever.
Due to the above factors modern apps are very complex and addressing issues consumes time and expensive resources. In fact Gartner predicts that, “By 2020, 75% of enterprises will experience visible business disruptions due to infrastructure and operations (I&O) skills gaps, which is an increase from less than 20% in 2016”.
Making Sure It All Works All of the Time The applications and business services that result from Digital Transformation initiatives must work all of the time, and must provide an excellent user experience all of the time in order for these new services to meet their business objectives. The technical challenges associated with managing these applications in production mean that a new approach must be taken to monitoring them in production. The following requirements must be met:
The entire stack must now be monitored in real time (1 Min – 1 Sec) to be able to detect service quality issues in time
Flows, relationships and dependencies across the stack must be determined in real time
AI (AIOps) must be deployed to cope with the deluge of incoming monitoring data and automatically understand normal vs. abnormal
AIOps and relationships must be leveraged for automated root cause and ultimately automated remediation.
The results of monitoring must be made relevant to business constituents
The Need for Business Visibility Since these new software based business services are so critical to the business, business constituents like product managers and business executives responsible for the results of these services need consolidated visibility and manageability across the entire stack of technologies that comprise each service. Centerity’s Dynamic Service Views provide this visibility. Centerity’s Dynamic Service Views Centerity’s Dynamic Service Views consolidate the availability, performance, throughput, and error rate of the entire software and hardware stack that supports each critical business service into a service level gauge that allows business constituents to easily understand how the business services supported by these stacks are actually working.
The Centerity AIOps Platform Centerity delivers these Dynamic Service Views through a comprehensive AIOps platform that works with the existing monitoring tools, virtualization platforms and cloud platforms in use at the customer. Metrics, events and logs are collected across the entire stack, and evaluated by an AIOps engine for anomalies. Degradations in service levels are the surfaced in Dynamic Service Views and forwarded to alert and service management systems.
Centerity Functional Overview
Summary Modern business services are composed of new applications, existing applications, custom developed applications and purchased applications. The software and hardware infrastructure for these new business services is updated frequently and operates in a dynamic manner. This creates a new imperative to be able to monitor the resulting business services in a continuous and full-stack manner.
https://www.centerity.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/AdobeStock_334109487.jpg8001200Marty Pejkohttps://centerity.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/Centerity-Logo-White.pngMarty Pejko2019-10-15 13:32:132019-10-15 13:32:13Why Digital Transformation Needs AIOps
What Do Digitization, Digitalization and Digital Transformation Mean?
These terms mean many different things to many different people and in many different industries and contexts. However, in the world of business IT they generally mean the following:
Digitization – Digitization means to transform something from an analog process to a digital process. For example when a bank scans a check to a digital image and stores this image instead of the paper check, the paper check and the manual storage of it has been digitized.
Digitalization – Digitalization refers to implementing a manual business process in technology and software. A kiosk in a restaurant to order and pay for food is an example of a formerly manual process now implanted as a digital service. Amazon’s online shopping service is an example of many digital business processes combined into a seamless shopping and delivery experience.
Digital Transformation – Digital Transformation means taking advantage of the fact the software based processes can be evolved and enhanced more frequently to dramatically drive up the business agility of the company, and to gain market share and revenue as a result. This is sometimes stated as “Compete online or die”, but it does not always have to involve people using browsers and mobile devices to access web services.
The Imperative to Digitalize Core Business Processes
The leading initiative for nearly every CIO (especially the ones who have rebranded themselves as Chief Digital Officers) is digitalization. Digitalization means that the key business processes of the company get implemented in software. This creates the following imperatives:
Drive online business results – revenue, customer acquisition, customer service, customer satisfaction, market share, and reputation
Time to Market – Implement key businesses in software more quickly than both current and emerging competitors
Rapid and Continuous Improvement – Rapidly improve those digitized processes in order to compete and gain market share
Great Customer Experience – Web and mobile experiences must be available all of the time, and offer excellent performance (responsiveness to user actions).
Fast Resolution of Problems – Every online system has issues, but they need to be prevented as often as possible and solved as quickly as possible.
Scale in Response to Demand – If the system is subject to spikes in demand (like online retail), then it needs to be able to response to dramatic increases in load without suffering from reliability and performance problems.
Be Cost Effective – Modern application teams need to be efficient with their time and need to avoid overspending on legacy and expensive toolsets.
In summary, every enterprise must now run like a highly agile, responsive and forward thinking SaaS software product company. The infographic below shows the important Digital Transformation trends for 2019.
Industry Changes caused by Digitalization
Digitalization is creating unprecedented demand for the resources (primarily the people) who know how to implement business processes in software (software developers and architects) and the people who know how to operate complex application systems in production with high reliability and performance (cloud and applications operations).
The most important architectural change is the shift to a microservices architecture which allows each microservice to be independently enhanced – leading to dramatically shorter application development cycle times, dramatically increased technical and business agility and dramatically increased online competitiveness.
The demand to implement business processes in software exceeds the supply of knowledgeable people, which is fueling a set of innovations designed to speed the delivery of software into production, and ease the process by which highly complex, dynamic, and scaled out applications are supported in production.
Complex Multi-Cloud Architectures
Today the question is not whether to do cloud, but which clouds and how many different ones will be deployed. For most enterprises an on premise private or hybrid cloud based upon VMware vSphere is a reality. Public clouds like Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure must then be integrated with the existing on premise private cloud as the public clouds in many cases simply cannot replace the on premise or hybrid clouds.
This means that for cloud operations teams, the cloud is a source of increased complexity, not a source of simplification.
Innovation and Dynamic Behavior across the Stack
The imperative to digitalize core business processes, and the resulting shortage of people who can do the work is fueling as set of process and technology innovations designed to speed business functionality implemented in software into production. These process innovations (DevOps and CI/CD) and technology innovations (containers, and the dynamic infrastructure upon which they run) are being brought to bear to help development teams be more agile and effective to help support teams deliver better reliability and performance results to the business. These layers of innovation are shown in the diagram below.
The above architectural (microservices), and process (CI/DC) innovations, combined with the diversity in the stack, and the dynamic behavior across the stack create an unprecedented monitoring and management challenge for modern online enterprises. This challenge is compounded by a high rate of innovation which constantly increases the complexity and diversity of the environment.
The Problem with Legacy Monitoring Approaches
Digital Transformation produces new critical business services which must be monitored and managed holistically. However, ever since the death of the monitoring frameworks from IBM, BMC, CA and HP, monitoring has devolved into a best of breed approach leaving enterprises with between 20 and 200 different tools, none of which give the business the visibility into the reliability and performance of these new critical business services.
The Franken-Monitor
Monitoring Challenges with Modern Applications, Stacks and Processes
The modern application, development process, and technical stack, combined with dynamic behavior across the stack, create the following new and unprecedented challenges for monitoring solutions:
Modern apps are highly scaled out (many things to monitor – hundreds and thousands of microservices in production)
Modern apps are highly dynamic (high rate of change in scale and new versions – multiple releases of new software into production every day)
Modern apps are very diverse (many different languages and stacks – with the need for developer productivity driving ever more diversity)
Business services are often comprised of not just the modern applications, but previously developed N-Tier application, monolithic applications and purchased applications.
As stated above, the environment spanning the on premise private cloud and the new public clouds is more complex than ever and more dynamic than ever.
Due to the above factors modern apps are very complex and addressing issues consumes time and expensive resources. In fact Gartner predicts that, “By 2020, 75% of enterprises will experience visible business disruptions due to infrastructure and operations (I&O) skills gaps, which is an increase from less than 20% in 2016”.
Summary
Modern business services are composed of new applications, existing applications, custom developed applications and purchased applications. The software and hardware infrastructure for these new business services is updated frequently and operates in a dynamic manner. This creates a new imperative to be able to monitor the resulting business services in a continuous and full-stack manner.
https://www.centerity.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/Digitalization.png8081071Marty Pejkohttps://centerity.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/Centerity-Logo-White.pngMarty Pejko2019-10-10 16:04:342019-10-10 16:04:34Digitization, Digitalization and Digital Transformation
In an era of digital transformation, stakeholders like business planners and executives find themselves increasingly dependent on IT services not only for routine business operations, but also for evolving their business models to become more competitive and more customer-aware. At the same time, IT executives and innovators find themselves increasingly pressured to show value and accelerate service delivery while minimizing costs and eliminating IT inefficiencies. This combination echoes Dickens’ “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…” in its mixture of innovative opportunity with outstanding pressures to perform faster and more effectively without breakage or loss.
https://www.centerity.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/AdobeStock_108675541.jpg8001200Marty Pejkohttps://centerity.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/Centerity-Logo-White.pngMarty Pejko2019-06-25 13:47:572019-06-25 13:47:57Recorded EMA Webinar – A Look at the Changing IT-to-Business Landscape
In an era of digital transformation, stakeholders like business planners and executives find themselves increasingly dependent on IT services not only for routine business operations, but also for evolving their business models to become more competitive and more customer-aware. At the same time, IT executives and innovators find themselves increasingly pressured to show value and accelerate service delivery while minimizing costs and eliminating IT inefficiencies. This combination echoes Dickens’ “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…” in its mixture of innovative opportunity with outstanding pressures to perform faster and more effectively without breakage or loss.
https://www.centerity.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/AdobeStock_108675541.jpg8001200Marty Pejkohttps://centerity.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/Centerity-Logo-White.pngMarty Pejko2019-06-25 13:47:572019-06-25 13:47:57Recorded EMA Webinar – A Look at the Changing IT-to-Business Landscape
The retail industry has changed significantly over the past decade and it keeps on evolving further and faster by adopting new, cutting edge technologies while transforming from a classic store to an omnichannel business that is not limited to one country or to the physical world at all.
While these businesses strive forward, some of them open new online or offline stores every day, their infrastructures can’t sometimes keep up with the pace.
The modern store is a vast collection of technologies: Points of Sale, Self-checkout kiosks, payment and security systems and operational technologies like refrigerators and baking ovens. Most of these technologies are not limited to the store and rely on many different backend systems which in their turn rely on other systems which often span multiple vendors and service providers. This huge, interconnected network of technologies is very hard to keep track of and when problems start you need to be ready to identify and solve them fast or suffer the consequences.
The State of Online Commerce
Digital transformation is no longer about if enterprises will transform, but about when. Companies that have not embraced transformation, such as Kodak, Blockbuster or Borders have disappeared, and even technology companies like Nokia, that have failed to change with the times, are now struggling to survive.
Source: Profitindustry.com May 2019
The accelerated pace of economic change is compressing the lifecycle of businesses and those that don’t digitally transform will be rendered irrelevant; and it will happen with remarkable speed, and with little warning.
Digital transformation is not just about technology; it’s about redefining your entire business strategy. The degree of difficulty is compounded by the dearth of experienced resources. According to Forrester, in 2017, 74% of companies have a digital transformation strategy, but only 15% have the skills and capabilities to implement it.
The Changes Driven by Digital Transformation
Digital Transformation is a disruptive process and it will not only “transform” your IT department but also will change all aspects of your business, including; the way you relate with your customers, your partners, and your suppliers.
In this document, we will focus on the intrinsic technological requirements, not the business process aspects of the process.
At its core, Digital transformation drives some key changes:
Every key business process of the company and the interactions with every key constituency are implemented in software and are rapidly evolved to maintain competitive advantage online.
Data driven applications are deployed on cloud-based infrastructure and every facet of the supply chain is connected through the cloud.
Real-time data analytics for notifications and abnormality detection (AIOps).
Big Data to optimize system performance in reaction to change.
Users now must have a connected device to see the necessary information on cloud.
Applications should be able to adapt to different environments (on-premise, Cloud, containers, etc.), detect and inform environmental changes and proactively change their behavior accordingly.
The Omnichannel Approach
The term OmniChannel refers to better introspection of the customer experience by understanding where, when, how, and of course, what he/she wants. It means offering the customers a real-time, on-demand, cloud-based, self-service experience through the convergence of all the channels. With information coming from virtually everywhere (on premise, cloud systems, IoT, mobile applications, etc.) and in real time, it is critical to have applications that can provision these sources of information efficiently, and in real time.
OmniChannel may include:
Online browser based applications
Mobile applications (owned and 3rd parties)
Kiosks
Telephone Interactive Voice Response
Social media
Help desk
Physical locations (branches, plants, etc.)
One of the most critical components of the OmniChannel strategy is the backend.
As with any other multi-technology support (IoT, Cloud, on-premise, Mobile, etc.) it needs a myriad of connecting elements and workflows to pull, push and normalize the information flows. The business in turns needs to guarantee that these business flows are working correctly, as they are becoming the bloodline of the digital business.
An OmniChannel approach at a Global Fast Food Restaurant
What Happens When Things Go Wrong?
Online systems in retail directly support the revenue generation of the company, and when they are not working correctly also damage the reputation of the company, and the ability to retain customers. So an outage does not just represent a one-time loss of revenue, it often causes customers to leave and to never return.
Immediate revenue loss, stock market crashes and reputation damage cause retailers billions of dollars of damage every year!
The Centerity Solution
The Centerity AIOps Platform has a proven history in supporting business service outcomes across complex enterprise and managed service environments. Centerity is built on strong operational analytics and data mining, as well as powerful discovery, visualization, and dependency insights. Highlighted features include the following:
Deep and Broad Integrations: Centerity integrates with the tools and platforms that you rely upon.
Dynamic Service Views: Simple to understand gauges that show the service quality for each critical business service
In Context: Constant alignment between IT data and business objectives.
Consistent User Experience: Detect user experience degradation before your users do.
Traffic Analysis: Analyze bandwidth consumption and data flow; filter by application, packets, protocols, etc.
AI-driven Anomaly Detection: Machine learning for digital services moves the performance discipline beyond thresholds
The Centerity AIOps Platform
Centerity Functional Overview
Centerity’s Dynamic Service Views translate technical metrics and their impact on business services and resultant consequences.Each gauge represents the availability, performance, throughput and error rate of the entire stack of software and hardware supporting each digital business service.
Unified Dynamic Business Service Views
When service levels degrade, Centerity provides a bird’s eye view of how the operation of each layer that supports the digital business service is impacting the overall service level.
Drill Down Into Each Layer of a Digital Business Service
We all spend many hours talking about digital transformation at work. At home we book our movie tickets on our phones, make payments using internet banking, and grocery shop on Amazon.
Statistics show that 71% of shoppers in the US and up to 91% in APAC countries prefer to shop online and this tendency is growing around 23% year over year. Up to 58% of these operations are performed via mobile devices like phones and tablets.
Latin American markets are the most active and are shifting from consuming largely global companies’ products towards their local products. For example, in Mexico (growing 7% in electronics shopping and 20% in online services between 2017 and 2018), local shops are taking the leading position in the ranking of purchases orders while global players, such as Amazon and Wish, are relegated to 4th or 5th place. In Brazil, the situation is similar; there are currently 66.4 million eCommerce users, with an additional 28.2 million users expected to be shopping Online by 2021. By 2023 these 94.6 million eCommerce users will spend an average of over $300 yearly online.
Growth rate of e-commerce sales in selected Latin America 2017-2018 (Source: Statistica)
Where will you be in 5 years?
Digital transformation is no longer about if enterprises will transform, but about when. Companies that have not embraced transformation, such as Kodak, Blockbuster or Borders have disappeared, and even technology companies like Nokia, that have failed to change with the times, are now struggling to survive.
The accelerated pace of economic change is compressing the lifecycle of businesses and those that don’t digitally transform will be rendered irrelevant; and it will happen with remarkable speed, and with little warning.
Digital transformation is not just about technology; it’s about redefining your entire business strategy. The degree of difficulty is compounded by the dearth of experienced resources. According to Forrester, in 2017, 74% of companies have a digital transformation strategy, but only 15% have the skills and capabilities to implement it.
The concern for many businesses is that they’ve already fallen behind and may be too late to get started. Digital speed
Companies that are not agile enough or cannot adapt to economic tides may end up stranded in shallow waters. Today’s consumers have countless options so keeping up is the only way to remain relevant, to survive.
Digital transformation will enable your company to:
Generate additional sources of revenue online
Be more agile in pursuit of new markets and opportunities
Improve interactions with customers, partners, suppliers and employees
Increase efficiency
Improve business decision making
Implement better governance
To have real impact the transformation must become a part of the fabric of the company and championed by leadership.
A complicating factor is that digital transformation may mean different things to different industries, and a valuable benefit for banking, may not apply to healthcare.
The following is an example of applications for different verticals.
Digital Transformation benefits by Vertical Market
The Tao of Transformation
Digital Transformation is a disruptive process and it will not only “transform” your IT department but also will change all aspects of your business, including; the way you relate with your customers, your partners, and your suppliers.
In this document, we will focus on the intrinsic technological requirements, not the business process aspects of the process.
At its core, Digital transformation drives some key changes:
Every key business process of the company and the interactions with every key constituency are implemented in software and are rapidly evolved to maintain competitive advantage online.
Data driven applications are deployed on cloud-based infrastructure and every facet of the supply chain is connected through the cloud.
Real-time data analytics for notifications and abnormality detection (AIOps).
Big Data to optimize system performance in reaction to change.
Users now must have a connected device to see the necessary information on cloud.
Applications should be able to adapt to different environments (on-premise, Cloud, containers, etc.), detect and inform environmental changes and proactively change their behavior accordingly.
The OmniChannel
The term OmniChannel refers to better introspection of the customer experience by understanding where, when, how, and of course, what he/she wants. It means offering the customers a real-time, on-demand, cloud-based, self-service experience through the convergence of all the channels. With information coming from virtually everywhere (on premise, cloud systems, IoT, mobile applications, etc.) and in real time, it is critical to have applications that can provision these sources of information efficiently, and in real time.
OmniChannel may include:
Online browser based applications
Mobile applications (owned and 3rd parties)
Kiosks
Telephone Interactive Voice Response
Social media
Help desk
Physical locations (branches, plants, etc.)
One of the most critical components of the OmniChannel strategy is the backend.
As with any other multi-technology support (IoT, Cloud, on-premise, Mobile, etc.) it needs a myriad of connecting elements and workflows to pull, push and normalize the information flows. The business in turns needs to guarantee that these business flows are working correctly, as they are becoming the bloodline of the digital business.
An OmniChannel approach at a Global Fast Food Restaurant
ERP and digital transformation
ERP systems are in the core of this transformation, as they manage the supply chain and often the order to cash process as well. SAP, the global leader in ERP systems is helping its customers drive Digital Transformation with its own Digital Transformation Platform shown below.
The industry’s response to the pressures generated by digital transformation
It is an imperative for modern enterprises to compete online and to digitally transform their operations. This places demands upon the scarce resources (people) that can build and operate these digital applications, business services and systems.
The technology industry has responded to the demand to implement business processes in software with a set of innovations. The architecture of applications is being further distributed and simplified around a microservices model. The process of delivering software into production is being automated as much as possible through CI/CD. At each layer of the technology stack new languages, services, and data architectures are being invented to meet new needs. Finally the operation of the environment is now automated.
Innovations and Dynamic Behavior across the Entire Technology Stack
An unprecedented situation in the modern enterprise:
Enterprises must compete and execute online as software vendors (Revenue, Cost Efficiency, Time to Market, Agility, Quality of Service, End User Experience)
An unprecedented pace of innovation in processes and technology to support the business imperative of digitization creates previously unheard of levels of complexity and diversity.
Time to market and agility pressures are causing applications to be architected around microservices and released multiple times a day with CI/CD processes leading to more change in production than ever before.
The need for continuous availability and performance is driving dynamic behavior in virtualized and cloud based compute, networking and storage services.
All of this has to work flawlessly all of the time and is beyond the scope of any single monitoring vendor to monitor
A new set of requirements for making sure it all works all of the time
Many companies still monitor their services using siloed tools. These tools are inefficient, providing a bottom-up view, which fail in modern applications and business services, where multichannel, containers, and multi-cloud environments are the new de-facto service architecture standard. A new concept in monitoring is required; one that can comply with the following conditions:
The entire stack must now be monitored in the present (1 Min – 1 Sec) to be able to detect service quality issues in real time.
Relationships across the stack must be determined in instantly
What talks to what (traces and flows)?
What runs on what?
What is a component of what?
AIOps must be deployed to leverage relationships for automated root cause analysis and remediation.
The results of system monitoring must be made relevant to business constituents.
It is not sufficient to monitor the IT infrastructure, application, and business services as separated silos. In real digital transformation, all the services components must be observed, correlated, and presented in a single dimension, and easily understood by both IT and the business, supplemented by predictive behavior analysis.
AIOps platforms at the core of Digital Transformation
Business outcomes cannot be adequately supported and achieved while IT organizations remain in siloed pockets with redundant tools and technologies. For this reason, AIOps Platforms now complement the conventional, siloed IT monitoring systems to cope with the torrent of incoming monitoring data and to discern abnormalities automatically.
By targeting thousands of components from the infrastructure, application and business layers simultaneously, AIOps can correlate, predictively analyze, and self-repair any irregularity, while presenting pertinent visualizations to both key stakeholders and IT operations personnel to quickly understand business service performance.
When properly integrated into a broader capability for data assimilation, integrations, and automation, AIOps can align IT with business in a very concrete way.
Gartner’s View of AIOps Platforms
The features that distinguish AIOps platforms from less advanced implementations of machine learning include the following:
Assimilation of data from cross-domain sources in high data volumes for cross-domain insights.
Access multiple data types, e.g., events, KPIs, logs, flow, configuration data, etc.
Capabilities for self-learning to deliver predictive, and/or prescriptive and/or if/then actionable insights.
Potential use as a strategic overlay that may assimilate multiple monitoring tools and other investments.
Integrations that can help unify stakeholders and bridge the political divides across IT and between IT and business stakeholders.
Support for private cloud, public cloud, SAAS, and on-premise, in one platform.
The ability to deliver on multiple use cases, such as business service performance and availability management, as well as integrated support for change and change impact awareness, and enabling more successful cloud migrations, resulting in greater optimizing of critical business outcomes.
An Introduction to Centerity
The Centerity AIOps Platform has a proven history in supporting business service outcomes across complex enterprise and managed service environments. Centerity is built on strong operational analytics and data mining, as well as powerful discovery, visualization, and dependency insights. Highlighted features include the following:
Deep and Broad Integrations: Centerity integrates with the tools and platforms that you rely upon.
Dynamic Service Views: Simple to understand gauges that show the service quality for each critical business service
In Context: Constant alignment between IT data and business objectives.
Consistent User Experience: Detect user experience degradation before your users do.
Traffic Analysis:Analyze bandwidth consumption and data flow; filter by application, packets, protocols, etc.
AI-driven Anomaly Detection: Machine learning for digital services moves the performance discipline beyond thresholds
The Centerity AIOps Platform
Centerity’s Dynamic Service Views translate technical metrics and their impact on business services and resultant consequences.Each gauge represents the availability, performance, throughput and error rate of the entire stack of software and hardware supporting each digital business service.
Unified Dynamic Business Service Views
When service levels degrade, Centerity provides a bird’s eye view of how the operation of each layer that supports the digital business service is impacting the overall service level.
Drill Down Into Each Layer of a Digital Business Service
How Centerity can help you with your Digital Transformation
Centerity helps you improve the top line business results (revenue, market share, customer satisfaction) of your digitalization transformation projects, and helps you minimize the number of disruptions and the cost and time to repair those disruptions. By providing a holistic view of both infrastructure and business through relevant visualizations enterprises can maintain command before, during, and after the transformation.
Before the transformation:
Centerity automates the discovery of legacy business communication flows and ascertains application service topologies accurately, saving the time and risk associated with performing this manually.
Centerity pinpoints performance bottlenecks and establishes standards before the service transformation so that you can compare before and after situations, ensuring that you are fully prepared to go live successfully.
Centerity distinguishes traffic patterns so that you can plan your services migration steps more cost-effectively, minimizing your expense during the migration.
During the transformation:
Centerity highlights application behavior anomalies and detects fluctuations in the application performance, compared to history, ensuring exceptional performance from day one, keeping the project on a positive track.
Centerity ensures a stress-free transition by monitoring new architectures, such as micro apps, containers, and multi-cloud resources as well as their relationship with legacy architectures, such as the mainframe, distributed storage, or on-premise resources.
Centerity’s flexible and intuitive interface will allow your technical resources, to economically adjust legacy interfaces and build fresh ones for the migrated systems. Developing interfaces can often be an unexpected, time consuming, expensive step in the process.
After the transformation:
Centerity’s Dynamic Service Views for the migrated services result in IT infrastructure metrics pictured in a way business partners can understand, allowing everyone to work together efficiently in “the new world”.
Project costs are considerably reduced, as well as the ongoing cost of ownership thanks to Centerity’s ability to integrate virtually any infrastructure technology and third-party software tools.
Proactive analytics reveal valuable insights for all areas of the business, including commercial transactions, purchase tickets, point of sales performance, etc.
Summary:
Centerity should be considered before, during, and after your digital transformation project to insure you achieve your objectives at a suitable cost and effort. Learn more about Centerity at www.centerity.com.
Authors:
The following people at Centerity contributed to this paper:
John Reuben – Director of Strategic Relationships, Americas. JohnR@centerity.com
https://www.centerity.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/AdobeStock_394340841-1030x687-1.jpg6871030Marty Pejkohttps://centerity.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/Centerity-Logo-White.pngMarty Pejko2019-06-24 14:02:132019-06-24 14:02:13Digital Transformation in Latin America It’s A Digital World
