Ensuring the quality of business services
Modern business services — what customers are willing to pay real money for — are complex software solutions that sometimes combine many different components, including those developed not only by your employees. Whether you want to provide services, maintaining effective contact with the client on any channel most convenient for him, whether you want to establish an effective sale of your products via the Internet or quickly bring to the market an innovative service involving mobile means of access, you will have to activate and maintain operational state of the application, which should organically fit into the already existing information landscape and seamlessly interact with other systems.
The client always expects that the promised functionality will be available in full, and there will be no interruptions in work and annoying delays in solving the set tasks. Speaking of a quality business service, we mean the fulfillment of these requirements, for which the provider has to take a whole range of measures throughout the entire life cycle of the application. Sophisticated design and development of the service, its deployment taking into account all the features of the infrastructure and integration with other applications and owners of related systems and, finally, effective control over the solution in a productive environment to prevent failures - all this is a guarantee that the client will be satisfied with the result.
At Hewlett Packard Enterprise, this approach to ensuring the quality of business services is considered optimal and offers a set of solutions for its implementation.
In order for the service to be in demand, it must exactly meet the objectives. These tasks in today's dynamic world transform with high frequency. Service providers should be able to respond quickly to the ever-changing demands of their customers and offer new opportunities to solve the most pressing problems. For this reason, application developers are increasingly preferring agile development approaches, which ensure that testing is closely related to the development process, rapid commissioning of new releases, and constant contact with customers to most fully reflect their requirements in the product being created. business services
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To speed up the process of releasing high-performance and reliable business applications equipped with all the necessary functions for clients, we need a unified information environment combining the steps of determining the requirements, coding and testing the components of a business service and supporting the most modern application development techniques. HPE Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) allows you to create such an environment, providing all the necessary tools for managing a business service development project - from the requirements formation stage to the deployment of the required software package and the transfer of ready-made components for testing. Important advantages of HPE ALM are the support of geographically distributed teams, which is a common practice for many companies, and the possibility of remote communication with customers.
Together with ALM, the HPE Quality Center (QC) solution is applied, which allows you to closely link the testing of service components with requirements management and the development process, and besides, it allows you to perform testing, automated or manually, at the initial stages of the application life cycle. As you know, the sooner errors are detected in the code, the easier it is to eliminate them, so this approach to testing is most conducive to achieving the required quality of business services. HPE Quality Center provides test management and error management tools in a single application creation environment.
Very often, business services need to be integrated with external systems that are not owned by the service provider. For example, an online store cannot do without interaction with one or another payment system. Such interactions need to be tested during the development of the service, but how can this be done if the provider does not have direct access to the functionality and data of external systems? To solve this problem, HPE offers external infrastructure virtualization tools that are integrated into a single architecture with ALM and QC. This makes it possible to capture information exchange with external systems and then emulate integration processes in a test environment. For example, Network Virtualization delivers real-world network traffic in a business service deployment environment. And thanks to testing applications in “combat conditions” using Server Virtualization, even at the design stage, it is possible to detect and prevent failures that may arise due to the problems of connecting the new service with external solutions.
An extremely important feature of many modern business services is support for mobile access. To avoid any complaints about its quality, it is necessary to verify at the testing stage that this access will be implemented optimally for various mobile platforms. This functionality is provided by the HPE Mobile Center solution. With its help, service developers will be able to analyze the behavior of the application on Android, iOS or other mobile OS devices, and when used in conjunction with the Network Virtualization system, estimate the possible load on the network for different mobile platforms.
At the final stage, before the introduction of a new application into productive operation, load testing is carried out, which is supported by the tools of the HPE Performance Center complex. To implement this stage, you need to configure a test environment that includes all the components necessary for the application to work: an operating platform, a database, an application server, etc. This time-consuming process is greatly simplified and accelerated if you use HPE Codar, an automated deployment solution. releases of complex applications. The system uses information about the application requirements for the production environment and uses the tools of automation of operating processes HPE Operations Orchestration, Server Automation, Network Automation to create the necessary test environment.
Another important quality assurance tool for business services comes into play here: the HPE Universal CMDB configuration database, which contains information about the configuration of the application's production environment and controls the compliance of the test area with this configuration. The use of Codar and UCMDB ensures accurate reproduction of the “combat situation”, thereby significantly increasing the productivity of the testing process and ensuring the release of an application that is completely ready for commercial operation.
During the development and testing stages, we did everything so that the components of the business services meet the highest requirements. The next step is the most important stage of its life cycle - productive use. HPE solutions will help ensure the provision of high-quality customer service.
First of all, once again turning to the tools of Codar and UCMDB, we perform the deployment of a new service, either entirely or only updates of its components in a properly built productive environment. The use of the configuration database will ensure the adjustment of all necessary infrastructure elements in accordance with the provider’s corporate policies and taking into account the interdependencies of the various components of the service, including interaction with external components and other services.
In addition, during the operation of the service, it is necessary to understand who owns each of the components, what contractual relationships exist between the providers of the component parts of the business service, what IT resources are involved in them and how much they cost. With this information, you can track the costs of providing business services over time (providers and the price of individual components may vary depending on various factors) and optimize its cost without compromising quality.
The control over the financial component of the quality of a business service is provided by the IT resource lifecycle management system - HPE Asset Manager. The growing demand for this solution in Russia can be explained by the desire to carefully evaluate and control IT spending in the current economic environment. However, one has to be aware that having an effective asset management tool is essential for the quality delivery of business services, regardless of the market situation.
To ensure the proper quality of a business service, it is necessary to constantly monitor its implementation at all levels - from user interaction with the application to the performance of individual elements of the IT infrastructure. One of the approaches to the analysis of what is happening with user transactions is their emulation, but to realize such an opportunity for all business service modules without exception is a highly technical task and not always realizable due to, for example, licensing restrictions. HPE proposes a different approach: “listening” of real user hits with the help of the Real User Monitor solution. The system is installed as if in front of the business service and monitors user traffic, allowing you to see what is happening with the service in a certain period of time - who, how and why it is accessing it.
As a result, the service provider receives the most valuable information about the status of the service: which components are in demand and which are not (and, perhaps, in subsequent updates of the application, it is not worth spending efforts and funds to develop the latter); how many users access the service and whether architectural improvements or channel capacity expansion will be required to support more than expected customer numbers; from which mobile devices the main traffic is coming and is it necessary to support platforms with a small number of users (the answer is “no” is not obvious, because in the course of further analysis it may be revealed that representatives of the top management of large companies constitute this minority).
Processing this kind of data allows you to improve the service and maintain user satisfaction at the highest level. In addition, listening to their requests, the service provider is always ready to promptly solve problems if they arise, and in addition it is able to warn in advance about problems, which helps to increase customer loyalty. HPE emphasizes that there is no need to fear any violations in the field of personal data - the system supports means of masking and does not store confidential information.
The results of user monitoring can be recorded in the form of a load profile and transferred to the design stage, where they will serve as the most valuable source of objective data for load and functional testing, helping to make these processes more productive.
It is impossible to guarantee high-quality business service provision (with the required functionality at any time and a specified response time) during operation without monitoring tools that control all levels of its implementation - from application performance to virtual and physical server status. In addition to a set of traditional IT infrastructure management solutions, HPE offers an innovative Operations Analytics tool. HPE refers to it as a “time machine”, because the system allows you to see and understand what is happening with a business service at one time or another and how it affects its current state. HPE Operations Analytics consolidates historical information about events at various levels, including user transactions and unstructured data (events in the infrastructure, log files of various information systems, data from log files, etc.). Efficiently handle them allows the use of high-performance database Vertica, one of the key HPE solutions in the field of working with Big Data.
With the help of Operations Analytics, the administrator on a convenient visual panel - a kind of "dashboard" of a business service - analyzes key performance indicators. In the event of a failure, which is signaled by the red color of one indicator or another, you can move with the mouse on the timeline and find out from when and in which components of the service problems started. The system filters and correlates data coming from different levels of service implementation, and allows you to quickly identify the causes of failures without involving specialists from different departments to solve this problem.
HPE Operations Bridge allows centralizing all business service monitoring processes, not only in operation mode, but also during the testing phase. The solution, which, among other things, contains the Operations Analytics module, consolidates information about events at different levels of service implementation and its various components, performs correlation and provides a complete picture of what is happening, allowing you to quickly identify the problem and cope with it. Thanks to these opportunities, the provider will provide the client with a truly high-quality business service that meets all stated requirements and will be able to improve it.
The HPE Operations Bridge includes a module for executives - the Business Value Dashboard, which in a visual form represents the main KPI business services. These data allow us to assess the benefits that the company provides for the provision of this service. You can also open access to the interface of this solution for the managers of the client company, so that they can see in numbers the compliance of the service with the specified quality parameters.
So, a distinctive feature of the HPE solution stack to ensure the quality of business services is an integrated approach and the possibility of a phased increase in functionality in accordance with the strategy chosen by the company. It covers all stages - from development and testing to deployment and operation. At each stage, effective tools are provided to create a high-quality service at the optimum time, to introduce it into the productive environment with minimal costs and to keep the parameters of its provision under constant control. HPE solutions make it possible to pre-empt the occurrence of problems, detecting potentially dangerous situations that are not yet known for this service, and drastically reduce the recovery time for its performance if a failure has occurred. None of the vendors today provides such a complete picture of the quality of business services as HPE does.
The client always expects that the promised functionality will be available in full, and there will be no interruptions in work and annoying delays in solving the set tasks. Speaking of a quality business service, we mean the fulfillment of these requirements, for which the provider has to take a whole range of measures throughout the entire life cycle of the application. Sophisticated design and development of the service, its deployment taking into account all the features of the infrastructure and integration with other applications and owners of related systems and, finally, effective control over the solution in a productive environment to prevent failures - all this is a guarantee that the client will be satisfied with the result.
At Hewlett Packard Enterprise, this approach to ensuring the quality of business services is considered optimal and offers a set of solutions for its implementation.
Cooking the best ingredients
In order for the service to be in demand, it must exactly meet the objectives. These tasks in today's dynamic world transform with high frequency. Service providers should be able to respond quickly to the ever-changing demands of their customers and offer new opportunities to solve the most pressing problems. For this reason, application developers are increasingly preferring agile development approaches, which ensure that testing is closely related to the development process, rapid commissioning of new releases, and constant contact with customers to most fully reflect their requirements in the product being created. business services
')
To speed up the process of releasing high-performance and reliable business applications equipped with all the necessary functions for clients, we need a unified information environment combining the steps of determining the requirements, coding and testing the components of a business service and supporting the most modern application development techniques. HPE Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) allows you to create such an environment, providing all the necessary tools for managing a business service development project - from the requirements formation stage to the deployment of the required software package and the transfer of ready-made components for testing. Important advantages of HPE ALM are the support of geographically distributed teams, which is a common practice for many companies, and the possibility of remote communication with customers.
Together with ALM, the HPE Quality Center (QC) solution is applied, which allows you to closely link the testing of service components with requirements management and the development process, and besides, it allows you to perform testing, automated or manually, at the initial stages of the application life cycle. As you know, the sooner errors are detected in the code, the easier it is to eliminate them, so this approach to testing is most conducive to achieving the required quality of business services. HPE Quality Center provides test management and error management tools in a single application creation environment.
Very often, business services need to be integrated with external systems that are not owned by the service provider. For example, an online store cannot do without interaction with one or another payment system. Such interactions need to be tested during the development of the service, but how can this be done if the provider does not have direct access to the functionality and data of external systems? To solve this problem, HPE offers external infrastructure virtualization tools that are integrated into a single architecture with ALM and QC. This makes it possible to capture information exchange with external systems and then emulate integration processes in a test environment. For example, Network Virtualization delivers real-world network traffic in a business service deployment environment. And thanks to testing applications in “combat conditions” using Server Virtualization, even at the design stage, it is possible to detect and prevent failures that may arise due to the problems of connecting the new service with external solutions.
An extremely important feature of many modern business services is support for mobile access. To avoid any complaints about its quality, it is necessary to verify at the testing stage that this access will be implemented optimally for various mobile platforms. This functionality is provided by the HPE Mobile Center solution. With its help, service developers will be able to analyze the behavior of the application on Android, iOS or other mobile OS devices, and when used in conjunction with the Network Virtualization system, estimate the possible load on the network for different mobile platforms.
At the final stage, before the introduction of a new application into productive operation, load testing is carried out, which is supported by the tools of the HPE Performance Center complex. To implement this stage, you need to configure a test environment that includes all the components necessary for the application to work: an operating platform, a database, an application server, etc. This time-consuming process is greatly simplified and accelerated if you use HPE Codar, an automated deployment solution. releases of complex applications. The system uses information about the application requirements for the production environment and uses the tools of automation of operating processes HPE Operations Orchestration, Server Automation, Network Automation to create the necessary test environment.
Another important quality assurance tool for business services comes into play here: the HPE Universal CMDB configuration database, which contains information about the configuration of the application's production environment and controls the compliance of the test area with this configuration. The use of Codar and UCMDB ensures accurate reproduction of the “combat situation”, thereby significantly increasing the productivity of the testing process and ensuring the release of an application that is completely ready for commercial operation.
Productive excellence
During the development and testing stages, we did everything so that the components of the business services meet the highest requirements. The next step is the most important stage of its life cycle - productive use. HPE solutions will help ensure the provision of high-quality customer service.
First of all, once again turning to the tools of Codar and UCMDB, we perform the deployment of a new service, either entirely or only updates of its components in a properly built productive environment. The use of the configuration database will ensure the adjustment of all necessary infrastructure elements in accordance with the provider’s corporate policies and taking into account the interdependencies of the various components of the service, including interaction with external components and other services.
In addition, during the operation of the service, it is necessary to understand who owns each of the components, what contractual relationships exist between the providers of the component parts of the business service, what IT resources are involved in them and how much they cost. With this information, you can track the costs of providing business services over time (providers and the price of individual components may vary depending on various factors) and optimize its cost without compromising quality.
The control over the financial component of the quality of a business service is provided by the IT resource lifecycle management system - HPE Asset Manager. The growing demand for this solution in Russia can be explained by the desire to carefully evaluate and control IT spending in the current economic environment. However, one has to be aware that having an effective asset management tool is essential for the quality delivery of business services, regardless of the market situation.
Under vigilant control
To ensure the proper quality of a business service, it is necessary to constantly monitor its implementation at all levels - from user interaction with the application to the performance of individual elements of the IT infrastructure. One of the approaches to the analysis of what is happening with user transactions is their emulation, but to realize such an opportunity for all business service modules without exception is a highly technical task and not always realizable due to, for example, licensing restrictions. HPE proposes a different approach: “listening” of real user hits with the help of the Real User Monitor solution. The system is installed as if in front of the business service and monitors user traffic, allowing you to see what is happening with the service in a certain period of time - who, how and why it is accessing it.
As a result, the service provider receives the most valuable information about the status of the service: which components are in demand and which are not (and, perhaps, in subsequent updates of the application, it is not worth spending efforts and funds to develop the latter); how many users access the service and whether architectural improvements or channel capacity expansion will be required to support more than expected customer numbers; from which mobile devices the main traffic is coming and is it necessary to support platforms with a small number of users (the answer is “no” is not obvious, because in the course of further analysis it may be revealed that representatives of the top management of large companies constitute this minority).
Processing this kind of data allows you to improve the service and maintain user satisfaction at the highest level. In addition, listening to their requests, the service provider is always ready to promptly solve problems if they arise, and in addition it is able to warn in advance about problems, which helps to increase customer loyalty. HPE emphasizes that there is no need to fear any violations in the field of personal data - the system supports means of masking and does not store confidential information.
The results of user monitoring can be recorded in the form of a load profile and transferred to the design stage, where they will serve as the most valuable source of objective data for load and functional testing, helping to make these processes more productive.
It is impossible to guarantee high-quality business service provision (with the required functionality at any time and a specified response time) during operation without monitoring tools that control all levels of its implementation - from application performance to virtual and physical server status. In addition to a set of traditional IT infrastructure management solutions, HPE offers an innovative Operations Analytics tool. HPE refers to it as a “time machine”, because the system allows you to see and understand what is happening with a business service at one time or another and how it affects its current state. HPE Operations Analytics consolidates historical information about events at various levels, including user transactions and unstructured data (events in the infrastructure, log files of various information systems, data from log files, etc.). Efficiently handle them allows the use of high-performance database Vertica, one of the key HPE solutions in the field of working with Big Data.
With the help of Operations Analytics, the administrator on a convenient visual panel - a kind of "dashboard" of a business service - analyzes key performance indicators. In the event of a failure, which is signaled by the red color of one indicator or another, you can move with the mouse on the timeline and find out from when and in which components of the service problems started. The system filters and correlates data coming from different levels of service implementation, and allows you to quickly identify the causes of failures without involving specialists from different departments to solve this problem.
HPE Operations Bridge allows centralizing all business service monitoring processes, not only in operation mode, but also during the testing phase. The solution, which, among other things, contains the Operations Analytics module, consolidates information about events at different levels of service implementation and its various components, performs correlation and provides a complete picture of what is happening, allowing you to quickly identify the problem and cope with it. Thanks to these opportunities, the provider will provide the client with a truly high-quality business service that meets all stated requirements and will be able to improve it.
The HPE Operations Bridge includes a module for executives - the Business Value Dashboard, which in a visual form represents the main KPI business services. These data allow us to assess the benefits that the company provides for the provision of this service. You can also open access to the interface of this solution for the managers of the client company, so that they can see in numbers the compliance of the service with the specified quality parameters.
***
So, a distinctive feature of the HPE solution stack to ensure the quality of business services is an integrated approach and the possibility of a phased increase in functionality in accordance with the strategy chosen by the company. It covers all stages - from development and testing to deployment and operation. At each stage, effective tools are provided to create a high-quality service at the optimum time, to introduce it into the productive environment with minimal costs and to keep the parameters of its provision under constant control. HPE solutions make it possible to pre-empt the occurrence of problems, detecting potentially dangerous situations that are not yet known for this service, and drastically reduce the recovery time for its performance if a failure has occurred. None of the vendors today provides such a complete picture of the quality of business services as HPE does.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/278263/
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