Automate complex monitoring activities to realize the full potential of your investment and remain competitive.

Editor's note: This article introduces the white paper "How to Effectively Manage and Monitor Your Business Applications," available free from the MC White Paper Center.

Traditionally, businesses have targeted hardware, operating systems, and the user-base as the focus of their monitoring and management expenditure, but an increasing number of companies are now investing in Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and High Availability (HA) applications to keep ahead of the competition. Organizations that follow this trend are making a large investment in their future, and complex implementations mean that you have to manage more, faster, and with less downtime so that ROI, and effectiveness in a highly competitive marketplace, is not compromised.

Time, cost, and resource availability can all impact the success of your ERP or HA implementation. You need to be confident that you are handling all of the information generated by these applications in an efficient and effective manner so that the decisions you make do not adversely affect the business.

Company acquisitions and mergers, software enhancements, and even changes in personnel can all lead to increasingly diverse information being demanded by departments and locations across the globe. You need to be able to react quickly, even when you are not at your desk and often while having to learn new processes and technologies with which you were not previously familiar. The amount and varied nature of information generated by these applications can soon overwhelm and impact your reaction times, until it seems as though you are continually swimming against the tide.

You need to have a tried, trusted, scalable, and future-proof plan in place to ensure that your application is available as and when expected, that routine tasks have completed when scheduled, and most importantly, that any exceptions have been captured and are being handled by the appropriate resource before they impact the business.

Even the most robust business applications are, by their very nature, notoriously difficult to manage and monitor. They can be resource-hungry applications; connections and activities are enough to stretch even the most dedicated of IT departments to the breaking point in an effort to keep ahead of the game. History is littered with numerous examples of companies that failed to keep up with rapid technological advances and changes in market forces, quickly losing their competitive edge in an increasingly demanding operating environment as a result.

By taking a proactive stance and deploying an automated monitoring solution that incorporates a proven set of intelligent business templates to look after the business-critical elements of your ERP and HA applications, you are removing the time-consuming and labor-intensive requirements of monitoring to maximize system availability to the business. Additionally, monitoring by exception means that you are only alerted to events that are out of the ordinary, allowing you to react to and fix issues, even when you are not at your desk and frequently before users are even aware there was a problem. This leaves you more time to concentrate your knowledge and resources on other projects beneficial to the business.

This paper explores the management and monitoring challenges faced by companies when implementing ERP and HA applications within their organization and demonstrates how, by automating complex and resource-hungry monitoring activities, the business can focus on realizing the full potential of its investment and remain competitive.

Want to Know More?

Download the free white paper "How to Effectively Manage and Monitor Your Business Applications" from the MC White Paper Center.

About Halcyon Software

Halcyon Software is a global leader in multi-platform systems management solutions that reduce the complexity and cost of monitoring critical business systems, core applications and processes. They help companies prevent business disruption, increase the efficiency of their IT services and save costs.  In most cases, Halcyon’s solutions increase IT efficiency by 30 – 40 percent, delivering significant savings and a rapid return on investment – often in less than six months.

Halcyon achieves this in three ways:

Monitoring: Halcyon’s monitoring software keeps a vigilant watch on the most critical IT systems and core applications on which business depends. IT administrators receive early warnings of any potential problems or ‘bottlenecks’ before they affect the organization.

Automating: Halcyon enables IT teams to set up ‘self–corrective actions’ to issues or problems to ensure that they never impact the business again.  IT teams can also automate regular tasks, checks or jobs which would normally be undertaken manually. This frees up valuable resources, saves costs and helps to eliminate human error. 

Reporting: Halcyon’s cloud-based reporting solution proves to management that the IT team is achieving the service levels demanded by the business or flags any issues so they can be quickly resolved. 

Halcyon’s products support IBM Power Systems servers running IBM i, AIX, Linux and Windows. With regional offices in the United States, Australia and UK, Halcyon also has a network of partners and distributors supporting territories world-wide. For further information, please visit www.halcyonsoftware.com