Industry's First Visual Artificial Intelligence Platform To Predict Oracle ERP Business Application Issues Across Hybrid IT

Transcription

1 Industry's First Visual Artificial Intelligence Platform To Predict Oracle ERP Business Application Issues Across Hybrid IT 2018 FixStream All Rights Reserved 1

2 An Industry First AIOps Platform for Oracle ERP Out-of-the-box discovery and correlation of Oracle ERP business processes and transactions with infrastructure. Preserves speed of digital transformation and breaks down the barriers of communication between IT operations and business owners. Many enterprises are accelerating their digital transformation and increasing their dependency on critical business processes that run on Oracle ERP, thus requiring the utmost focus on performance and availability. To these companies, ERP is as indispensable as the electricity that keeps the lights on. The business impact of an ERP outage or poor performance could be dire service outages could cost a company $72k per minute (Digital Enterprise Journal ). Guaranteeing the uptime and performance of these business processes can be challenging, since Oracle ERP instances are deployed across distributed environments. Oracle ERP solutions also use a very fragmented set of applications services, and are connected via a complex infrastructure of network, compute, storage, virtualization, and container orchestration systems. At the same time, enterprises are rushing to hybrid cloud seeking both business agility and security, increasing its adoption rate 3x in the last year, from 19 percent to 57 percent (Forbes) The combination of a complex, distributed environment and the migration to a hybrid cloud will require IT and business operations to cooperate and gain visibility into the end-to-end process, from business transactions all the way to the underlying infrastructure. According to DEJ, the number of processed metrics, events and alerts has increased by 88 percent since last year, while the number of devices has increased by 57 percent. The cloud is the only way to leapfrog from where you are to where you have to be and do it at a compelling [total cost of ownership; TCO] that s both secure and drives the level of innovation. Oracle CEO Mark Hurd, sharing one of the five cloud predictions to come true by Today s domain-centric tools don t correlate business transactions with application services and infrastructure events, making troubleshooting in a hybrid cloud environment increasingly complex and costly. FixStream, an Oracle Gold Partner, facilitates digital transformation by automating the discovery and mapping of critical Orderto-Cash and Procure-to-Pay processes to the underlying application process flows, hosts, backend databases and infrastructure entities such as switches, routers and storage arrays. The Journey to Cloud Requires Modern IT Operations Oracle predicts and drives a digital disruption strategy to motivate companies to replace legacy IT systems, including ERP, with an emerging cloud-based ERP solution. In 2016, a major transformation began that allowed CIOs to modernize their more than 2018 FixStream All Rights Reserved 2

3 20-year-old financial, supply chain and other core applications using cloud technologies. The maturity of cloud technologies in the last few years has offered IT executives a low-risk and agile platform to transform their business processes by migrating ERP applications to the cloud. Enterprise will consider one of three deployment options to run their Order to Cash (O2C) business flow: Entirely in a public cloud. This is typically the case for medium-scale businesses. Entirely on-prem (or on a private cloud). This is typical of very customized, complex or highly critical processes. In a hybrid environment. This will likely be the case for most large-scale customers. Fig: 1 Three deployment models of Oracle ERP Though there is a strong push and incentive to run Oracle ERP as a public cloud, it s likely that a decent number of enterprises will run their O2C business process in a hybrid environment where proprietary core application will still continue to stay in customers on-premise private data centers FixStream All Rights Reserved 3

4 Fig: 2 Which type of cloud architecture is your organization currently using? (Forbes 2017) As they embark upon this journey, CIO s will face the following operational challenges: Business risk with migration to a hybrid cloud. Complexity with troubleshooting of business issues within the entire O2C process stack. Management of capacity to deliver the quality of service. IT compliance, auditing and reporting becomes cumbersome, requiring FTEs. To address these challenges, IT executives are looking for IT Operations (AIOps) that provide insights powered by big data analytics and machine learning algorithms, and by the visibility into the moving pieces across business process, application and infrastructure entities. Per Gartner, platforms enable I&O leaders to meet the proactive, personal and dynamic demands of digital business by transforming the very nature of IT operations work via unprecedented, automated insight. AIOps platforms utilize Big Data, modern machine learning, and other advanced analytics technol-ogies to directly and indirectly enhance IT operations (monitoring, automation, and service desk) functions with proactive, personal, and dynamic insight. (Gartner - Innovation Insight for Algorith-mic IT Operations Platforms Colin Fletcher, Refreshed: 26 April 2017 Published: 24 March 2016) 2018 FixStream All Rights Reserved 4

5 AIOps solutions deliver tangible value. DEJ s research collected data on current deployments and deployment plans for nearly 1,000 management and organizational capabilities, identifying those that have the most significant impact on performance. As shown in the table below, the 20 percent Top Performing Organizations (TPO) enjoyed significant operational benefits versus their peers: Fig: 3 Digital Enterprise Journal (2017) To achieve these results, these organization invested in advanced analytics. Specifically, the TPO s were significantly more likely to deploy: Anomaly detection (3.1x). Correlation of application performance and business metrics (2.2x). Automated root cause analysis (92%). A single platform for monitoring both on-prem and cloud infrastructure/ applications (78%). FixStream Partners with Oracle to Accelerate Adoption of Hybrid Cloud FixStream has partnered with Oracle to address this issue for Oracle ERP customers. FixStream s industry-recognized emerging AIOps platform provides the correlation, analytics and visualization for an ERP environment deployed in hybrid cloud. It correlates across three very important layers: business processes such as O2C and Procure to Pay (P2P); application components such as Oracle ERP, Fusion Middleware and other legacy environments; and compute, network and storage supporting these application entities. Although the FixStream platform is extensible for all enterprise applications and business processes, we are going to focus on O2C process to explain FixStream capabilities and business value propositions in this document. Let s walk through a real customer scenario and see how FixStream helped provide the solution to a problem FixStream All Rights Reserved 5

6 Let s imagine the customer Oracle ERP instance is deployed in the Oracle cloud and is interacting with enterprise services for tax calculation, authentication and identity service, and that the tax services are hosted on-premise in the customer data center. The number of pending orders increased beyond the expected threshold during a specif-ic time period because of a system failure while doing a credit check. Upon investigation, the root cause was a CPU starvation issue in the VMs in the customer premise where Oracle DB was deployed for applications doing credit checks. How long would it have taken an IT organization to determine the root cause? How many people across all the domains would have been involved? The FixStream platform automates identification of the root cause and visually pinpoints the issue in close to real-time, reducing the time required to detect the root cause from hours to minutes. The dashboard widget for O2C business process will not only show the business metrics, but further organize them into legitimate business problem categories such as inade-quate credit score or system errors. In this case, system errors include performance and health issues in compute, storage, network, application server and DB log files. The anal-ysis of the business metrics is done in a time series to quickly pinpoint the exact window where there are system failures. The system will then navigate the user to the event correlation window. This window pro-vides the context with the order to cash flow for the selected timeframe and shows the sequence of events on a time-series graph across the server performance alerts, service alerts, log events, network faults, network performance alerts, etc. across hybrid cloud and pinpoints the pattern that creates the incident FixStream All Rights Reserved 6

7 This clarity and specificity helps operations team to quickly identify the root cause of problems impacting the health of O2C business process flow and reduces MTTR from hours to minutes. How does FixStream work? To allow IT operations teams to automate the process of get to the root cause of Oracle ERP issues that are spanning multiple IT domains, FixStream performs the following functions: 1. Discovery FixStream smart discovery is agentless. With just two user inputs read-only user account credentials (we call it service account ) and an IP address range, FixStream discovery scans through each IP and auto-discovers physical and virtual compute, storage and network entities, including configuration data, interface and links and services running in them FixStream All Rights Reserved 7

8 2 Topology Mapping FixStream discovery delivers the end-to-end topology of hybrid environment out-of-box which shows connections between network, storage, and compute entities across hypervisors, VMs, VNFs, physical server, network and storage entities. 3 Application Discovery and Dependency Mapping FixStream auto-discovers the logical groups of interconnected service flows that represent critical applications such as ERP, tax applications, and credit and collection applications. The group entities are then automatically associated with the underlying physical and virtual compute, storage and network entities to build the application dependency maps. These become the foundation for operational use cases FixStream All Rights Reserved 8

9 4 Business Process Hierarchy Mapping FixStream s platform provides an intuitive drag and drop UI interface for users to create the business process hierarchy. For example, O2C business processes can be quickly created by simply grouping Oracle ERP and Tax Service where the Oracle ERP application is running in the cloud and Tax Service is running in on-prem, accessing external services. The application dependency map is auto computed for the business process once the user completes the grouping FixStream All Rights Reserved 9

10 5 Operational Analytics and Event Correlation Operational data such as server performance metrics (CPU, memory, IO, disk), network performance (bandwidth, interface I/O, CPU, memory), storage (IOPS, latency, throughput etc.), log events, network faults thru SNMP and other alerts and metrics are fed to the Fix- Stream platform from various sources using its open API ingestion layer. The events are stored in time-series and correlated and analyzed via machine learning algorithms for patterns and anomalies to conduct root cause analysis FixStream All Rights Reserved 10

11 6 Machine Learning FixStream quickly predicts business application issues across an enterprise s entire hybrid IT stack. With its Machine Learning (ML) algorithms and advanced multi-layer correlation from Oracle ERP business transactions to application services and infrastructure, FixStream can rapidly identify business impacting issues in minutes instead of hours. The FixStream AIOps platform can also detect patterns to predict and prevent future business outages, modernizing IT operations management while increasing revenues, customer satisfaction, and business agility. FixStream ML capabilities include: Dynamic thresholding and multivariate anomaly detection IT can identify a sequence or group of anomaly events for transaction, application and infrastructure entities that may impact a business application. For example, you can detect an unplanned event such as DDOS attack and better plan for a critical business events such as black Friday FixStream All Rights Reserved 11

12 Sequential Pattern Analysis for Incident Prediction IT teams can now identify and visualize in seconds the sequence of correlated events that have impacted a specific application or business process and identify patterns with probabilities to predict future incidents. For example, you can predict that SAP ERP transactions such as billing or invoicing will stop working after 1 hour due to a detected event such as network bandwidth and interface utilization alert. By doing so, it will give enough time to help the business take proactive action to stop the incident from happening FixStream All Rights Reserved 12

13 Disk/Network Bandwidth Predictive Analytics By analyzing the historic trend of utilization of an infrastructure resource and by predicting when the infrastructure entity will run out of capacity, it allows the IT operations team to proactively plan to add more capacity before it negatively impacts the business FixStream All Rights Reserved 13

14 7 Dashboard Dashboards are personalized views keeping the users needs in mind. There are two categories of dashboards the FixStream platform provides: business and operations. Business dashboards are tailored for CIOs and VPs of Business Ops to derive insights into business process health and associated infrastructure health. Operations dashboards, on the other hand, use widgets to provide deep visibility into infrastructure. What Oracle Products Does FixStream Support? FixStream 6.0 provides support for Oracle ERP 12.X, Oracle Real Application Clusters, Oracle VM hypervisor and Oracle Fusion Middleware in on-premises, hybrid, public or Oracle ERP cloud deployments, with support for JD Edwards, Peoplesoft, Siebel, and Netsuite planned for upcoming releases FixStream All Rights Reserved 14

15 FixStream Enhances Your Existing IT Investment FixStream s connector ecosystem preserves your investment in IT operations and service management tools, and provides end-to-end correlation with detailed visualization and analytics over application-to-infrastructure topology maps. As such, it provides a connector to Oracle Enterprise Manager. FixStream 2001 Gateway Place, Suite 520W San Jose, CA 95110, USA All rights reserved. WP info@fixstream.com Gartner, Cool Vendors in Enterprise Networking, 2017, 17 April The Gartner Cool Vendor Logo is a trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc., and/or its affiliates, and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved. Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner s research organization.nany warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular 2018 FixStream All Rights Reserved 15