Evolven Comparison can prevent IT incidents & reduce investigation time

By comparing two different environments, or an environment's current snapshot with a historical snapshot of when it was working well or its golden baseline, IT Operations and Infrastructure organizations can use Evolven Comparison to quickly and easily identify and analyze the changes and differences that made or could potentially make their environment unstable.

Evolven Comparison enables companies to dramatically increase the stability of their IT environments, cut environment incident investigation time and effort, and reduce the risk of production outages.

What pressing IT issue does Evolven Comparison deal with?

According to a recent survey of US IT installations, some 85% of VP's of IT Operations and Infrastructure mention that the accurate investigation of the root-cause of environment-based IT application instabilities is very challenging and involves significant human effort and loses them a lot of production system up-time.

In fact one such VP said "when such environment issues occur its often like trying to find a needle in a haystack to solve them".

What are the benefits of Evolven Comparison?

Evolven Comparison delivers a powerful solution to prevent and investigate such hard-to-find IT environment incidents.

Typical customers find these benefits from their use of Evolven Comparison:

Increase Environment Stability - obtain and maintain environment stability through the rapid identification and analysis of changes and differences that put your IT environment's stability at risk, both at release and throughout their ongoing operational use.

Cut investigation time and effort - significantly reduce the time and effort spent on identifying and investigating environment issues and analysing their root-cause.

Transition with confidence - prevent production outages and ensure accuracy and consistency during environment transitions and releases.

Minimize Operational Maintenance Windows - check out any risks to releases and ensure that unwanted changes and differences in the IT environment do not impact operational system maintenance time ensuring less risk of failure to deliver agreed end-user and business system service levels.

· Evolven Comparison™ is an innovative Environment Comparison solution that makes it easy to compare environments with each other, or with their historical or golden baselines.

Evolven Comparison supports the well-known methodology for solving unknown problem root-causes by helping IT teams to rapidly locate IT environment changes which then act on IT system differences to cause stability problems (see Kepner-Tregoe for more information on this type of methodology).

IT teams can use it to prevent IT incidents occuring due to inadvertent or unwanted IT environment changes, and also to speed up the time taken to investigate environment-based IT incidents, and finally to reduce the risk of production outages by validating the accuracy of their releases.

Overall, our customers typically find that Evolven Comparison helps them to achieve:

an 80% reduction in Service Incidents associated with Environment Releases
a 90% reduction in time required to determine Service Incident root cause
a 70% reduction in Operational Maintenance Window downtimes

How does Evolven Comparison achieve its benefits?

Evolven Comparison delivers its benefits via three key capabilities:

Comparison of the entire environment: applications and their underlying infrastructure
Comparison of the most granular level of the environments' configuration and content, allows organizations to capture the root-cause of issues and incidents, no matter how minute
Analysis of the criticality and impact of changes and differences, allows users to home in on the root-cause of their environments' issues

1. Evolven Comparison Compares the Entire Environment

Modern business systems include interdependent layers of applications and infrastructure. Focusing on only one layer, or on a point technology, leaves room for error, and ignores critical context and interdependencies. It's only by focusing on the entire environment that you can ensure a stable business service that meets agreed service levels.

Evolven Comparison compares the entire environment: applications and their underlying software infrastructure stack, including: applications, front-end servers, middleware, databases, messaging layer and operating systems.

Evolven Comparison applies an environment perspective: rather than only being able to focus on a particular server or point technology it compares the logical environment architecture and not merely infrastructure components, thus allowing for the comparison of entire business applications, even when they are on different physical topologies.

2. Evolven Comparison delivers in-depth comparison

The Devil is in the Detail - IT environments are complex. A typical such environment will include thousands of different configuration parameters in which the mis-configuration or disregard of a single parameter can cause an environment incident with a major impact on IT and business service. When it comes to IT environment configuration, the devil is indeed in the detail.

Evolven Comparison covers all facets of the IT environment, including the architecture, configuration and bill-of-materials.

Evolven Comparison drills-down to the most granular level of each individual configuration parameter in any configuration source, including configuration files, registry, database schema, stored procedures, and reference data held in the database.

Evolven Comparison compares the content of each environment component, including: version, size, checksum, modification date etc.

3. Evolven Comparison applies comparison analytics

Focus on What Matters Most - With the complexity of IT environments involving thousands of different configuration parameters, it can be a challenge to turn an IT environment comparison into an actionable set of information that supports problem solving or decision making. Evolven Comparison's unique Comparison Engine™ includes a set of technologies that allows just that: clear, definitive information that highlights critical possible root-causes and their impact.

Evolven Comparison analyses changes and differences with a focus on their criticality and impact. It classifies changes and differences by their impact, prioritises and highlights based on criticality, ignores insignificant changes and differences, and even allows for the effective comparison of inherently different environments (e.g. test vs. production).

Evolven Comparison visualises comparison results for fast and easy analysis.

Evolven Comparison leverages a customisable Knowledge Base and embedded logic to ensure meaningful and useful comparisons.

How Does Evolven Comparison Work?

To enable valuable information that supports decision making, Evolven Comparison collects granular environment configuration, analyses automatically differences and changes and presents the critical items on which one should focus in a convenient manner.

Collection - Evolven Comparison collects environment configuration using any of three types of agents: i) remote agents; ii) local agents (to collect information that is not accessible remotely); iii) offline agents - collecting information in a file that is then uploaded to the Evolven Server (for environments that have no communication with the Evolven server).

The collection itself can either be either on-demand or scheduled (e.g. every night during the maintenance window). To ensure low overhead on infrastructure, Evolven Comparison applies a piecemeal approach where collection is done incrementally and following the original snapshot - only through the collection of deltas.

Environment configuration is collected at the most granular level of configuration parameter allowing for the capture of even the most minute of root-causes of environment incidents.

Analysis - collected environment configuration information is compared against the information collected from a different environment, or a historical snapshot of the same environment or a golden baseline.

Since Evolven Comparison dives deep and collects enviroment configuration at the most granular levels, it can be a challenge to compare information in a way that will produce valuable and useful information. The Comparison Engine™ includes a set of proprietary analytic technologies that help users focus on critical differences. The technologies include: i) the Impact Knowledge Base: this customizable knowledge base determines the impact and severity of each difference identified; ii) the Rule Mechanism - which handles the aggregation, tagging and normalization of information to make it clear and consolidated; and iii) the Noise Reduction Mechanism - filtering out irrelevant or expected/required differences.

Presentation - the results of comparisons are presented through Evolven Comparison's rich browser-based client, and consequently deliver: i) comparison results in a graphic format that allows users to get a clear, comprehensive and easy-to-understand view of environmental risks and their potential impact; ii) visibility into the complete Environment Configuration Repository often for more advanced users (i.e. subject matter experts) that want to have the entire environment configuration view and the ability to drill down to the most granular levels of the environments that they manage.

Want to know more?

If you like what you hear about Evolven Comparison and perhaps are keen to know more, then please get in touch with us to arrange an online demo of Evolven Comparison (using WebEx or a similar web meeting technology). Just click here to complete a few details and we will get back to you to schedule the demo within 24 hours.