Introduction to NonStop Operations Management

Application Management
Introduction to NonStop Operations Management–125507
11-4
Check List for an Applications Review
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Performance measurement. Performance-measurement tools or counters should be
built into the applications. Determine what types of counters you need and what
types of procedures are required.
•
Application-specific operations guides. Require documentation for all applications.
Your staff needs information on monitoring, installing, starting, and stopping
applications, and on resolving simple problems. Your staff also needs to know how
the application operates, who the end users are, what hardware is required, and what
other applications can or cannot run concurrently. For batch jobs, your staff needs to
know any output destinations and commitment times.
•
Application control. The operations staff should have total control over the
application on production systems. To maintain security, you might want to create a
policy that prevents applications staff from accessing a production system and data
except under the supervision of the operations staff or during an emergency if the
operations staff is unavailable.
•
Application development. Ideally, the applications staff should have their own
development system for developing application programs. If this is not possible,
create separate production disk volumes or subvolumes with create or write
restrictions to the production files.
Check List for an Applications Review
The cost of failure recovery for an application escalates by an order of magnitude at each
of the following implementations of the application:
•
Specification and design
•
Prototype
•
Manufacture
•
Installation
•
Operation
Participating in an application review (at the design stage, if possible) is a good means
of ensuring that your requirements are met and that the application developers and
vendors understand the needs and concerns of the operations staff. Usually, senior-level
support personnel attend the reviews.
The following list provides examples of questions to ask during an application review:
•
What operator intervention is required to run the program?
•
What parameters must be input by the operator? Does the operator understand
and have access to all the necessary information?
•
Are the screens clear and easy to use? Is the screen design and the use of the
keyboard standard with the application?
•
If the application needs to run when there are no operators present (for example,
during a holiday), is it designed so that operator intervention isn’t required?
•
Will data be available when the job needs to run? What is the impact if some of
the data is not available when the job needs to be run? Is the job as easy to run
as possible?