Use Case:
How Discoverer can help in IT support

The Problem

Within tangled IT systems, it is so difficult to find the root cause of the system failure that supports teams spend more time finding out who’s the problem is then actually solving it.

Many companies operate within extremely complicated and unclear structures. Naturally, finding out why a certain program wrote a certain value in a cell is nearly impossible.

It happens very often that L2 and L3 support teams are stuck trying to figure out which system(s) caused the failure and subsequently, whose responsibility this failure is. And in the end, avoiding having a ticket on the table and in one’s KPI’s becomes the priority, resulting in ping pong match between the teams.
However, it is the end customer who suffers, as the business has to pay for extra hours even though the ticket could have been resolved much faster.

The Challenge

Correctly using the root cause analysis to figure out the real reason why a problem has occurred. Across all systems.

The system analytics and support team might have a tool that would help them find the answer in one system, but if more systems are involved using multiple programming languages, the task is getting almost impossible. Almost.

The Solution

The X Language discovery tool constitutes of one coherent environment that enables the visualization of all dependencies. And it works at various support and operation levels. You just load in the respective data, process it and see all existing real or embedded
relations.

Discoverer enables visibility through the following functionalities.

• RESOURCES – objects, entities, databases, files
• TECHNOLOGIES – schedulers, programs, jobs,
• STATISTICS – graphs, code lines, dashboards
• DEPENDENCIES – relations, statistics, dependencies,
  analytical capabilities, dead code analytics
• USAGE – MSU, database, file, FTP, mainframe screens,
  file access, FTP access, web page access,
• DEAD AND ZOMBIE CODE ANALYTICS
• EXPORTER – Archi, CSV, XML, XLS
• EXTERNAL TOOLS – access to an internal graph
  database, full-text search capabilities, BI/reporting

Mobile access shows the data loaded in real time to managers, architects, analysts and support teams. They are thus able to follow the structures and references of the embedded objects. It helps by showing exact analytical and statistical information while resolving requests, incidents or problems.

The application is web-based, running on any device with standard web and mobile widgets displaying Discoverer’s analytical data in easy-to-read charts. Therefore, teams supporting running systems can easily access and analyze the root cause on the fly without the need to connect to a central system.

With Discoverer, a root cause analysis can even uncover tickets and issues inherited from other systems. Simply because they might be disturbing the production environment of a system user is currently looking at.

The Discoverer knowledge module can easily be used to compare the status of the architecture before and after a certain release is executed. This helps to identify if the issue is connected to a recent release.

The resulting charts combine data from multiple applications and data sources to display year-over-year changes and comparisons – a view that before Discoverer’s arrival did not exist across multiple platforms or toolsets as a standalone screen.

Once one or more projects or programs are optimized, the same algorithm enables an X Language application that does not require any changes to the underlying environment. Therefore the risk of overlooking mandatory dependencies is minimized. This brings immediate benefits to organizations that run large business-critical toolsets.

The Result