Uc4 wp one_automation_us
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This document discusses ONE Automation, an approach from UC4 that integrates and orchestrates workflows across an entire enterprise using a single automated process stream. It addresses the problem of technology silos created by virtualization and cloud computing. The UC4 Automation Platform is presented as the solution, allowing end-to-end monitoring, orchestration, and execution across physical, virtual and cloud environments. It combines process automation with complex event processing to make automated decisions based on business indicators across the entire organization.
Uc4 wp one_automation_us
- 1. For more information about UC4 products please visit www.uc4.com. ONE Automation Dynamically Orchestrating Business Processes and IT Infrastructure Across the Enterprise
- 2. Table of Contents The Problem: Changing IT Landscape Creates Technology Silos .......................................3 The Answer: ONE Automation............................................................................................4 Automating Tasks...............................................................................................................5 Job Scheduling ...............................................................................................................1 Application Release Automation......................................................................................2 Run Book Automation .....................................................................................................3 Managed File Transfer ....................................................................................................4 Application Process Automation......................................................................................5 Virtualization Automation.................................................................................................5 Automating Decisions and Business Intelligence.................................................................7 UC4 Decision for CEP-based Automated Decision Making..............................................7 UC4 Insight for Business Intelligence and Analytics.........................................................8 Conclusion .........................................................................................................................9
- 3. The Problem: Changing IT Landscape Creates Technology Silos The IT landscape is evolving, with major developments under way that are changing how we think about IT infrastructure and services. And in the same way that application, database, and server vendors are evolving from physical to virtual and cloud computing, automation technology must also evolve to support business processes in the new IT landscape. Today, business processes span multiple applications, people, and departments—and the applications and servers they use can be located in physical, virtual, or cloud environments. As IT infrastructure moves beyond the physical, on-premise world, it becomes ever more dynamic, agile, and componentized. Virtualization has its benefits, enabling IT departments to use their infrastructure more efficiently. It lowers acquisition, space, and energy costs while driving up productivity and results. But because so few elements in enterprise IT infrastructures are deliberately engineered to operate in a transparent, unified manner, virtualization poses major problems for IT opera- tions management. With no defined industry standards for integrating products across hybrid environments, the multiple technologies, tools, and tasks involved cannot interact in a cohesive, centralized fashion. The advent of cloud computing poses similar challenges. On the plus side, as applications evolve from packaged, store-bought solutions (or complex, home-grown ones) to light- weight, utility-based services, businesses are saving money and becoming more agile. On the downside, cloud computing is adding a whole new level of complexity for IT depart- ments and is creating its own technology silos. The result of both the virtualization and cloud computing trends is isolated silos of technology that must be bridged by human efforts rather than through standard tools and methods. To meet immediate needs, IT departments have come up with ad-hoc, situation-specific automation solutions that usually involve scripted interactions between pairs of machines, applications, or services. These solutions may involve activities ranging from job scheduling to release manage- ment—but because they were typically developed to support the requirements of a particular group within the company, they tend to create silos of automation rather than end-to-end automation solutions, as shown in Figure 1. The combination of a lack of cross-project communication and the inherent lack of flexibility in legacy automation solutions results in point solutions that normally add no value outside of the silo they support. Figure 1. Point solutions for automating IT silos typically end up wasting resources and money on a dozen or more isolated tools.
- 4. The Answer: ONE Automation A better approach than the point automation solutions found in IT departments today is what we at UC4 call ONE Automation. As illustrated in Figure 2, ONE Automation is an approach that enables you to integrate and orchestrate workflows across the enterprise into a single, automated process stream that encompasses all your computing environments. Breaking down the technology silos, ONE Automation provides visibility and touch points that let you see and manage processes throughout the enterprise. In so doing, it enhances your productivity, lowers your operating costs, and serves as the foundation for the agile IT infrastructure that your company needs to meet its business objectives. And it’s available today, through the UC4 Automation Platform™. Figure 2. With ONE Automation, you have a single, automated process stream that integrates and orchestrates workflows across the enterprise. The UC4 Automation Platform supports the most operating systems, databases, applications, and services of any automation solution available today. A highly scalable platform, it can handle tens of thousands of servers and millions of jobs and processes per day. And, as shown in Figure 3, it eliminates automation silos, providing end-to-end monitoring, orchestration, and execution, across physical, virtual, and cloud environments—enterprise-wide. Figure 3. The UC4 Automation Platform offers smarter automation, breaking down operational silos and automating decisions as well as tasks.
- 5. The UC4 Automation Platform unites a unique and powerful process automation engine with innovative Complex Event Processing (CEP) technology. Its real-time CEP intelligence enables it to apply policies and rules to identify event patterns that could affect your ability to meet your service level agreements (SLAs), and then take automated action to resolve these situations before they become critical. For example, if changes in conditions threaten the completion of a key business process, UC4 can predictively reschedule other workloads or provision additional resources to ensure that the process can be executed without interruption. With legacy point solutions, automated decisions can be based only on information that exists within the one silo addressed by that solution (unless you add excessive complexity to the process). With the UC4 Automation Platform, that limitation no longer applies. Breaking down operational silos, UC4 delivers smarter automation, basing its automated decisions on the ever-changing business indicators across all aspects of your business—not just on IT indicators, as traditional automation tools do. The UC4 Automation Platform takes the guesswork out of your automation requirements. It enhances your productivity, accelerates your business and IT processes, reduces your operational costs, and enables you to deliver the promised services on time—every time. Automating Tasks Your IT infrastructure and applications support various business processes that often do not connect and talk to each other natively. Add in virtual applications and those hosted in the cloud, and you have an incredibly complex environment to manage. Further complexity comes from the intricate network of interdependencies that exists across your applications and IT infrastructure, with some processes depending on the successful completion of others. In addition to making sure that steps are performed in the right order, you also need to ensure that you have sufficient IT resources to meet the needs of each step, as well enough to handle the overall process load. These challenges present themselves in every process—from fulfilling an order, to running a report, to automating month-end close; and they apply to on-demand as well as scheduled processes. Without a broad automation solution, organizations must coordinate all these processes separately—through e-mails, phone calls, file arrivals, and elementary scheduling at the operating system, database, or application level. This approach, as pointed out earlier, typically results in automated processing silos, with no means of global visibility, management, or control. The only way to eliminate these automation silos is to apply a single, enterprise-wide automation solution—one that’s powerful enough to manage complex tasks and interdepen- dencies across hybrid infrastructures, while also making intelligent decisions in real time. The UC4 Automation Platform is the only solution available today that’s capable of accom- plishing this. It will also help keep your IT overhead costs down by eliminating low-value, error-prone manual tasks. In the next few sections, we’ll describe more specifically how the UC4 Automation Platform handles specific types of business and IT processes.
- 6. Job Scheduling The concept of job scheduling has been around for decades, dating back to mainframe days, when all business activity was driven through batch transactions. Initially, most companies launched their batch jobs manually. However, as the number of machines, jobs, and scheduling dependencies increased, this approach soon became unworkable. Today, however, enterprises that run batch jobs still typically need to intervene manually at numerous points. Manual processes may be needed to set up new batch runs, review previous job output, verify that dependent batch jobs have been successfully completed, gather additional input data, or initiate subsequent jobs. Further complexities stem from the use of multiple computing platforms and business processes that run 24/7, making it harder to find windows of time to run batch processes. Standard scheduling tools simply cannot handle this degree of complexity, due to inherent limitations in their design. These limitations typically include: Limited support for scheduling options, such as calendar rules (see Figure 4) No support for parallel processing, resulting in longer job execution times No ability to adjust schedules to handle dependencies between jobs or job sets No ability to see and control any jobs beyond the native application and computing platform for which they were designed Difficulties in dealing with parent/child processing Limited error-detection abilities, resulting in processes with errors in the logs or listings still finishing with a completed or normal status No ability to deal with file events or other event types To overcome these limitations, many organizations have resorted to writing custom code to submit, monitor, and manage enterprise application processes. These custom solutions are typically initiated by operating system schedulers, such as CRON or Windows Task Scheduler. The limited functionality in these schedulers generally results in incomplete or hard-to-manage solutions. Figure 4. Calendar rules specify the date and time that jobs need to be run. JOB1 JOB2 JOB3 JOB4 JOB5 Process Flow
- 7. The UC4 Automation Platform supports traditional batch job scheduling, but its scheduling capabilities go far beyond the limited capabilities of traditional batch schedulers, encom- passing calendar- and event-based scheduling, and more. Working across all your computing environments—on-premise, virtual, and cloud—UC4 gives you enterprise-wide visibility and control over all jobs that are running, integrating existing (legacy) schedulers and new applications, streamlining your IT operations with true end-to-end automated processing, and eliminating islands of automation. Key job-scheduling benefits provided by the UC4 Automation Engine include: One tool for managing jobs enterprise-wide—across all platforms, databases, applications, and Web services Scriptless integration with most enterprise applications and tools Built-in script, version, and source control Multi-tenant support for business units and subsidiaries Complete audit trail and security features to ensure compliance Full international time zone support Unmatched scalability and throughput, enabling it to handle tens of thousands of servers and millions of jobs and processes per day Clustering and load balancing to ensure continuous operations, so that if one server fails, processing can continue uninterrupted Application Release Automation Releasing new and updated applications is a complex process. For example, within a single week, you may be releasing multiple applications to different platforms, environments, and owners—each with different deployment requirements. Complex dependencies between applications, operating systems, configurations, and other elements further complicate the process. Deployment also typically involves numerous manual steps, which not only require extensive staff time but also increase the risk of errors. Yet, with all this complexity, you still need to keep everything on schedule, be able to verify that the deployment matched the expectations in each case, and be aware of any problems that arise. The more frequent your application releases, patches, or updates, the more complicated deployment becomes. In addition to all the hours of staff time deployments typically require, any errors that occur—for example, from missteps in manual processes, corrupt packages, or conflicts between applications that are released in parallel—may result in production outages, making it hard to fulfill your SLAs. The UC4 Automation Engine automates the application release process end to end—from packaging all the way to deployment. A flexible, cross-platform solution, the UC4 Automation Platform coordinates and automates all the activities involved in application deployment, allowing for different environments and owners and different processes in each case. It handles upgrades, changes, patches, and first-time deployments—from development through multiple intermediate stages to production. It gives you visibility and control across all application releases, enterprise-wide. It provides you with the assurance you need by generating notifications if any problems arise, and it can take automated actions (continue, pause, remediate) based on rules you specify. And it does all this in an auditable and reversible manner. It’s also the most scalable solution in the market, supporting even the largest deployments, as well as the most databases, operating systems, and tools of any application deployment solution.
- 8. Run Book Automation Data centers are dynamic entities. They have the tendency to grow over the years, and they continually change. Without detailed and timely documentation of all systems and processes, the IT department can quickly lose control, no longer understanding its own internal processes. Questions such as “How did these results come about?” and “What are the mutual dependencies between these processes?” become difficult to answer. IT run books are the documents that contain descriptions of these process and dependencies. They serve as an IT operations manual, describing how to perform specific tasks and jobs. A significant portion of the run book consists of IT housekeeping procedures—fundamental infrastructure processes and maintenance routines, such as database maintenance and backup and recovery procedures. These processes are critical for the data center to operate efficiently and provide the necessary support for business continuity in the event of a disaster. However, they take a lot of time and are also error-prone, due to the need for manual intervention—for example, to shut down a database before taking a complete backup. And the more manual steps involved, the larger the probability of making mistakes, with potentially serious consequences. The UC4 Automation Platform, with its built-in source control and version management, enables you to automate and standardize IT housekeeping processes across your entire infrastructure. As a result, you can manage tasks more efficiently and process workloads faster and more transparently. For example, a common Windows or UNIX management routine can be stored centrally inside the UC4 Automation Platform and executed on each applicable server, eliminating the requirement to store source on each individual server. And as new servers are brought into the data center, UC4’s automated agent recognition can be used to place the new server into the appropriate agent group—so as you add capacity in your data center, maintenance processing will automatically be performed appropriately on the new servers. By automating fundamental infrastructure processes and maintenance tasks, UC4’s intelligent IT housekeeping ensures that tasks are performed at the right time and in the proper manner; enhances performance and availability; increases transparency in the data center; and frees up administrative personnel for other tasks. Because UC4 provides centralized control across all computing environments through a single management console, it solves the IT house- keeping problems introduced by heterogeneous IT landscapes. In addition, it eliminates the errors that often occur with manual efforts and makes it easier to implement and report on compliance requirements. Figure 5 illustrates how run book automation can improve reliability and availability. Figure 5. Run book automation enhances reliability and availability by reducing the risk of manual errors.
- 9. Managed File Transfer Managed file transfer (MFT) is a core requirement of batch automation and is the most common way of transferring data from one application to another, as well as a common means of transferring data between business partners. MFT solutions facilitate the secure movement of files from one computer to another over a network, converting character sets as needed while also providing high performance. With a trusted key relationship that ensures end-to-end encryption and the ability to guarantee delivery from origin to destination, MFT offers significant security and control advantages over traditional File Transfer Protocol (FTP) or Secure File Transfer Protocol (SFTP). The UC4 Automation Platform includes tightly integrated MFT functionality, eliminating any need for third-party products. With UC4’s MFT capabilities, you can be confident that your file transfers are secure, encoded, and fully auditable, with comprehensive safeguards against using inaccurate data. And because the entire file transfer process—including encoding—takes place automatically, it eliminates all the tedious manual steps that are required when working with other technologies, such as FTP/SFTP tools. Figure 6 illustrates the breadth of UC4’s MFT capabilities. For the occasional situation where FTP or SFTP is a more appropriate choice, UC4 also provides support for these protocols, enabling you to transfer files without having to write any script—and without having to place user names or passwords in clear text. Figure 6. The UC4 Automation Platform includes tightly integrated MFT functionality with extensive built-in protection.
- 10. Application Process Automation IT departments have always operated under mandates to provide the highest quality of service at the lowest possible cost. Application Process Automation is one of the best ways to lower IT costs, since it can eliminate a great deal of manual effort. But with organizations running hundreds, or even thousands, of different applications, each with its own distinct technologies and interfaces—and with business processes often spanning multiple people, departments, applications, databases, and servers—implementing end-to-end automation can be difficult. The result is often a complex set of integrations and custom solutions based on multiple tools, creating islands of automation. The only way to simplify this situation is to integrate all applications into a single automation platform. And because your application landscape is always changing—whether it grows organically or through mergers and acquisitions—you need a means of dynamically and rapidly integrating new applications, databases, servers, tools, and services into your automation strategy. The UC4 Automation Platform supports the most operating systems, databases, applica- tions, and services of any solution in the industry, allowing you to rapidly automate all your business processes, across physical, virtual, and cloud environments. It can automate legacy, custom, packaged, and service-oriented architecture (SOA) applications. It also provides you with template packages for rapid automation of such functions as Automated System Copy for SAP, Oracle Retail Merchandising, Oracle Customer Care & Billing, Oracle Financial Period Close, JD Edwards nightly and monthly financial reports and more. With the UC4 Automation Platform, you’ll be able to automate your application processes enterprise-wide, reducing your operational costs and giving you better visibility and control across your entire IT landscape. Figure 7 illustrates how UC4 enhances one such process, SAP System Copy, by automating the pre-copy and post-copy tasks that normally have to be performed manually. This automation can reduce the time required to perform SAP Automated System Copy by as much as 90%. Figure 7. The UC4 Automation Platform automates the complete SAP System Copy process, including pre-copy and post-copy tasks, reducing time requirements by as much as 90%. Virtualization Automation One way that IT organizations can reduce costs is by converting physical servers to virtual servers. Virtualization technology facilitates numerous IT initiatives, including green IT, time- based control, event-based management, and dynamic provisioning. Virtual environments do create a number of IT infrastructure challenges, however. They add an additional layer of complexity and management requirements; increase security and risk exposure; make software compliance and configuration management more difficult; and create potential service and performance challenges. And because of the complexity of virtualized environments, error identification can also be difficult. Virtualization vendors provide some automation tools, but these tools have limited func- tionality. They focus solely on the virtualized infrastructure and provide no visibility of IT processes that occur between physical and virtual environments.
- 11. Yet being able to automate business processes across the entire enterprise offers tremen- dous business advantages. By eliminating the need for manual intervention across the IT landscape, and by defining rules that ensure that processes will run correctly, in the right sequence, and with proper error handling, virtualization automation can improve IT compliance while also enhancing the ability to handle enterprise workloads. The UC4 Automation Platform accomplishes all of the above, making your virtual environment processes part of your enterprise-wide automation solution. For example, by incorporating virtual machines into your IT housekeeping strategy, it ensures that backups and snapshots are taken not just at the scheduled time, but at the right time (e.g., after completing any dependent processes). The UC4 Automation Platform also determines the right time to provision additional virtual machines to increase processing capacity—that is, before the lack of sufficient resources causes performance problems. For example, because UC4 is aware of event patterns, it will provision additional capacity before the monthly financial close processes are initiated. Similarly, because it’s aware that the Extract-Transform-Load (ETL) data warehousing process is CPU-intensive, the UC4 Automation Platform will provision additional virtual capacity before initiating an ETL process, thereby avoiding resource overload and enabling the ETL process to finish earlier. In addition, after the month-end or ETL process completes, UC4 will de-provision the added virtual servers, avoiding the inefficiencies of server sprawl. By providing the right virtual resources at the right time to meet the needs of your business, the UC4 Automation Platform helps you take best advantage of your virtual capacity. Figure 8 illustrates the broad virtualization management capabilities of the UC4 Automation Platform. Figure 8. The UC4 Automation Platform interacts with a broad range of virtualization technolo- gies, incorporating virtualization management into your enterprise-wide automation strategy.
- 12. Automating Decisions and Business Intelligence With information flow and event traffic increasing exponentially, it has become nearly impossible to predict how changes in one arena will affect operational delivery in another. This is where Complex Event Processing (CEP) can help. CEP technology automatically sifts through massive data streams to sense, interpret, analyze, and respond just in time to meet or exceed your SLAs and objectives. By detecting critical business events, analyzing them, and then triggering downstream actions to keep your business on track, CEP moves you from reactive to proactive management of your IT operations. UC4 Decision for CEP-based Automated Decision Making UC4 Decision is a distributed and scalable CEP platform and a key part of the UC4 Automation Platform. It enables you to monitor your business in real time and implement just-in-time automation. It graphically depicts business processes, lets you conduct simulations to experiment with different what-if scenarios, and uses its unique sense-and-respond technology to take automated actions as needed to keep your business on track. With UC4 Decision, your company becomes a highly adaptive enterprise that monitors business processes in real time, delivering: Continuously updated information on critical business processes Early detection of emerging business opportunities through real-time trend analysis Automated decision making, reacting intelligently and immediately to incoming event exceptions Data-model-independent integration with existing IT systems UC4 Decision’s predictive pattern-matching capabilities make your organization more agile and proactive by detecting and responding to potential problems before the situation becomes critical. In so doing, UC4 Decision helps avoid downtime, improves your overall service quality, and enables you to meet or exceed your SLAs. Figure 9 illustrates how UC4 Decision works.
- 13. Figure 9. Using advanced CEP capabilities, UC4 Decision detects and responds to potential problems before they can affect performance, making your organization more agile and increasing your ability to meet or exceed your SLAs. UC4 Insight for Business Intelligence and Analytics Being able to quickly identify error patterns and understand their root cause is essential for maintaining a high level of service quality. If you have to manually sift through raw data, reports, qualitative information, and more to understand trends and their root causes, the process could take weeks—or even months. In today’s rapidly changing business and IT environments, there’s no time for that. UC4 Insight is a pattern-mapping and 3D visualization tool that is a key part of the UC4 Automation Platform. It enables you to quickly and intuitively detect and analyze event processes, so you can rapidly correct fault patterns before they spiral out of control. UC4 Insight gives you immediate answers to questions such as: Where did irregularities occur in my IT and business processes? Are there recurring patterns in IT and business process failures? Have my IT and business processes changed over time? Is my IT and business processing slowing down? Can certain processes be executed more effectively? Which of several possible execution paths for a process is the most effective? What happened at a certain point in time, at a certain location?
- 14. Copyright 2011 UC4 Software GmbH (UC4), all rights reserved. The materials in this publication are protected by copyright and/or other intellectual property laws. Any unauthorized use of the materials in this publication can result in an infringement of these laws. Unless expressly permitted, the copying of information or documents from this publication, in any form, without the prior written permission of UC4 is prohibited. Conclusion It is now common for global enterprises to possess thousands of applications and applica- tion servers, rely on extensive globalized networks, and store more data than ever before. Therefore, it is more important than ever to have a single, enterprise-wide automation solution that will help you efficiently manage this complex IT landscape—a solution that delivers what we at UC4 refer to as ONE Automation. The UC4 Automation Platform responds to this need, providing a single, intelligent automa- tion solution that automates both processing and decision making across hybrid computing environments—physical, virtual, and cloud. UC4 delivers event-based as well as time- based automation, and It supports the most operating systems, databases, applications, and services of any automation solution available today. By eliminating automation silos and removing manual steps that slow execution time, decrease productivity, and introduce human error, the UC4 Automation Platform will enhance your efficiency, accuracy, and agility and will lower your operational costs. And it will enable you to deliver the promised services on time, every time. We invite you to visit us at www.uc4.com to see why more than 2,000 companies worldwide have chosen UC4 to automate their most mission-critical business and IT processes—and to learn more about how the industry-leading UC4 Automation Platform can enable your company to experience ONE Automation.