Monitoring the health of a business application requires that knowing all configuration items used by the business applications. First challenge, what is a business application? The first step is to define the business applications in unambiguous terms with consensus among the interested parties. So how do you objectively define a business application?
The first realization is that tools like Microsoft Office are not business applications. They are tools completely business agnostic. They are business agnostic because they do not automate a particular business function or contain any business logic but instead are productivity tools used by employees.
So what is a business application? A business application is referred to in the abstract such as ‘claim payment system’. Business applications are not referred to by the components executing in the environment used to support the business application. In order to evaluate the health of the business application, all supporting software and hardware items must be identified so they can be monitored to provide the business application health.
Business Application definition . . .
A business application is defined as the collection of software services and hardware used to automate a specific business task or function. Business application is an abstract concept with a commonly referenced name to facilitate management from both a financial and utilization perspective. Typically a business application will automate entire business processes such as finance, customer relationship management or manufacturing to accelerate business. An application can traverse multiple tiers of the technology services such as application instances, web instances, database instances and servers. Each application consists of software components ‘running’ on hardware. These software and hardware components are those items in the environment that can be uniquely identified and monitored.