Application Lifecycle Management Tool
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Recently, I have been involved in a fair amount of what we call asset analysis work, that is, analysing a large number of Notes databases/templates for a company to highlight potential issues associated with upgrading Notes, consolidating servers etc. While you can easily analyse 500 or more databases for the relevant issues in a short space of time, it will always take much longer to remediate and test the issues that really need it. This inevitably means that the customer’s ability to prioritise the discovered issues becomes critical.
It is here that the customer usually gets stuck, with them often being forced to arbitrarily assign priority because they have no data on which to do it properly.
We can offer our customers an audit that helps them to prioritise on the basis of application usage but wouldn’t it be great if this kind of information was readily to hand? ITIL (amongst others) has the concept of an asset catalogue, which captures information about assets including owner, purpose, current version and so on. What about a Notes application that allows you to capture this information, but at the same time continuously monitors database size and would be capable of rolling a database over when it reaches a certain trigger? One that could monitor relevant usage (while ignoring the system related/housekeeping stuff), resetting to zero at the end of each day/week/month but keeping a history for trend analysis. One that could note replication settings for a database, could monitor replication traffic and flag when replication fails? In other words a proper application lifecycle management tool.
Now, I know the database catalogue can do some of the above, but it is way too limited a tool for what I have in mind. Do you think such a tool is something that IBM should provide out of the box with Notes, or would it be a waste of space, or too much hassle to maintain? If you think this would be useful, what other features would you like to see? What do you think?