In this article, we discuss how test environment managers can minimize environment downtime. We also show how enov8 can help.
Health Check your Processes
In today’s world, generally, organisations outsource IT Operations to multiple vendors. On top of the organisation’s processes, each vendor also brings its own processes and tools for managing its Test Environment.
As a test environment manager, you need to review these processes. Then identify which ones work and which need improvement.
Also, you need to check the existing implemented projects to see whether teams followed these processes properly. Document each process with all its system dependencies, and audit it regularly for better control.
A process health check helps the organisation improve and adopt new changes. In turn, this leads to better test environment management.
Enov8 EcoSystem allows organisations to view their processes from different perspectives and enables them to understand their dependencies. It also allows environment managers to conduct impact analysis in case of a failure in processes or systems. Enov8 EcoSystem has built-in audit & reporting capabilities that give alerts if action is required.
User Access Management
Data Integrity is one of the crucial elements in test environment management. Wrong data can lead to application failures, which result in environment downtimes.
Additionally, unauthorized access to environments can lead to wrong code or configuration version deployments/changes, which can also result in environment breakage.
To avoid this downtime, proper user access control should be in place throughout test environments.
You should also audit user access regularly. That way, only the right users can change environments and data. This will lead to better test environment control and an increase in availability.
As part of the July 2017 release, the enov8 ecosystem has implemented a new User Access Management Module, which enables organisations to control and audit their user access across environments. It has built-in reports & dashboards that help in better management of user access.
Contention Management
In today’s fast-paced market, each organisation is on its toes to deliver products to the market. This means lots of projects running in parallel with different requirements.
These requirements sometimes lead to contention with other projects for the same systems or environments. Misunderstanding these contentions can lead to overriding changes in the same environment. As a result, projects suffer downtime and miss crucial timelines.
To control these types of downtimes, an environment manager needs to have a complete view of these requirements and contentions.
Enov8 EcoSystem environment and release management module allows the organisations to track contentions not only from environment perspective but also from the requirements perspective with comparison to another project. The advanced level reporting allows the projects to understand if there is any gap in their requirements that they have missed as part of their analysis.
ITSM Processes
In our recent survey, we found that more than 80% of the organisations did not have a proper ITSM solution for test environments, in comparison to production environments.
There was no proper change process in place for the test environment, which led to chaos, resulting in downtime. Therefore, organisations need a proper CMDB solution along with ITSM for managing their test environments’ configurations.
Enov8 provides inbuilt ITSM capabilities to organisations. It also allows integration with an organisation’s existing ITSM products to provide more visibility into their environments. Their visual CMDB and Connectivity views provide users with an end-to-end view of the whole landscape.
Author Rohit Gupta