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HPE IT with Operations Analytics logoHPE IT with Operations Analytics

HPE IT identifies the source of a problem 72 times faster with OpenText (formerly Micro Focus) Operations Bridge Analytics (OBA)

HPE IT with Operations Analytics logo

Outcomes

  • Automated capture of test results supports more precise and actionable data on defects
  • Time to run stress and performance tests reduced from weeks to minutes
  • Faster development times accelerated the business ROI of improved sales productivity and performance
  • 16K sales reps now have high-quality, full functionality mobile access to critical software tool

Challenge

Maintain the highest levels of availability for thousands of databases, applications, servers, and network devices.

Managing a complex IT environment

The HPE IT organization manages more than 20,000 databases, over 35,000 servers, 60,000 network devices, and 2,000 applications spread across traditional and private cloud data centers. The expectation is that HPE IT will deliver five 9s of availability, or services that are up and running 99.999 percent of the time.

To meet this requirement, HPE IT makes heavy use of management tools for data center automation, proactive monitoring, and lights-out operations. While these tools are highly effective, they aren’t necessarily designed to ferret out the causes of complex issues that span technology silos. Sometimes IT performance issues or outages arise while various management tools indicate that all is well.

“When this happens, SMEs from different data center domains get together in a war room to figure out what the problem is,” explains the functional architect in the Enterprise Services unit at HPE IT. “Every SME has their own tools to do analysis on their data. You could have 10 people involved on calls that go hours at a time.”

Running the tests was easy. We just loaded the app on our smart phones and ran the OpenText (formerly Micro Focus) AppPulse Mobile test script.

Kara Maloney
Program Manager Sales Compensation Operations Innovation
HPE

Details

Solution

Then the team re-evaluated the project to consider whether it could adopt a DevOps framework by leveraging the OpenText (formerly Micro Focus) Software portfolio: Unified Functional Testing (UFT), Mobile Center to automate mobile app functional and regression testing, and OpenText (formerly Micro Focus) AppPulse Mobile to help its developers and testers more quickly isolate, prioritize, and fix mobile app performance.

“We realized that with these Software solutions, we could automate both our functional and our diagnostics workflows,” says Brown.

UFT & Mobile Center, for example, allows testers to launch test scripts with a single mouse click. “It’s easy to run the same test over multiple devices and operating systems,” Brown notes, “to make sure you’re getting consistent results.”

Because AppPulse Mobile delivers comparable efficiencies for mobile app diagnostics monitoring, HPE IT decided to use it to manage its beta test workflows. “The software works with both Apple and Android,” Brown says. “It captures performance information, categorizes anything that causes a slowdown or drains battery power, and presents it on a dashboard. The data it gathers is completely anonymous, so you don’t have to establish and manage complicated security protocols. And it’s a Software as a Service application, so our dev and test teams can access the data no matter where they sit.”

To drive further efficiencies, HPE IT integrated the two OpenText (formerly Micro Focus) Software mobile application performance management and testing solutions with its Application Lifecycle Management platform. With this architecture, any issue arising during testing automatically generates a service ticket and routes it for resolution.

After evaluating the efficiency gains it could achieve by leveraging these OpenText (formerly Micro Focus) Software mobile app monitoring solutions, HPE IT realized it would need far fewer resources to develop the app. For example, in-stead of four or five testers, it would be able to support the project with only two at the most. The mobile monitoring solutions would also allow HPE IT to more easily integrate its development workflows with beta testers on the operations side of the company.

So IT contacted the Sales Compensation team with the good news. “They said they’d found a way to free up the resources needed to support our project,” Maloney says. “Needless to say, we were thrilled.”

Results

Over the next several weeks, HPE IT developed the HPE MyComp Mobile app and put it through a series of internal tests. These tests range from manual usage tests, such as making sure the app logs input correctly and displays the correct data, charts and graphs for that user, to performance testing that ensures the application runs at an expected speed when downloading data and switching between pages. In this situation, this is espe-cially important because they have to support some older phone hardware. The app goes through stress tests to see if the team can get the application to crash from standard or unusual usage patterns.

Then Maloney recruited a team of user acceptance testers from within the Sales Compensation organization. “Running the tests was easy,” Maloney notes. “We just loaded the app on our smart phones and ran the OpenText (formerly Micro Focus) AppPulse Mobile test script.”

On the development side, the workflow was equally automated and seamless. “Software solutions automated the testing itself,” Brown says. “But they also automated the hand-offs between our dev teams, test teams, and user acceptance testers.” This streamlined tasks like communicating test requirements and test results, and determining how to apply test results to subsequent app builds – in other words, tasks that can add substantial overhead to development projects.

Using UFT & Mobile Center also reduced the time it took to run IT stress and performance tests from weeks to minutes, because the UFT software can run multiple tests back-to-back across multiple devices and operating systems all at once.

Another advantage of using OpenText (formerly Micro Focus) Software mobile app monitoring solutions was that conducting automated tests yielded more comprehensive information than would be possible using manual tests. “When tests are automated, you can run more of them,” Brown explains. “The Software also gives very specific information about the app functionality and performance, along with precise data about the conditions of the defect. It makes diagnosis and resolution both easier and faster.”

Perhaps the most important benefit of the DevOps strategy that HPE IT adopted, however, was the relationship it fostered between HPE IT and the Sales Compensation organization that requested the MyComp Mobile app. “It was a very positive experience,” says Maloney. “First, HPE IT was able to fit the project in, which was a pleasant surprise. Then, when they turned the app over to my team for testing, it met our specifications and the performance was already very solid. And for the minimal defects we did discover, the reporting process was straightforward and easy to manage.”

With the mobile app performance testing now complete, Maloney’s team has released the app – and HPE’s sales managers are looking forward to the positive impact it will have on their reps. “This app will help our reps become more productive, and will also serve as a performance motivator,” Maloney notes. “The HPE MyComp Mobile app is an important step forward for our sales organization, and thanks to HPE IT, we are ready to take that step that much faster.”

“In problem situations, we spend a lot of resources across our team and other HPE IT teams to figure out what’s wrong,” Solanky says. “Troubleshooting across a landscape with so much information is virtually impossible from a human standpoint. For the most part, when this occurs, we are not able to find the root cause.”

Soon after this event, HPE IT deployed OBA, and the Global Data Services team recreated the same type of database configuration issue in a test case. With OBA and its powerful log analytics and event analytics capabilities, they identified the root cause of the problem in less than 30 minutes.

“With OpsAnalytics, we fixed the problem in a matter of minutes,” Solanky says. “OpsAnalytics gave us key metrics on application performance, database performance, and OS/ platform performance that all came together in one place so we could triage and diagnose more effectively.”

About HPE IT with Operations Analytics

HPE IT with Operations Analytics logo

Mobility solutions are useful productivity tools for all enterprise employees. They’re particularly valuable, however, to sales reps, because they help reps stay connected while they’re on the road, meeting with prospects, and visiting customer sites.

The challenge for enterprise IT organizations is to keep mobile apps current – which is why the Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) IT organization recently leveraged two mobile app monitoring solutions from the Micro Focus Software portfolio: Micro Focus Unified Functional Testing (UFT), Mobile Center and AppPulse Mobile. These solutions allowed HPE to adopt a DevOps approach to building and testing a new mobile app – and in turn accelerated HPE’s ability to meet the needs of its sales organization with tools that enhance rep productivity and on-the-job effectiveness.

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