ExplorViz: Visual Runtime Behavior Analysis of Enterprise Application Landscapes

Enterprise application landscapes are complex and hard to manage systems. Enterprise models abstract from this complexity and seek to capture relevant information to cope with business requirements, i.e., increase flexibility while reducing costs of IT. Recent automated approaches focus on utilizing existing information sources. We identified two issues in current approaches. First, in line with these approaches we observe that enterprise models often get outdated and, thus, are an unreliable basis for decision making. Second, these approaches lack detail and after larger transformations commonly the entire application landscape exhibits an altered load profile. In this paper, we present how ExplorViz can be utilized to ensure consistency between an enterprise model and the actual information systems. We exemplify our approach via modeling the application landscape of the Kiel Data Management Infrastructure at the Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research Kiel (GEOMAR). In our scenario, we depict an application landscape and exemplary drill-down to our EPrints productive installation to the source-code level. We explain the importance of underlying concepts and features, which help to optimize the responsiveness of an entire application landscape based on runtime information.