Today's fast-paced business environment has put pressure on organizations to develop and maintain applications at an unsurpassed rate to drive increased employee productivity, company revenue, and customer satisfaction. The ultimate goal is to improve operational efficiencies while lowering total cost of ownership (TCO) and increase return on investment. However, this effort poses its own risks and challenges that must be addressed, including how to maintain and manage applications as both end-user and business requirements change. These changes can quickly and decisively alter the competitive landscape, rendering certain applications obsolete.

The complex tasks of maintaining and managing applications in production accounts for up to two-thirds of an application's TCO. This means that two dollars will be spent maintaining applications that only cost one dollar to develop. Currently, many organizations are considering future manageability and TCO in their development platform choice as legacy applications built on technologies like COM and COBOL near the end of their useful life.

Many of these organizations are turning to Microsoft's .NET Framework with its compelling platform for building robust distributed applications. Among the framework's advantages are the use of safe managed code, automatic garbage collection, language independence, and wide functionality through a comprehensive class library, all making development easier and quicker. These features, coupled with a 20%-25% lower estimated development and maintenance cost than J2EE-built applications, have many organizations viewing .NET as a powerful means of lowering their TCO.

Organizations must consider several strategies to reduce costs throughout the application lifecycle, from planning and development, to testing, deployment, and support. These strategies should be linked by a common thread: enabling the monitoring and measuring of application behavior and health throughout the application lifecycle.

Determine and Verify Business Rules
When developing or migrating an application to a new framework, the first consideration should be to determine the business rules that are being automated. These rules can simply be specifications for extracting and displaying data, but more likely have added complexity for reading, querying, manipulating, and storing data; interacting with users, other systems, and services; and providing management and monitoring functionality. Therefore, it's imperative to ensure business rules aren't only implemented correctly but also meet current business and end-user needs.

Monitor the Health of Applications
Along with analyzing business rules, forward-thinking principles and best practices require architects to design a health model or blueprint for application behavior. The health model contains definitions of state transitions that occur when an individual service or component changes its state from "working normally" to some type of error such as "performance degraded" or "failed." The health model typically illustrates a simple indication such as:

• Green indicator for "working normally"
• Yellow indicator for "performance degraded"
• Red indicator for "failed"

These indicators provide users with health state notifications for each application, component, service, and group of servers.