Frequently Asked Questions | Evolven - Your Top Source for IT Operations Analytics

Production Support, Major Incident Management, ITSM, DevOps and Audit/Governance.

Generally, IT Operations Analytics tools just detect symptoms, like higher CPU usage, slower transactions, or an extremely slow Java query. Although important to understanding the health of the environment and for guiding IT operations towards the general direction of where the problem lies, symptoms are merely a manifestation of a problem, not the true root cause. The true root cause for performance and availability incidents, are triggered by "undesired changes".

These undesired changes can be attributed to different type of changes: configuration, data, capacity, code, and workload.

Changes are critical for analysis. So for really mastering changes you need to make sure that no change is overlooked, that every change counts.

Evolven tracks the most granular bill of material and configuration changes in end-to-end environments, from application to infrastructure, from physical to cloud environments.

We are obsessed with changes and Evolven is the only vendor that collects and analyzes actual changes across end-to-end IT environment at most granular level. We collect all change types, including changes in configuration, capacity, data, workload and application code. We also cover the end-to-end environment: from application down to infrastructure and all the layers included (web servers, app servers, databases, messaging buses, operating system, hypervisor, virtualization management platform, cloud platform and even hardware). Since minor changes can turn into high impact incidents, we look into changes at most granular level. For example, we break down configuration changes to the level of individual parameters, being able to say what exactly changed in each parameter value. Lastly, we collect changes in near real time to ensure we identify undesired changes as they happen.

Collecting information about changes in the environment state is not easy; particularly configuration, data and code at the granular level and in near real-time. Information is stored in different formats across different sources (files, databases, registry in Windows, APIs, system utilities etc.). With environment state data collected in huge volumes, business systems (especially in production) need to remain unaffected during such massive data collections. Thus both IT and vendors have put their focus on the far more accessible area of symptoms.

Evolven is unique. There is no product on the market that collects the most granular change information across the entire end-to-end environment and applies analytics to present the highest risk changes and inconsistencies for decreasing MTTR and avoiding incidents.

For a list of technologies supported by Evolven, visit the Supported Technologies page

Evolven can support Custom Applications with minimal effort, using a wizard-based approach.

For the list of IT operations product that are integrated with Evolven, visit the Integrations page

Absolutely! Evolven delivers significant value right out of the box, deployed as a stand-alone solution, with no additional data feeds needed. Evolven's unique ability to collect and analyze all actual changes across the entire environment allows our customers to know exactly "what changed" in their environments. This is also the basis for providing them with actionable insights into the true root cause for preventing and troubleshooting incidents. For example, as a stand-alone solution Evolven detects unauthorized changes, inconsistencies between environments, and can validate your releases to ensure they will run error-free. Furthermore, with a phased implementation approach, customers can connect additional data feeds to support their most important use cases e.g. adding deployment data feed to support DevOps analytics.

Evolven's specialized Analytics Engine leverages deep examination of granular changes and sophisticated correlation techniques and algorithms to identify and correlate specific attribute-level changes to the production problems that they have the highest probability of causing.

Evolven will bring benefits to organizations in early stages of maturity with no existing processes or tools in place. Our technology collects and analyzes all actual changes across the entire environment right out of the box. With no formal change management in place, this is your only opportunity to know exactly "what changed" and "what is different" in your environments. You can start from reactive scenarios using Evolven to investigate incidents identifying changes that caused them. Then you can start using Evolven to become more proactive early detecting high risk changes and environment inconsistencies. Remediating those will allow you to reduce the amount of issues.

When there is no Service Desk or approved change records, Evolven allows for a number of options:
- Define authorization windows directly in Evolven (one time or regularly scheduled) for specific environments
- Automatically detect "suspicious" changes by applying anomaly detection (time and loneliness)

Frequently, IT organizations do not fill change records thoroughly enough. Evolven can use even low quality change records, if they have any indication of hosts where a change will be applied and some kind of time window when the change will happen or happened. This information can even be extracted from a change description. If none of the details are provided at all, Evolven allows for a number of options:
- Define authorization windows directly in Evolven (one time or regularly scheduled) for specific environments
- Automatically detect "suspicious" changes by applying anomaly detection (time and loneliness)

Evolven integration with monitoring tools primarlily imports key monitoring events like performance alerts. Imported alerts are automatically clustered and cleaned to boost data quality. If alerts are completely unreliable, you can manually point Evolven to an environment and time when an issue has occured.

The administrator role in Evolven is very light, usually part of an existing admin's job. It primarily includes configuring users and roles, deploying server and agent upgrades, and maintaining the application definition updates either provided by Evolven or which are customized for a customers custom applications. Existing examples of administrative resources range from 0.25% of FTE supporting an organization managing several thousands of servers with Evolven to 1 FTE supporting Evolven for 10,000-20,000 servers.