Āśraya
Manage Product Performance, Log Issues, Identify Problems and Respond
* This application requires some prior understanding of the engineered application architecture.
Āśraya (Sanskrit for Refuge) is a WPF standalone application written in C# for the purpose of aiding logging of IT Ops issues and their responses while providing a statistical business overview of the operational outcomes with built-in graphical depictions of logged issues and their responses.
The application has a end-to-end open ended design, that means you design up to 20 escalation categories, 30 products and unlimited requester and personnel definitions. You basically design your own issue escalation architectures and define products, nothing is imposed on you. With version 1.5, you can easily upload files into specialized repositories that are part of the issues of any kind and these files are encrypted when stored. You can easily import and export CSV files to autopopulate a host of different installations in any component of the application, no real data entry work is required as long as you have a designed copy of ĀśrayaLite installed somewhere, just dump and deploy or share your logs with other team mates if necessary.
The operational process is cyclic when you populate data, as you are required to log in Issues (Issue numbers are autogenerated, other than Response IDs, these are the only things imposed upon you) and then populate responses linked to the parent issue. As you populate and work overtime, the Analytics module (the reason why this app was written) will summarize findings overtime to give you important product-related statistics. For ITOps, statistical analysis is critical. Whether you log issues, have effective responses and resolve such issues, nothing matters if you forget about past lessons, with some data analysis of issues and it's subsequent responses until resolution, you are presented with important data that can be translated into business information for an important cost-centre that is IT.
The typical operational scenario for the standlone version of Asraya is that you manage issues/responses on an annual basis, dump Issue-Responses tables and reset app. Then deal with this data for analysis on an annual basis.
You will need to double click the 'pending' Issues when one is declared to be given the option to complete these logged issues. All completed escalated issues, whether with or without responses, need to be closed in this manner. The button is not directly visible, so you HAVE TO DOUBLE CLICK data table entry when you're dealing with pending issues
This application uses LiveCharts component, an Open Source project for .NET.
Currently, work is being put into a distributed version of Āśraya for SQL Server backend (currently, it uses SQLite). With that app, you may easily expand Issue/Response management and resolution with multiple stakeholders. Āśraya is a work in progress, but it is meant to be an end-to-end ITOps tool for any well educated practitioner who understands that it is not just about the 'now', it is also about 'yesterday' as much it is about 'tomorrow'.