App Overview using App Provider's Static Architecture

Post Reply
joyce.chan
Posts: 2
Joined: 23 Apr 2012, 08:03

I want to be able to view the overview of application interfaces across a series of applications.

The intent is to have a high-level diagram showing the application interfaces so I know if changes are made to an application, what possible interfaces can be impacted.

How can I do this diagrammatically?

Is there a view that allows me to 'connect' several Application Provider's Static Architecture to form a diagram?
User avatar
jonathan.carter
Posts: 1087
Joined: 04 Feb 2009, 15:44

The Application summary view provides a non-graphical view of this. Underneath the graphic of the Application Provider Static architecture, there is a table showing the inbound and outbound interfaces to the selected Application Provider.

This table is produced by querying all the Static Application Provider architectures that contain a usage of the selected Application Provider and so can list applications on which the selected one is dependent or applications that depend on the selected Application Provider, even though they are not defined in the Static Application Architecture of the selected application.

In this way, we can see at a glance the interfaces that might be affected by any changes to the selected Application Provider.

Similarly, the Application Impact Analysis view uses the same approach to list the set of business processes and applications that may be affected by a change to the Application Provider that is in focus.

However, in the version 3 of Essential Architecture Manager, we have a view that provides a more graphical representation of the information and data that is exchanged between Application Providers - "Application Information Dependencies Model". This shows the Application in focus in the middle of the page and the incoming interfaces to the left, and out-going interfaces to the right.

This will be available as part of the out-of-the-box set of views very soon.

Jonathan
Essential Project Team
rungsima
Posts: 10
Joined: 15 Dec 2009, 07:29

Could you please describe how to add an interface to external organization?
User avatar
jonathan.carter
Posts: 1087
Joined: 04 Feb 2009, 15:44

To define an interface to an Application that's actually owned or operated by an external party, we create an Application Provider instance for that external system and then define the dependencies to / from it in the Static Application Architecture - in just the same way as we do for any of our internal systems.

To mark it as being a system or application that is external, we can use various attributes on the Application Provider to most accurately reflect what we mean by external. Do we mean that it's hosted by a third party? Owned by a third party? etc.
We can use the stakeholders attribute to reflect the owner, the main contact, the business owner, whatever we need. The owner or operator of the system would be an Actor who we mark as being 'external' (via that attribute on the Actor).
Alternatively, we can capture the supplier of the system (although this normally means the vendor).

Lastly, if we want to easily find all the applications that are part of the extended enterprise but to which we have interfaces, we can define a Taxonomy (e.g. application type) to classify these applications as being, e.g. external interfaces.

In this way, we can model the extended enterprise in the same way as we do our 'local' enterprise.

If we want to really accurately model where the application is located, we can define Application Deployments and connect those to the physical servers (Technology Nodes) on which the deployments are hosted. The servers themselves can be related to the Site in which they are located and with each Site, we can associate geographical attributes, including geo-codes and combine this information with a map.

Jonathan
Essential Project Team
Post Reply