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Application Portfolio Advisor

Getting Started with Txture Application Portfolio Advisor

The Application Portfolio Advisor is Txture's central management area for creating and maintaining visibility into your entire application portfolio and identifying optimization and modernization opportunities.

At its core, the Application Portfolio Advisor combines the disciplines of Enterprise Architecture Management with FinOps, GreenOps and Cloud Modernization. This module is designed to help organizations continuously prioritize optimization opportunities by identifying areas of risk and technical obsolescence, highlighting candidates for application rationalization, and providing actionable recommendations for improvements to reduce costs, minimize your carbon footprint, or unlock technology performance gains.

Similar to the Transformation Cockpit, the Application Portfolio Advisor has a global view and an application-specific view. Selecting an application from the vertical left sidebar filters all reports for that application and closely related assets, we call this view Application Mode.

The horizontal navigation bar at the top of the Application Portfolio Advisor provides the main contextual navigation, allowing you to view your application or entire portfolio from different angles.

The navigation bar​

The main navigation bar provides multiple perspectives for analyzing your application portfolio.

  • Summary
    The Summary page helps maintain high data quality by actively highlighting issues such as duplicate assets and tracking recent modifications. In Application Mode, you can view all data gathered for a specific application, ensuring you have a comprehensive understanding of its status.
  • Insights
    The Insights section offers a broad overview of the optimization potential within your entire application portfolio. It also features a quadrant chart based on the principles of Gartner's TIME analysis, which allows you to analyze the technical and functional fit of your applications. This analysis helps you identify where to focus your optimization efforts.
  • Technology/Cloud
    In the Technology/Cloud section, you can examine your applications from a technological perspective. This view enables you to discover opportunities for significant performance improvements and assess risk factors, such as end of life technologies.
  • GreenOps
    The GreenOps section allows you to evaluate the environmental impact of your applications. Here, you can analyze the current carbon footprints of your applications, identify those with the highest emissions, and determine which applications offer the greatest potential for carbon savings.
  • FinOps
    By applying a financial lens in the FinOps section, you can identify which applications have the highest associated costs and understand the reasons behind these costs. This analysis will help you pinpoint applications that present the most substantial cost-saving potential.
  • Business/Organization
    The Business/Organization section focuses on the associations between applications and the business layer to keep an overview, for instance, which applications belong to an organizational unit or support which business capability.

Transitioning to the Transformation Cockpit​

Once you have identified one or several candidates for migration, you can seamlessly transition to the Transformation Cockpit in Txture. This feature allows you to view detailed Cloud Proposals based on the application stack data that has been previously collected.

Recommendations​

The Application Portfolio Advisor continuously analyzes your application infrastructure, as well as the business layer and provides pro-active recommendations for potential savings and other functional or technical improvements. These recommendations are the result of several Recommendation Rules:

  • End-Of-Life
    This rule evaluates application stacks for components that have reached vendor specific technology end-of-life and recommends particular version upgrades. As the technology end-of-life date typically defines the point at which the vendor officially stops developing, selling or providing full support for that product, this output also influences the Technical Fit scoring. The time period that should be tolerated before or after an actual end-of-life date is adjustable (see Preferences).
  • Technology Versions
    Evaluates application stacks for components with outdated technology versions in use and recommends newer available versions. As newer technology versions often offer better price-to-performance ratios, as well as security, this output also influences the Technical Fit scoring. Technical fit is negatively impacted mainly by the amount of major versions the technology in use is lagging behind. But also minor and patch versions are considered if applicable.
  • Cloud Data Center
    Two rules evaluate if and how much existing cloud components would benefit from a cloud data center relocation. One rule focuses on potential cost savings, while the other rule detects if there are re-location opportunities that would result in lower carbon emissions. Defining preferred data center locations or limiting the distance (by km) is possible via the Preferences.
  • Right-Sizing
    Evaluates if and how much existing application cloud components would benefit in cost savings from choosing right-sized cloud service instances Right-sizing cloud components (i.e. saving resources according to utilization or compute processor performance) can lead to cost savings, as well as carbon reductions. There are two separate rules to determine the saving potential in each category.

Levels of Analysis​

Overall Recommendation Rule Summaries
The Insights page shows aggregated results of all individual Recommendation Rules by category. The aggregates are sensitive to the selected scope of Applications in the sidebar.

Single Recommendation Rule Summary
In the respective categories Technology/Cloud, GreenOps, FinOps or Business/Organization you get a better view on how much each rule contributed to the overall category result. The individual rule results are aggregated again by the scope of Applications according to your sidebar selection.

Detailed Recommendation Rule Results
For each rule you can inspect detailed table with per component results. This table also provides insights into data completeness issues by application and individual components.