A New Analysis Approach Incorporated with Analytic Hierarchy Process for The Software Application in A Multiple Tiers Environment

Abstract

Software application becomes critical tool in a business operation today. Generally there is no management staff in the business operation can tolerate the software application downtime beyond the Service Level Agreement (SLA). The time duration spent on root cause analysis activity of software application error carries crucial impact to the business transaction. This is because business operation cannot afford if the software application downtime gets prolonged. Especially an enterprise level of software application is involving multiple tiers. There will be at least one or even more log files at each tier. Of course the root cause analysis activity will easily get prolonged as more than one log file are required for analysis activity. The research is not only to mitigate the time duration prolonging on root cause analysis activity. It is also to increase the accuracy of identifying the actual root cause during analysis activity. This is a necessity to have a proposed logic model sitting at the logic tier. The logic model can analyze the required log files, and then identify the root cause without creating any interruption to the existing software application executing in the production environment. Therefore, this is the strong reason for a Prescriptive Analytical Logic Model (PAL) incorporated with Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) proposed. The proposed logic model will contribute a new knowledge in the area of log file analysis. It aligns with the two research objectives, (1) to shorten the total time spent on root cause analysis activity by adopting the decision making process and technique of AHP, (2) to reduce the frequency of attempt by increasing the accuracy of identifying the actual root cause. Furthermore, this proposed logic model contributes the new knowledge to close the existing knowledge gap of software application root cause analysis using AHP.