Take a Peek: What does Opus’ Application Management Team do on a Daily Basis?

Launching a site, product, or e-commerce outlet is only half the battle, as complex and high-volume applications need regular upkeep, maintenance, and monitoring, to ensure flawless user experience and longevity. Whilst some of this could be handled in-house, more often than not these tasks are better left for dedicated teams, for example, Opus’ experienced Application Management team.

“The Application Management team broadly covers three large areas – client requests and bug reports, updates and configuration, as well as ongoing monitoring and hotfixing any issues before they spiral out of control,” explained Hendrik Spiegelberg, Team Lead for the Application Management team. “All of this leads to increased uptime, higher degrees of security, and peace of mind for the customer – they know that somebody somewhere is always on alert and ready to ensure uninterrupted service for their applications.”

One of the main business lines for Opus’ Application Management team is e-commerce, where small issues can quickly lead to large-scale problems. For example, should a server encounter an issue or some critical configurations fail right at the start of a major campaign, the losses faced could be substantial. This is especially true if these issues arise at a time when nobody is actively monitoring the system.

However, by employing a dedicated team responsible for the health of the application, these kinds of issues can quickly be fixed.

“Each service contract dictates the degree and terms of monitoring and support, as such, if the client wants their services to be monitored over the weekend, on public holidays, or at any other point in time, we’re there and keeping an eye on everything,” noted the Team Lead, adding that oftentimes issues can be fixed before any customers feel their impact.

“We might see some irregularities pop up and fix them before they have time to have any wide-scale impact, for example with cache issues or smaller server-side problems,” said Spiegelberg.

It’s not just putting out fires

Whilst reacting to any unexpected issues is a key part of the Application Management service, the bulk of the work handled by the team is a bit calmer and with a longer runway. For example, the team manages all updates and security patching, helps to diagnose smaller issues administrators might face, and reports issues to Opus’ development team to implement bigger fixes.

“There are a lot of things that we can fix ourselves, but by being under one roof with the people who actually built the systems we’re monitoring, we can refer any bigger and large-scale issues to respective experts who can quickly fix the root causes,” Spiegelberg said.

As such, the Application Management team functions as the first line of defense, ensuring uninterrupted day-to-day operations of any system under their supervision, advising and coaching Opus’ clients, and removing the burden of worrying about every small detail from the clients.

“Be it a business-critical in-house tool, large-scale e-commerce site, customer-facing mobile application, or anything else, we take our tasks seriously and work hard to ensure that any and all issues are dealt with as soon as, and as well as humanely possible,” Spiegelberg added.

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