Purpose
To ensure
business-critical applications remain functional, secure, and optimized, this
article defines the processes and best practices for application (software) maintenance
throughout the lifecycle.
Types
of Application Maintenance
- Maintenance through
application
- Periodically Checking the
application release notes, performance issues, Hardware issues, Network
and connectivity issues.
- Application version checking
on different machines
- Application optimization during
EOD
- Report , custom report,
addon, Payment processor deployment across the landscape.
- Maintenance out of application
- Performance optimization, and
risk mitigation
- Regularly back up application
installers, configuration files, Reports and logs.
- Ensure database backups are
aligned with application on daily basis.
- Clear OS-level temp folders
(e.g., /tmp, %TEMP%, cache directories).
- Remove outdated log files and
crash dumps generated by applications.
- Review Audit OS-level
scheduled tasks (Task Scheduler on Windows or cron jobs on Linux).
- Set alerts on critical
storage thresholds.
- Validate OS file and folder
permissions for installed applications.
- Remove unused service
accounts or restrict privileges as needed.
- Check application
compatibility with pending OS updates.
- Test in staging before
applying critical patches that may affect app behavior.
- Backup registry entries or
critical .ini, .conf, or .xml config files before making changes.
- Ensure application licenses
or keys are backed up securely and documented.
- Enable OS performance logging
for CPU, RAM, and disk usage related to applications.
As a
standard practice, we recommend implementing changes in the UAT/TEST
environment first. Once the changes have been successfully tested and
validated, they can be safely applied to the production environment.