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

1. 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.
2. 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• Remove outdated log files and crash dumps generated by applications.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.