Tag: real time user monitoring tools

GAVS’ commitment during COVID-19

Posted on by ZIF

MARCH 23. 2020

Dear Client leaders & Partners,

I do hope all of you, your family and colleagues are keeping good health, as we are wading through this existential crisis of COVID 19.

This is the time for shared vulnerabilities and in all humility, we want to thank you for your business and continued trust. For us, the well being of our employees and the continuity of clients’ operations are our key focus. 

I am especially inspired by my GAVS colleagues who are supporting some of the healthcare providers in NYC. The GAVS leaders truly believe that they are integral members of these  institutions and it is incumbent upon them to support our Healthcare clients during these trying times.

We would like to confirm that 100% of our client operations are continuing without any interruptions and 100% of our offshore employees are successfully executing their responsibilities remotely using GAVS ZDesk, Skype, collaborating through online Azure ALM Agile Portal. GAVS ZIF customers are 100% supported 24X7 through ROTA schedule & fall back mechanism as a backup.

Most of GAVS Customer Success Managers, Client Representative Leaders, and Corporate Leaders have reached out to you with GAVS Business Continuity Plan and the approach that we have adopted to address the present crisis. We have put communication, governance, and rigor in place for client support and monitoring.  

GAVS is also reaching out to communities and hospitals as a part of our Corporate Social Responsibility.  

We have got some approvals from the local Chennai police authorities in Chennai to support the movement of our leaders from and to the GAVS facility and we have, through US India Strategic Partnership Forum applied for GAVS to be considered an Essential Service Provider in India.  

I have always maintained that GAVS is an IT Service concierge to all of our clients and we individually as leaders and members of GAVS are committed to our clients. We shall also ensure that our employees are safe. 

Thank you, 

Sumit Ganguli
GAVS Technologies

The Hands that rock the cradle, also crack the code

Posted on by ZIF

It was an unguarded moment for my church-going, straight-laced handyman & landscaper, “ I am not sure if I am ready to trust a woman leader”, and finally the loss of first woman Presidential candidate in the US, that led me to ruminate about Women and Leadership and indulge in my most “ time suck” activities, google and peruse through Wikipedia.

I had known about this, but I was fascinated to reconfirm that the first programmer in the world was a woman, and daughter of the famed poet, Lord Byron, no less. The first Programmer in the World, Augusta Ada King-Noel, Countess of Lovelace nee Byron; was born in 1815 and was the only legitimate child of the poet laureate, Lord Byron and his wife Annabella. A month after Ada was born, Byron separated from his wife and forever left England. Ada’s mother remained bitter towards Lord Byron and promoted Ada’s interest in mathematics and logic in an effort to prevent her from developing what she saw as the insanity seen in her father.

Ada grew up being trained and tutored by famous mathematicians and scientists. She established a relationship with various scientists and authors, like Charles Dickens, etc..   Ada described her approach as “poetical science”[6] and herself as an “Analyst & Metaphysician”.

As a teenager, Ada’s prodigious mathematical talents, led her to have British mathematician Charles Babbage, as her mentor. By then Babbage had become very famous and had come to be known as ‘the father of computers’. Babbage was reputed to have developed the Analytical Engine. Between 1842 and 1843, Ada translated an article on the Analytical Engine, which she supplemented with an elaborate set of notes, simply called Notes. These notes contain what many consider to be the first computer program—that is, an algorithm designed to be carried out by a machine. As a result, she is often regarded as the first computer programmer. Ada died at a very young age of 36.

As an ode to her, the mathematical program used in the Defense Industry has been named Ada. And to celebrate our first Programmer, the second Tuesday of October has been named Ada Lovelace Day. ALD celebrates the achievement of women in Science, Technology and Engineering and Math (STEM). It aims to increase the profile of women in STEM and, in doing so, create new role models who will encourage more girls into STEM careers and support women already working in STEM.

Most of us applauded Benedict Cumberbatch’s turn as Alan Turing in the movie,  Imitation Game. We got to know about the contribution, that Alan Turning and his code breaking team at the Bletchley Park, played in singularly cracking the German Enigma code and how the code helped them to proactively know when the Germans were about to attack the Allied sites and in the process could conduct preemptive strikes. In the movie, Kiera Knightly played the role of Joan Clark.  Joan was an English code-breaker at the British Intelligence wing, MI5, at Bletchley Park during the World War II. She was appointed a Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) in 1947, because of the important part she essayed in decoding the famed German Enigma code along with Alan Turing and the team.

Joan Clark attended Cambridge University with a scholarship and there she gained a double first degree in mathematics. But the irony of it all was that she was denied a full degree, as till 1948, Cambridge only awarded degrees to men. The head of the Code-breakers group, Hugh Alexander,  described her as “one of the best in the section”, yet while promoting Joan Clark, they had initially given her a job title of a typist, as women were not allowed to be a Crypto Analyst. Clarke became deputy head of British Intelligence unit, Hut 8 in 1944.  She was paid less than the men and in the later years she believed that she was prevented from progressing further because of her gender.

In World War II the  US Army was tasked with a Herculean job to calculate the trajectories of ballistic missiles. The problem was that each equation took 30 hours to complete, and the Army needed thousands of them. So the Army, started to recruit every mathematician they could find. They placed ads in newspapers;  first in Philadelphia, then in New York City, then in far out west in places like Missouri, seeking women “computers” who could hand-compute the equations using mechanical desktop calculators. The selected applicants would be stationed at the  University of Pennsylvania in Philly. At the height of this program, the US Army employed more than 100 women calculators. One of the last women to join the team was a farm girl named Jean Jennings. To support the project, the US Army-funded an experimental project to automate the trajectory calculations. Engineers John Presper Eckert and John W. Mauchly, who are often termed as the Inventors of Mainframe computers, began designing the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer, or ENIAC as it was called.  That experimenting paid off: The 80-foot long, 8-foot tall, black metal behemoth, which contained hundreds of wires, 18,000 vacuum tubes, 40 8-foot cables, and 3000 switches, would become the first all-electric computer called ENIAC.

When the ENIAC was nearing completion in the spring of 1945, the US Army randomly selected six women, computer programmers,  out of the 100 or so workers and tasked them with programming the ENIAC. The engineers handed the women the logistical diagrams of ENIAC’s 40 panels and the women learned from there. They had no programming languages or compilers. Their job was to program ENIAC to perform the firing table equations they knew so well.

The six women—Francis “Betty” Snyder Holberton, Betty “Jean” Jennings Bartik, Kathleen McNulty Mauchly Antonelli, Marlyn Wescoff Meltzer, Ruth Lichterman Teitelbaum, and Frances Bilas Spence—had no documentation and no schematics to work with.

There was no language, no operating system, the women had to figure out what the computer was, how to interface with it, and then break down a complicated mathematical problem into very small steps that the ENIAC could then perform.  They physically hand-wired the machine,  using switches, cables, and digit trays to route data and program pulses. This might have been a very complicated and arduous task. The ballistic calculations went from taking 30 hours to complete by hand to taking mere seconds to complete on the ENIAC.

Unfortunately, ENIAC was not completed in time, hence could not be used during World War II. But 6 months after the end of the war, on February 14, 1946 The ENIAC was announced as a modern marvel in the US. There was praise and publicity for the Moore School of Electrical Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania, Eckert and Mauchly were heralded as geniuses. However, none of the key programmers, all the women were not introduced in the event. Some of the women appeared in photographs later, but everyone assumed they were just models, perfunctorily placed to embellish the photograph.

After the war, the government ran a campaign asking women to leave their jobs at the factories and the farms so returning soldiers could have their old jobs back. Most women did, leaving careers in the 1940s and 1950s and perforce were required to become homemakers. Unfortunately, none of the returning soldiers knew how to program the ENIAC.

All of these women programmers had gone to college at a time when most men in this country didn’t even go to college. So the Army strongly encouraged them to stay, and for the most part, they did, becoming the first professional programmers, the first teachers of modern programming, and the inventors of tools that paved the way for modern software.

The Army opened the ENIAC up to perform other types of non-military calculations after the war and Betty Holberton and Jean Jennings converted it to a stored-program machine. Betty went on to invent the first sort routine and help design the first commercial computers, the UNIVAC and the BINAC, alongside Jean. These were the first mainframe computers in the world.

Today the Indian IT  industry is at $ 160 B and is at 7.7 %age of the Indian GDP and employs approximately 2.5 Million direct employees and a very high percentage of them are women. Ginni Rommeti, Meg Whitman are the CEOs of IBM and HP while Sheryl Sandberg is the COO of Facebook. They along with Padmasree Warrior, ex CTO of CISCO have been able to crack the glass ceiling.    India boasts of Senior Leadership in leading IT companies like Facebook, IBM, CapGemini, HP, Intel  etc.. who happen to be women. At our company, GAVS, we are making an effort to put in policies, practices, culture that attract, retain, and nurture women leaders in IT. The IT industry can definitely be a major change agent in terms of employing a large segment of women in India and can be a transformative force for new vibrant India. We must be having our Indian Ada, Joan, Jean and Betty and they are working at ISRO, at Bangalore and Sriharikota, at the Nuclear Plants at Tarapur.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Sumit Ganguli

Sumit Ganguli

Understanding Reinforcement Learning in five minutes

Posted on by ZIF

Reinforcement learning (RL) is an area of Machine Learning (ML) that takes suitable actions to maximize rewards situations. The goal of reinforcement learning algorithms is to find the best possible action to take in a specific situation. Just like the human brain, it is rewarded for good choices and penalized for bad choices and learns from each choice. RL tries to mimic the way that humans learn new things, not from a teacher but via interaction with the environment. At the end, the RL learns to achieve a goal in an uncertain, potentially complex environment.

Understanding Reinforcement Learning

How does one learn cycling? How does a baby learn to walk? How do we become better at doing something with more practice? Let us explore learning to cycle to illustrate the idea behind RL.

Did somebody tell you how to cycle or gave you steps to follow? Or did you learn it by spending hours watching videos of people cycling? All these will surely give you an idea about cycling; but will it be enough to actually get you cycling? The answer is no. You learn to cycle only by cycling (action). Through trials and errors (practice), and going through all the positive experiences (positive reward) and negative experiences (negative rewards or punishments), before getting your balance and control right (maximum reward or best outcome). This analogy of how our brain learns cycling applies to reinforcement learning. Through trials, errors, and rewards, it finds the best course of action.

Components of Reinforcement Learning

The major components of RL are as detailed below:

  • Agent: Agent is the part of RL which takes actions, receives rewards for actions and gets a new environment state as a result of the action taken. In the cycling analogy, the agent is a human brain that decides what action to take and gets rewarded (falling is negative and riding is positive).
  • Environment: The environment represents the outside world (only relevant part of the world which the agent needs to know about to take actions) that interacts with agents. In the cycling analogy, the environment is the cycling track and the objects as seen by the rider.
  • State: State is the condition or position in which the agent is currently exhibiting or residing. In the cycling analogy, it will be the speed of cycle, tilting of the handle, tilting of the cycle, etc.
  • Action: What the agent does while interacting with the environment is referred to as action. In the cycling analogy, it will be to peddle harder (if the decision is to increase speed), apply brakes (if the decision is to reduce speed), tilt handle, tilt body, etc.
  • Rewards: Reward is an indicator to the agent on how good or bad the action taken was. In the cycling analogy, it can be +1 for not falling, -10 for hitting obstacles and -100 for falling, the reward for outcomes (+1, -10, -100) are defined while building the RL agent. Since the agent wants to maximize rewards, it avoids hitting and always tries to avoid falling.

Characteristics of Reinforcement Learning

Instead of simply scanning the datasets to find a mathematical equation that can reproduce historical outcomes like other Machine Learning techniques, reinforcement learning is focused on discovering the optimal actions that will lead to the desired outcome.

There are no supervisors to guide the model on how well it is doing. The RL agent gets a scalar reward and tries to figure out how good the action was.

Feedback is delayed. The agent gets an instant reward for action, however, the long-term effect of an action is known only later. Just like a move in chess may seem good at the time it is made, but may turn out to be a bad long term move as the game progress.

Time matters (sequential). People who are familiar with supervised and unsupervised learning will know that the sequence in which data is used for training does not matter for the outcome. However, for RL, since action and reward at current state influence future state and action, the time and sequence of data matters.

Action affects subsequent data RL agent receives.

Why Reinforcement Learning

The type of problems that reinforcement learning solves are simply beyond human capabilities. They are even beyond the solving capabilities of ML techniques. Besides, RL eliminates the need for data to learn, as the agent learns by interacting with the environment. This is a great advantage to solve problems where data availability or data collection is an issue.

Reinforcement Learning applications

RL is the darling of ML researchers now. It is advancing with incredible pace, to solve business and industrial problems and garnering a lot of attention due to its potential. Going forward, RL will be core to organizations’ AI strategies.

Reinforcement Learning at GAVS

Reinforcement Learning is core to GAVS’ AI strategy and is being actively pursued to power the IP led AIOps platform – Zero Incident FrameworkTM (ZIF). We had our first success on RL; developing an RL agent for automated log rotation in servers.

References:

Reinforcement Learning: An Introduction second edition by Richard S. Sutton and Andrew G. Barto

https://web.stanford.edu/class/psych209/Readings/SuttonBartoIPRLBook2ndEd.pdf

About the Author:

Gireesh Sreedhar KP

Gireesh is a part of the projects run in collaboration with IIT Madras for developing AI solutions and algorithms. His interest includes Data Science, Machine Learning, Financial markets, and Geo-politics. He believes that he is competing against himself to become better than who he was yesterday. He aspires to become a well-recognized subject matter expert in the field of Artificial Intelligence.

CCPA for Healthcare

Posted on by ZIF

The California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) is a state statute intended to enhance consumer protection and data privacy rights of the residents of California, United States. It is widely considered one of the most sweeping consumer privacy laws, giving Californians the strongest data privacy rights in the U.S.

The focus of this article is CCPA as it applies to Healthcare. Let’s take a quick look at what CCPA is and then move onto its relevance for Healthcare entities. CCPA is applicable to any for-profit organization – regardless of whether it physically operates out of California – that interacts with, does business with and/or collects, processes or monetizes personal information of California residents AND meets at least one of these criteria: has annual gross revenue in excess of $25 million USD; collects or transacts with the personal information of 50,000 or more California consumers, households, or devices; earns 50% or more of its annual revenue by monetizing such data. CCPA also empowers California consumers with the rights to complete ownership; control; and security of their personal information and imposes new stringent responsibilities on businesses to enable these rights for their consumers.

Impact on Healthcare Companies

Companies directly or indirectly involved in the healthcare sector and dealing with medical information are regulated by the Confidentiality of Medical Information Act (CMIA) and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). CCPA does not supersede these laws & does not apply to ‘Medical Information (MI)’ as defined by CMIA, or to ‘Protected Health Information (PHI)’ as defined by HIPAA. CCPA also excludes de- identified data and information collected by federally-funded clinical trials, since such research studies are regulated by the ‘Common Rule’.

The focus of the CCPA is ‘Personal Information (PI)’ which means information that “identifies, relates to, describes, is capable of being associated with, or could reasonably be linked, directly or indirectly, with a particular consumer or household.” PI refers to data including but not limited to personal identifiers such as name, address, phone numbers, email ids, social security number; personal details relating to education, employment, family, finances; biometric information, geolocation, consumer activity like purchase history, product preferences; internet activity.

So, if CCPA only regulates personal information, are healthcare companies that are already in compliance with CMIA and HIPAA safe? Is there anything else they need to do?

Well, there is a lot that needs to be done! This only implies that such companies should continue to comply with those rules when handling Medical Information as defined by the CMIA, or Protected Health Information, as defined by HIPAA. They will still need to adhere to CCPA regulations for personal data that is outside of MI and PHI. This will include

employee personal information routinely obtained and processed by the company’s HR; those collected from websites, health apps, health devices, events; clinical studies that are not funded by the federal government; information of a CCPA-covered entity that is handled by a non-profit affiliate, to give a few examples.

There are several possibilities – some not so apparent – even in healthcare entities, for personal data collection and handling that would fall under the purview of CCPA. They need to take stock of the different avenues through which they might be obtaining/handling such data and prioritize CCPA compliance. Else, with the stringent CCPA regulations, they could quickly find themselves embroiled in class action lawsuits (which by the way, do not require proof of damage to the plaintiff) in case of data breaches, or statutory penalties of up to $7500 for each violation.

The good news is that since CCPA carves out a significant chunk of data that healthcare companies/those involved in healthcare-related functions collect and process, entities that are already complying with HIPAA and CMIA are well into the CCPA compliance journey. A peek into the kind of data CMIA & HIPAA regulate will help gauge what other data needs to be taken care of.

CMIA protects the confidentiality of Medical Information (MI) which is “individually identifiable information, in electronic or physical form, in possession of or derived from a provider of health care, health care service plan, pharmaceutical company, or contractor regarding a patient’s medical history, mental or physical condition, or treatment.”

HIPAA regulates how healthcare providers, health plans, and healthcare clearinghouses, referred to as ‘covered entities’ can use and disclose Protected Health Information (PHI), and requires these entities to enable protection of data privacy. PHI refers to individually identifiable medical information such as medical records, medical bills, lab tests, scans and the like. This also covers PHI in electronic form(ePHI). The privacy and security rule of HIPAA is also applicable to ‘business associates’ who provide services to the ‘coveredentities’ that involve the use or disclosure of PHI.

Two other types of data that are CCPA exempt are Research Data & De-Identified Data. As mentioned above, the ‘Common Rule’ applies only to federally-funded research studies, and the CCPA does not provide much clarity on exemption status for data from clinical trials that are not federally-funded.

And, although the CCPA does not apply to de-identified data, the definitions of de-identified data of HIPAA and CCPA slightly differ which makes it quite likely that de-identified data by HIPAA standards may not qualify under CCPA standards and therefore would not be exempt from CCPA regulations.

Compliance Approach

Taking measures to ensure compliance with regulations is cumbersome and labour-intensive, especially with the constantly evolving regulatory environment. Using this opportunity for a proactive, well-thought-out approach for comprehensive enterprise-wide data security and governance will be strategically wise since it will minimize the need for policy and process rehaul with each new regulation.

The most crucial step is a thorough assessment of the following:

  • Policies, procedures, workflows, entities relating to/involved in data collection, sharing and processing, in order to arrive at clear enterprise-wide data mapping; to determine what data, data activities, data policies would fall under the scope of CCPA; and to identify gaps and decide on prioritized action items for compliance.
  • Business processes, contracts, terms of agreement with affiliates, partners and third-party entities the company does business with, to understand CCPA applicability. In some cases,

HIPAA and CMIA may be applicable to only the healthcare-related business units, subjecting other business units to CCPA compliance.

  • Current data handling methods, not just its privacy & security. CCPA dictates that companies need to have mechanisms put in place to cater to CCPA consumer right to request all information relating to the personal data collected about them, right to opt-out of sale of their data, right to have their data deleted by the organization (which will extend to 3rd parties doing business with this organization as well).

Consumer Consent Management

With CCPA giving full ownership and control of personal data back to its owners, consent management mechanisms become the pivot of a successful compliance strategy. An effective mechanism will ensure proper administration and enforcement of consumer authorizations.

Considering the limitations of current market solutions for data privacy and security, GAVS has come up with its Blockchain-based Rhodium Framework (pending patent) for Customer Master Data Management and Compliance with Data Privacy Laws like CCPA.

You can get more details on CCPA in general and GAVS’ solution for true CCPA Compliance in our White Paper, Blockchain Solution for CCPA Compliance.

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Proactive Monitoring

Posted on by ZIF

Is your IT environment proactively monitored?

It is important to have the right monitoring solution for an enterprise’s IT environment. More than that, it is imperative to leverage the right solution and deploy it for the appropriate requirements. In this context, the IT environment includes but is not limited to Applications, Servers, Services, End-User Devices, Network devices, APIs, Databases, etc. Towards that, let us understand the need and importance of Proactive Monitoring. This has a direct role in achieving the journey towards Zero Incident EnterpriseTM. Let us unravel the difference between reactive and proactive monitoring.

Reactive Monitoring – When a problem occurs in an IT environment, it gets notified through monitoring and the concerned team acts on it to resolve the issue.The problem could be as simple as slowness/poor performance, or as extreme as the unavailability of services like web site going down or server crashing leading to loss of business and revenue.  

Proactive Monitoring – There are two levels of proactive monitoring, 

  • Symptom-based proactive monitoring is all about identifying the signals and symptoms of an issue in advance and taking appropriate and immediate action to nip the root-cause in the bud.
  • Synthetic-based proactive monitoring is achieved through Synthetic Transactions. Performance bottlenecks or failures are identified much in advance; even before the actual user or the dependent layer encounters the situation

Symptom-based proactive monitoring is a USP of the ZIF Monitor module. For example, take the case of CPU related monitoring. It is common to monitor the CPU utilization and act based on that. But Monitor doesn’t just focus on CPU utilization, there are a lot of underlying factors which causes the CPU utilization to go high. To name a few,

  • Processor queue length 
  • Processor context switches
  • Processes that are contributing to high CPU utilization

It is important to arrest these brewing factors at the right time, i.e., in the case of Processor Queue length, continuous or sustained queue of greater than 2 threads is generally an indication of congestion at processor level.Of course, in a multiple processor environment, we need to divide the queue length by the number of processors that are servicing the workload. As a remedy, the following can be done

1) the number of threads can be limited at the application level

2) unwanted processes can be killed to help close the queued items

3) upgrading the processor will help in keeping the queue length under control, which eventually will control the CPU utilization.

Above is a sample demonstration of finding the symptom and signal and arrest them proactively. ZIF’s Monitor not only monitors these symptoms, but also suggests the remedy through the recommendation from SMEs.

Synthetic monitoring (SM) is done by simulating the transactions through the tool without depending on the end-user to do the transactions. The advantages of synthetic monitoring are, 

  • it uses automated transaction simulation technology
  • it helps to monitor the environment round-the-clock 
  • it helps to validate from across different geographic locations 
  • it provides options to choose the number of flows/transactions to be verified
  • it is proactive – identifies performance bottlenecks or failures much in advance even before the actual user or the dependent layer encounters the situation

How does Synthetic Monitoring(SM) work?

It works through 3 simple steps,

1) Record key transactions – Any number of transactions can be recorded, if required, all the functional flows can be recorded. An example of transaction in an e-commerce website could be, as simple as login and view the product catalogue, or,as elaborate as login, view product catalogue, move item to cart, check-out, make-payment and logout. For simulation purpose, dummy credit cards are used during payment gateway transactions.

2) Schedule the transactions – Whether it should run every 5 minutes or x hours or minutes.

3) Choose the location from which thesetransactions need to be triggered – The SM is available as on-premise or cloud options. Cloud SM provides the options to choose the SM engines available across globe (refer to the green dots in the figure below).

This is applicable mainly for web based applications, but can also be used for the underlying APIs as well.

SM solution has engines which run the recorded transactions against the target application. Once scheduled, the SM engine hosted either on-premise or remotely (refer to the green dots in the figure shown as sample representation), will run the recorded transactions at a predefined interval. The SM dashboard provides insights as detailed under the benefits section below.

Benefits of SM

As the SM does the synthetic transactions, it provides various insights like,

  • The latency in the transactions, i.e. the speed at which the transaction is happening. This also gives a trend analysis of how the application is performing over a period.
  • If there are any failures during the transaction, SM provides the details of the failure including the stack trace of the exception. This makes fixing the failure simpler, by avoiding the time spent in debugging.
  • In case of failure, SM provides insights into the parameter details that triggered the failure.
  • Unlike real user monitoring, there is the flexibility to test all flows or at least all critical flows without waiting for the user to trigger or experience it.
  • This not only unearths the problem at the application tier but also provides deeper insights while combining it with Application, Server, Database, Network Monitoring which are part of the ZIF Monitor suite.
  • Applications working fine under one geography may fail in a different geography due to various factors like network, connectivity, etc. SM will exactly pinpoint the availability and performance across geographies.

For more detailed information on GAVS’Monitor, or to request a demo please visit, https://zif.ai/products/monitor/

About the Author

Suresh Kumar Ramasamy


Suresh heads the Monitor component of ZIF at GAVS. He has 20 years of experience in Native Applications, Web, Cloud and Hybrid platforms from Engineering to Product Management. He has designed & hosted the monitoring solutions. He has been instrumental in conglomerating components to structure the Environment Performance Management suite of ZIF Monitor.

Suresh enjoys playing badminton with his children. He is passionate about gardening, especially medicinal plants.

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