Getting started in the IBM Cloud Transformation Advisor UI

After you have installed IBM Cloud Transformation Advisor, you can access the URL from your browser, as described in the installation instructions. You will land on the Welcome screen for the UI. To get started, complete the following steps:

  1. Create and name a new workspace to house your analysis results. You can name your workspace anything you want, such as the name or your project or the portfolio of applications you will be analyzing. A best practice is to choose a name that will help you easily identify your work when you return at a later date.

  2. Now you need to add your analysis data to the workspace. Click the ‘Download’ button to get started with the data collector.

Viewing the analysis results

After the data collector has completed the scan and uploaded data about your applications, you will see a table that displays the results of the analysis for each application in your workspace.

Screenshot of the UI Recommendation page

The following details are included in the workspace summary:

  • Total Applications: The total number of applications in the workspace.

  • Avg. cost per application: The average number of days of development effort required to migrate an application.

  • Common Code: The total cost to migrate all the common code in the workspace to the target platform.

  • Unique app code: The total cost to migrate all the unique app code (code that is not shared between applications) in the workspace to the target platform.

  • Total cost: The total cost to migrate all the applications and common code in the workspace to the target platform.

The following details are included in the summary table (this is the per-application view):

  • Application Name: The name of the EAR/WAR file found on the application server.

  • Collection/Profile: Collection represents the hostname of the machine where the application resides. The profile represents the profile name in the application server where the application is installed.

  • Complexity: Indicates how complex Transformation Advisor considers this application to be if you were to migrate it to the cloud.

  • Issues: The number and severity of potential issues with the migration of the application.

  • Common code files: The number of common code files this application uses. A file is considered common if it is from a Shared Library, or is used by at least one other application.

  • Application cost in days: Provides an estimate in days for the development effort to perform the migration for just this application. Cost estimates calculated by Transformation Advisor are high-level estimates only and may vary widely based on skills and other factors not considered by the tool.

  • Overflow menu: Provides the ability to access the migration plan page for each application.

Each column in the table is sortable and you can filter the view by complexity. To see a breakdown of shared library complexity and shared files that are used by an application, you can expand the view. This is helpful in understanding the complete analysis that is applied to each application.

To see the analysis details for any application, click on the row. The complexity rating is explained and more information is provided about several different aspects of the analysis. At the end of the page, there are links to three reports which go into even more detail about the analysis.

Understanding Costs

There are a number of things to understand about the costs presented by Transformation Advisor:

  • All costs are listed in days and represent the development effort required to complete the migration.
  • They do not include costs of testing the new deployment and full configuration for production.
  • The costs at the workspace level assume the same team is migrating the whole workspace and will be faster at resolving issues that repeat across applications.
  • The costs in the summary table assume the migration of that application in isolation.
  • This means that if you add up the cost for each application in the summary table it will be greater than the total cost shown for the workspace. This is because it does not take into account:
    • the fact that common code needs to be migrated only once per workspace (not once per application).
    • the savings offered by the same issues repeating across applications.

Migration Targets

Transformation Advisor will always perform an analysis for migrating to Open Liberty, WebSphere Liberty and WebSphere traditional (for migration to WebSphere base in containers). You can use the Migration target dropdown on the migration page to change the analysis results that are displayed in the recommendations table.

Technology Report

The Application Technology Evaluation Report identifies the editions of WebSphere Application Server that are best suited to run the application. The report provides a list of Java EE programming models that are used by the application and indicates which platforms will support the application.

Screenshot of the UI Technology report

Inventory Report

The Application Inventory Report helps you examine what is in your application, including the number of modules and the technologies in those modules. It also gives you a view of all the utility JAR files in the application that tend to accumulate over time. Potential deployment problems and performance considerations are also covered.

Screenshot of the UI Inventory report

Analysis Report

The Detailed Migration Analysis Report does a deep dive on the preferred migration target to help you understand any migration issues, like deprecated or removed APIs, Java SE version differences, and Java EE behavioural differences. Note that Transformation Advisor uses a rule system based on commonly occurring events that are seen in real applications to enhance the base reports and provide practical guidance. As a result, some items may show a different severity level in Transformation Advisor than they do in the detailed binary scanner reports.

Note: The analysis report may specify Open Liberty as the target even if you have selected WebSphere Liberty as your target. This happens if the analysis for both of these targets are the same, so the report is still valid.

Screenshot of the UI Analysis report

Preparing for your migration

After you decide to migrate an application with a preferred migration path, open the overflow menu and select the View migration plan option to go to the Migration plan page.

Transformation Advisor automatically generates a migration bundle with the artifacts you will need to containerize your application running on Liberty and deploy it to OpenShift Cloud Platform. For binary applications, you can upload any dependencies and external drivers that were detected. When you deploy, the bundle is sent to the Git repository that you specify. You can also download the bundle.

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