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Most organizations know that service mapping is important, but they don’t know how to do it or where to start. The first step is to understand the basics of what service mapping is, why you should be doing it, and how ViVID™ Service Mapping from Virima can help you get started.
The purpose of a service map is to identify dependencies between services and to understand how they affect each other.
A service map can help you identify where failures are most likely to occur by depicting the relationship between services, which could include their dependencies, resource requirements and availability. By understanding how your services work together, you can prevent outages and downtime by pinpointing where issues may occur before they happen.
How does a service map work and why do you need it?
A service map is a visual representation of the interactions that make up a service. A service map provides a structured way to look at all the nitty gritty details and come up with an overall holistic understanding of the entire “service experience” as well as each component of it. It can be used for anything from figuring out how to improve customer loyalty to improving operational efficiency.
A service map can be created using manual or automated processes. Manual mapping relies on experts who know what each host looks like and what each connection means. Automated mapping uses software to interrogate hosts and identify connections between them.
A service map can be created using a top-down approach or a bottom up approach. The top down approach involves identifying services and their entry points (URLs), extracting the hostname from the URL, and then identifying other related components of the services. This data is used to build a complete map of the service. This mapping works based on a set of instructions that drive the mechanism for interrogating hosts and identifying their connections (data flow).
The bottom-up approach involves identifying applications through manual investigation, building on these data points and identifying every other application related to them, thereby creating a complete service map.
Another approach is the tag-based mapping technique which is a useful and efficient way to map your cloud resources. Cloud resources can be tagged with specific metadata, which allows you to easily identify and categorize them according to their relevant criteria.
Also read: How service mapping works wonders for your business?
ViVID™ Service Mapping: What is it and how does it work?
ViVID Service Mapping is a unique visualization tool by Virima that enables you to see and understand the relationships between all of your applications and services. ViVID Service Mapping provides a clear picture of the interdependencies between systems, applications, and services. You can use this information to better understand how changes in one area will affect other areas of your infrastructure.
Here’s how ViVID™ Service Mapping works.
1. Helps your organization reduce risks associated with change
When we talk about risks associated with change, we mean all the things that can go wrong—whether it’s an error from a human or a bug in the code. ViVID creates application dependency maps to identify what could be impacted during change windows or if something could go wrong as a result of the change.
Then, it helps you identify and coordinate with necessary stakeholders and involve them in the change approval process. This way, you can ensure that all parties are on board before implementing changes that impact services.
With ITSM integration, service maps display which service assets have changes pending and which have recently received changes. This gives you a quick view of where work is being performed so you can quickly find out who to contact if a recent change appears to cause a service disruption.
2. Equips you to deal effectively with incidents and recover faster from outages
ViVID™ Service Mapping is designed to help you recover from outages faster by integrating seamlessly with your system monitoring tools. With ViVID, you can automatically display alerts that could impact service availability before the effects are felt.
You can integrate ViVID with ITSM tools to display which business services and service assets have open incidents. You’ll also be able to see which service assets have recently changed and quickly identify what caused an outage.
If you click “re-scan now” at any time, this will trigger a real-time scan of only the mapped services, allowing you to check for any unapproved or undocumented changes.
3. Gives you customized and comprehensive view of relationships that matter
When it comes to managing your business’ assets, there are innumerable ways to get organized.
You can use ViVID™ Service Mapping tool to filter out the asset types that don’t matter to your business and focus only on the ones that do. You can organize your assets however you like, and ViVID will automatically connect them with lines.
It allows you to save, share, export, and print customized BSM views of your assets so you don’t have to waste time trying to find the right one.
It helps you to better understand your application’s assets, their relationships, and their dependencies. ViVID™ Service Mapping further enables you to assign meaningful names to asset relationships for a clearer understanding of service mapping relationships and application dependencies. Color coding depicts the nature of asset-to-asset relationships for easier comprehension.
4. Makes it easy to create a complete, accurate business service map
The ViVID™ Service Mapping feature allows you to discover, map and manage your services from a single platform. It leverages Virima Discovery that helps populate your configuration management database (CMDB) with several data points to compile asset relationships and application dependencies.
When integrated with Virima CMDB, it compiles the data into various Business Service Maps (BSMs). The resulting BSM can be easily shared across teams, organizations and locations.
ViVID Service Mapping makes it easy to create a map of a service by simply naming the service and pointing to a logical starting point, such as an app or web server. All of the relationships between the starting point and other elements in the CMDB are automatically reflected in the service map. All changes made to the CMDB data are automatically reflected in the service map.
Read about the importance of business service maps
Why you should integrate ViVID™ Service Mapping into your business processes
If you’re in charge of IT infrastructure, you know that understanding your application dependencies can be tricky. It’s easy to miss something and end up with a service outage that could have been avoided. That’s why ViVID™ Service Mapping has been created to help you easily identify stakeholders and understand the potential risks when planning IT infrastructure changes.
It helps you identify root causes of incidents to quickly restore service availability. ViVID further helps turn your CMDB into a trusted resource for countless stakeholders.
The following are some of the key benefits of ViVID™ Service Mapping:
1. Reduce incident response times
ViVID™ Service Mapping is a revolutionary new way to visualize and manage your IT infrastructure. It reduces incident response times by providing more accurate data about your IT assets and relationships, which means you can make better decisions about those assets.
With ViVID™ Service Mapping and Virima Discovery, you can tell more about your IT assets with greater accuracy than ever imagined and present the information in a variety of powerful, dynamic visualizations and reports. When changes do occur, ViVID™ will automatically keep up with them. This means no more decisions based on bad asset and relationship data!
2. Track root cause of incidents within minutes
The benefits of ViVID™ Service Mapping include performing root cause analysis and automatically mapping application dependencies. It also provides visualizations of hardware and software relationships, as well as reports that communicate flow between discovered and unknown assets.
In addition to providing a clear visual representation of the relationship between business services, ViVID™ Service Mapping tracks changes over time so you can see how your applications have evolved over time.
3. Improve customer support and resolve issues faster
ViVID Service Mapping provides clear visual representations of services and how they are connected, to help direct communication flow between service teams for incident resolution or change management processes. This results in faster resolution times that reduce costs for both you and your customers.
With ViVID™ Service Mapping, you can:
-Create a clear picture of how your services are related
-Identify gaps in communication between teams
-Make better decisions about which service to connect at what time
4. Integrate asset discovery, relationship/dependency mapping, and CMDB
ViVID Service Mapping is a versatile service management tool that provides integrated, automated discovery of your IT assets and relationships. It then maps these relationships and dependencies with your existing CMDB and other external systems.
With ViVID Service Mapping, you can:
-Discover all of your IT assets, including servers, virtual servers, storage devices, and networks
-Map out the relationships between your IT assets and the services they provide
-Identify vulnerabilities and gaps in your networked infrastructure
-Obtain a high-level overview of what resources are connected to what systems
– Integrate easily with existing systems like ServiceNow, Cherwell, and Jira.
Read: How to effectively implement service mapping for your organization
Choose ViVID for a seamless IT environment mapping experience
ViVID™ Service Mapping helps you solve your customers’ problems faster, and improve your customer service. It also makes it easier for support teams to find root causes of incidents, so they can fix issues before they affect customers.
With ViVID™ Service Mapping, you have a complete view of all the services in your environment at all times—including service dependencies and relationships between services—so you can make changes quickly when needed. Contact Virima today to find out more about our service mapping tool.
