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For a long time, IT teams have been looking for ways to gain deeper insight into how their applications work together as a system. The reason for this is simple: when one application goes down, it’s not uncommon for other applications that depend on it to fail as well.
In fact, the average business outage costs more than $12 million in lost revenue per minute, according to Aberdeen Group research. So, it is crucial that IT teams be able to identify these dependencies and understand how they affect each other so they can mitigate risks better than before.
Application dependency mapping can help IT teams avoid risks. Application Dependency Mapping is an important tool that enables IT teams to understand the dependencies between applications and systems. These dependencies can cause problems if not managed properly, so it’s essential for IT teams to have a clear understanding of what these relationships are.
Find out how service mapping is critical to your change management plan
What is Application Dependency Mapping?
Application Dependency Mapping (ADM) is a key consideration for developers and operations professionals alike, because it’s the first step to understanding how your application will respond when a failure occurs. Application Dependency Mapping identifies all components that are directly or indirectly related to your business applications, for example microservices, integrations with other systems, and batch jobs that generate data used by your front-end applications.
Application Dependency Mapping combines network and inventory mapping with knowledge of how applications are actually used by the business to provide a complete view of how information is created and consumed. In doing so, it helps organizations overcome the challenges they face in managing their IT systems effectively.
The risks associated with application dependencies include:
- Downtime on your applications or services due to outages in other applications or services that they depend on
- Security vulnerabilities in third-party software or services used by your organization (for example, if you use authentication software from one vendor and another vendor has poor security practices)
- Performance issues when multiple systems attempt to access the same data at once (for example, this could occur when multiple users are trying to access different parts of the same database)
Application dependency mapping – an important tool in your arsenal
Application dependency mapping helps IT teams understand the relationship between applications. A dependency is a system or resource that’s required by another application, and it can impact performance and availability of applications.
For example, if you have an e-commerce site with many microservices and databases, you may want to know which microservice depends on which database so that you can optimize your resources when there are issues in one area (such as a database).
You can use application dependency mapping tools to identify dependencies between two or more services, then map them out visually so you can see how they affect each other. This allows you to make informed decisions about where best practices apply based on real data rather than guessing what might happen under certain circumstances.
This information can be used by IT professionals to improve their understanding of the applications in their environment as well as identify potential vulnerabilities in those applications.
Users can generate a network diagram that shows how apps communicate with one another and how they depend on each other. Or they can customize the map by adding in different entities.
The goal of application dependency mapping is to identify any dependencies between applications and systems, as well as their impact on other applications/systems. This can mean identifying whether an outage in one part of your organization could affect another part (and vice versa). It also helps get rid of blind spots by showing where there are gaps in monitoring or control over critical resources.
Read: What kind of service mapping is best for your business?
Leverage your application dependency mapping tool to stay on top of your IT mapping objectives
Application Dependency Mapping is an underused asset in ensuring architecture and design decisions are always made with the business needs in mind. Here are some benefits:
1. Respond to problems faster
The key to reducing downtime is having a clear picture of all dependency relationships within your system. This is why you need an application dependency mapping tool in your cloud platform, which enables: a simplified view of dependencies that allows you to respond quickly and effectively to any issues, a greater understanding of the whole application environment, helping you to make better decisions based upon what you’re seeing across your infrastructure, and the ability to have multiple people working on resolving issues simultaneously.
2. Achieve better visibility of services
Application Dependency Mapping is a practical, repeatable process for mapping applications and services to their dependencies. IT operations management teams are given a benchmark to use in order to maximize the use of their resources, troubleshoot, prevent security threats, and sustain their technology services.
3. Track dependency changes effectively
As applications evolve, dependencies can change without anyone realizing it. This can lead to the creation of bugs, slowed deployments, and support issues. Not only will you know what versions comprise your application’s dependencies at any given time with an application dependency mapping software, but you’ll also be able to track changes made to those versions over time.
4. Overcome performance hindrances
Application Dependency Mapping focuses on the dependencies that affect application performance, such as service availability and performance, database performance, and caching. This can help you pinpoint performance bottlenecks and find the root cause of many application performance problems.
Work with Virima to seamlessly navigate your IT environment
ViVID Service Mapping by Virima provides detailed insight into how your applications work together as a system and what risks may exist within that system, allowing you to make informed decisions about how best to mitigate those risks before they become problems for users or revenue losses for businesses.
If you have a lot of services that depend on each other. You need to make sure that your applications are working well and not just because they’re supposed to work, but because they’re working together.
This is where Virima comes in. ViVID’s Application Dependency Mapping will help you map out the dependencies between all of your applications so you can see exactly what needs to be done if something goes wrong with one of them.
With ViVID, you can map on-premise, cloud-based, and hybrid services as well. Business service dependency mapping is available for major applications such as Epic and payroll.
ViVID’s ADM helps you visualize your CMDB and understand how all of its various applications are connected. It lets you see a holistic view of your infrastructure, including the network and host views. You’ll be able to see port numbers for all host-to-host communications and their flow across the network. And because ADM is based on the same tools we use in real production environments, you’ll have access to communication views that show which services are communicating, how they’re communicating with each other, and what ports they use for those communications.
Read about how ViVID Service Mapping plays well with your ServiceNow investment
This means that when a change needs to be made—say, when one service isn’t working correctly—you’ll be able to see where else it might affect other services as well. It’s all about making sure that every change has minimal impact on overall operation.Found this interesting? Then don’t wait to hear from our experts at Virima all about ViVID Service Mapping and more. Request a demo today!
