
How Discovery and Service Mapping Create Value for IT
Virima can tell you more things about more IT assets with greater accuracy than ever imagined and present the info in a variety of powerful, dynamic visualizations and reports.
Virima V6.0 will soon be available with an all-new look, enhanced discovery, mapping and vulnerability features and more. Stay tuned!
Create comprehensive, accurate, and up-to-date records of your IT business services with automated service mapping. ViVID (Virima Visual Impact Display) Service Mapping provides application and service dependency mapping with dynamic visual depictions of your IT infrastructure, application dependencies, business services, NVD vulnerabilities and ITSM Incident and Change records.
What’s more? Virima Discovery does most of the service mapping heavy lifting by automatically discovering relationships, dependencies and communications so you don’t have to worry about every little detail.
Seemingly minor configuration changes have been known to have dire consequences. Use application dependency mapping to easily identify stakeholders and understand the potential risks when planning IT infrastructure changes.
“What changed?” is usually the first thing people ask when a service interruption occurs. Service mapping and not just application dependency mapping, helps you identify root causes of incidents to quickly restore service availability.
Make sure your CMDB adds true value across the organization and isn’t just a glorified spreadsheet full of hard-to-consume data. Service mapping helps turn the CMDB into a trusted resource for countless stakeholders.
Virima’s ViVID Service Mapping visually maps application dependency and infrastructure relationships determined via Virima Discovery’s machine learning techniques. These auto-generated maps provide the foundation for comprehensive service dependency mapping once a little institutional knowledge is applied. ViVID Service Maps produce dynamic visual representations of service dependencies which greatly improves IT visibility to help avoid costly service disruptions from happening and quickly recover when one does occur.
A clear discovery and mapping of business services and their relationships help IT organizations understand which servers, apps, network infrastructure and cloud resources support these business-critical services and what impact a change, incident or exploited vulnerability could have- or had- on business operations.
With organizations across the world undergoing rapid transformation, increasing efficiency, ramping up customer interactions, and unlocking insights aren’t just an option, they are necessary. ViVID Service Mapping works closely with Virima Discovery and CMDB to identify CIs that support a service and their service-specific relationships. Some of the features of ViVID Service Mapping include:
Unique to Virima, every ViVID map includes overlays of ITSM records and vulnerabilities.
Many IT organizations across the world still rely on manual, error-prone processes to track and record service topologies. This manual mapping of services is a daunting and unsustainable effort and doesn’t give IT teams the critical visibility required to deliver robust services. With the rapidly evolving, dynamic cloud environments, this situation becomes worse as change in such environments are measured in minutes, not the weeks it takes to map a service manually.
That’s where ViVID Service Mapping makes a difference. Virima focuses on the fundamentals of service mapping and enhances visibility and clarifies the service dependencies in the IT infrastructure. ViVID Service Mapping is committed to simplifying IT business processes with an exceptionally strong platform that serves insights ready for action. IT organizations can save money and precious resources with Virima.
Service Mapping delivers great value to organizations in terms of better visibility, business continuity, and compliance. But implementing Service Mapping to get the maximum value out of it can be a little tricky if your technology is inadequate and some best practices aren’t followed. Of course we suggest you use Virima Service Mapping and follow some advice:
Implement a consolidated CMDB so that all IT assets are captured in one place. Otherwise it will be impossible to ensure your critical infrastructure will be included in the business service maps. Building a consolidated CMDB will require input from many stakeholders and will be made significantly easier with IT asset discovery such as Virima Discovery.
Service Mapping can benefit many groups within IT. Start by identifying your audience for service mapping and how it can be leveraged to simplify their common tasks. Common use cases include impact analysis for Change Management, faster root cause analysis in Incident Management, prioritizing vulnerability remediation by Cyber Security, identifying upgrade and refresh priorities in asset management, disaster recovery planning, accurate reporting for auditors and ensuring the right application of policies by compliance managers. Set one or two high-priority goals for Service Mapping and work towards achieving them before moving on to other use cases.
Service Maps can range from a single application or website (i.e. CRM) or be a collection of multiple apps and websites that support an overall enterprise business service (i.e. order entry). Start by identifying what is to be mapped and then ID what constitutes being part of the service (i.e. an executable or IIS website). Think of it as bread crumbs for service discovery automation to find its way and perform most of the service mapping work for you. After that there shouldn’t need to be too much human intelligence but expect some refining of the automated results.
Once the service maps are believed to be complete, make them available to the various departments. Ask for feedback on completeness and ways to improve them through things like individualized views, logical layouts and extending them to include dependencies to unmanaged assets such as third party networks. Suggest ways for users to incorporate the service maps in their daily activities. That will help ensure the maps remain current when drift occurs that automated discovery cannot detect or reconcile.
Service Mapping is the graphical representation of all application services in your organization. It’s a comprehensive map of all the devices, applications, and configuration profiles used in delivering services.
Service Mapping uses different methods for creating application services. The primary method followed by a Service Mapping software to discover and map devices and applications involves patterns. By detecting attributes of devices and applications and their outbound connections, the Service Mapping software creates graphical maps. If your organization tags assets for asset management, these tags can be used to map application services. Service Mapping can also discover devices and applications by following traffic connections between them. This method is referred to as traffic-based mapping.
Service Mapping helps you gain control over your operations, make informed decisions by quickly diagnosing problem areas and prioritizing action items based on business impact. It also helps eliminate errors stemming from manual mapping and improves accuracy so you can always have access to accurate data. Service Mapping software like ViVID Service Mapping uses the Virima Discovery tool to find hidden data and mechanisms to enhance service maps.
You can have discovery without service mapping but you cannot have service mapping without discovery. A typical discovery software provides an inventory of assets and maybe some high-level relationships. A true service mapping software goes further with discovery of in-depth relationships between assets, including hardware, applications and websites. These relationships are then represented in dynamic maps that should automatically adjust based on changes to the environment.
Virima can tell you more things about more IT assets with greater accuracy than ever imagined and present the info in a variety of powerful, dynamic visualizations and reports.
Virima breaks down the information silos by providing accurate, detailed asset configurations and easy to understand visual topologies of the relationships and dependencies between assets and business services.
With Virima ITSM, your service delivery will improve, IT ops and security will have the information they need to keep you running efficiently and securely and responding to compliance and financial audits will be easier than ever before.
Without a doubt, IT environments are complex. With cloud services, 3rd party components, and employees bringing their own devices (BYOD) to work, it can sometimes