ViVID™ Service Mapping
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.
See the Big Picture with Discovery and Dependency Mapping
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.
Eliminate the Guesswork with Service Mapping
“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.
Maximize CMDB Value
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.
How ViVID Service Mapping works
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.
Features
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:
Flexible Options to Map Any Service
- If the service runs as an application, website, or combination of the two, application dependency mapping tools by Virima will help you map them with ease
- Leverage the ability to map on-premises, cloud-based, and hybrid services
- Business service dependency mapping is available for major applications such as “Epic” and abstract business services consisting of many apps or websites like “HR”
Dynamic Visualizations of Complex CMDB Relationships
- CMDB Application dependency mapping (ADM)
- Holistic infrastructure and network map views
- Communication view to show flow and port numbers of host-to-host communications
- DevOps-style service topology views
Automated Discovery for Easy Mapping
- Equip your CMDB with several data points to compile asset relationships and application dependencies with Virima Discovery
- Virima’s CMDB-based application discovery compiles the data into various Business Service Maps (BSMs)
- ViVID service mapping is as easy as naming the service and pointing it to a logical starting point such as an app or web server and all of their relationships become part of the service map
- Any change to the CMDB data is automatically reflected in the service map
Reduce Downtime with Seamless Integrations
- Integrate with system monitoring tools to automatically display alerts that could impact service availability before the effects are felt
- ITSM integration displays which business services and service assets have open incidents
- Quickly identify root causes of service interruptions by checking which service assets have open incidents and recent changes. The “What changed?” scenario
- Clicking “re-scan now” triggers a real-time scan of only the mapped service assets to confirm everything is online and allows you to check for any unapproved or undocumented changes
Work Faster and Better with Personalized Views
- Create filters to focus only on the asset types that matter to you
- Organize asset icons in any order you prefer, and the connecting lines automatically follow
- Save, share, export, and print customized BSM views
- Assign meaningful names to asset relationships for a clearer understanding of the relationship
- Color coding depicts the nature of asset-to-asset relationships for easier comprehension
Virima Visual Impact Display
Unique to Virima, every ViVID map includes overlays of ITSM records and vulnerabilities.
- ITSM overlays are provided by Virima ITSM and 3rd party ITSM platforms including ServiceNow, Ivanti, Cherwell and Jira
- See which assets have open incidents or recently completed changes to quickly ID root causes of service disruptions
- Anticipate how an incident on an asset could be impacting a major application or service that has yet to be reported
- Understand the potential risk of making a change and identify the necessary stakeholders
- Avoid change collisions or expedite changes to take advantage of planned downtime
- Vulnerability overlays are provided by Virima Discovery and NIST NVD look-up
- Know which assets have NVD vulnerabilities
- Prioritize remediation efforts not only based on criticality of the vulnerability but also on the criticality of the asset and supported business service
- ViVID maps are a great aid in demonstrating service-level cyber security assurance and regulatory/audit compliance
Accurate Data to Manage Change Better
- Use application dependency mapping tool to identify what is impacted during change windows or if something went wrong because of the change
- Identify and coordinate with necessary stakeholders and get involved in the change approval process
- With ITSM integration, service maps display which service assets have changes pending and which have recently undergone changes
- Quickly find out who to contact if a recent change appears to cause a service disruption
Additional features
- Stay ahead of changes occurring across services, applications, compute platforms, network, and storage
- Use ViVID to confirm the comprehensiveness of the CMDB by ensuring no relationships exist with non-CMDB assets
- Identify suspect communications with external systems
- Quickly identify critical service assets and single points of failure
- Leverage discovery and dependency mapping and ITSM integration with ServiceNow, Cherwell, and Jira
Why Virima?
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 Best Practices
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:
- Unite your CMDB
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.
- Start with business use cases
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.
- Identify what will be mapped
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.
- Provide access and elicit feedback
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 Challenges & Solutions (FAQ)
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.
Use Cases
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.
Reporting & Auditing
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.
IT Service Management
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.
Resources
Mapping Service and Infrastructure Dependencies in Your IT Environment
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
