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At Datadope, we offer our clients Discovery functionality, which facilitates the detailed mapping of their infrastructure and its contextual updating. Our Discovery functionality can be integrated with the CMDB the client already has in place.
It is a configuration management database used to store the data of an IT environment and its relationships. You can think of it as a filing system for all important IT assets or configuration items (CI).
An important point to note is the selection of which configuration items (CI) of the infrastructure are considered important and should be included. This can include software, hardware, networking and storage components. Having all this information in one place makes it easier to monitor, track and manage the entire infrastructure.
With the rapid growth of virtual machines (VMs), containers, public cloud instances, private cloud infrastructure and hybrid cloud environments, complexity is also increasing rapidly.
Many companies mistakenly believe that, by operating in the cloud, a database such as IOMETRICS® Context becomes obsolete. They think that only focuses on the physical IT infrastructure or that it is the same as IT asset management. However, this is far from reality. In fact, operating a business in the cloud creates an even greater need for a competent platform. The ability to quickly identify which containers and instances are created and deleted in the infrastructure is critical to efficiently manage IT resources.
An organisation’s ability to quickly identify the root cause of a problem is crucial, as every minute of disruption can mean lost revenue. By having the most up-to-date IT data stored in a central repository and maintaining the relationship between resources, configuration management databases enable IT teams to quickly and easily find the root cause of problems, which in turn reduces MTTR (mean time to resolution).
An illustrative example is when you have a properly identified network: when faced with an outage, you can quickly determine which services are affected and connect them to an alternative router or switch, saving time and money. Since outages are inevitable, having the ability to quickly discover which services are affected and act immediately with a plan of action is essential to business profitability.
Service mapping allows organisations to see the totality of their IT resources, and in particular the resources that impact a particular service, by providing IT teams with the functionality to tag and view the resources that impact a particular service.
During an audit, IT teams often have to take time away from their already overwhelming workloads to cope with the audit requirements. Having a robust and efficient configuration management database means that audits can be completed much more quickly. There is no need to search spreadsheets, rely on the knowledge in people’s minds or go through multiple computer systems to get the details auditors need. Everything can be obtained directly from the database.
In the context of the ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library) framework, the purpose of a context database is to store configuration records throughout their lifecycle and to maintain the interrelationships between them. In other words, its purpose is to understand all configuration items (CIs) and the dependencies between them. ICs cover a wide range of elements, such as software, hardware, networks, virtual appliances, containers, power supplies, storage components and more.
Having a central repository that catalogues IT infrastructure and inter-connection relationships provides the ability to quickly detect any problems. For example, when a server fails and affects an application server, it is possible to identify this interdependency and connect the application server to a backup server, which reduces the time to troubleshoot (MTTR). In addition, in the event of a misconfiguration on a switch, all devices connected to that switch will be identified and relocated to restore public accessibility of the devices.
In short, having IOMETRICS® facilitates the mapping of application dependencies, which helps to ensure that the infrastructure operates with as little downtime as possible.
During audits, context databases become highly relevant. By keeping all IT infrastructure relationships, including dependency mapping, service location, software lifecycle status, instances and containers, in a central repository, it is possible to ensure compliance with the requirements of standards such as HIPPA, PCI-DSS or ISO.
Having a centralised repository where data is stored facilitates the entire auditing process, simplifying tasks and ensuring effective compliance.
