Regardless of where your company’s systems are deployed, whether on-premise, in public or private clouds, IOMETRICS® Context, based on Open Source code, organises the information it has found or that you provide, and displays it in optimised visualisations to find the problems that are affecting the infrastructure.
All organised, centralised and visualised in a single database that will help you reduce incident resolution time thanks to topology-based and contextualised visualisation.
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.
Adding information manually into a management database is time-consuming and impractical, and would quickly become obsolete.
An alternative is to upload information from an Excel spreadsheet that your company has been using to track ICs, but this information will only be as up to date as the Excel spreadsheet itself.
The most effective and efficient way to keep IOMETRICS® Context data up to date is to use a discovery tool. With IOMETRICS® Discovery, it is possible to scan and iden- tify any IP-enabled device in your infrastructure network. You set time intervals to check and see if devices have been added or removed from the network, and have reliable, accurate and up-to-date information.
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.
Identification of root cause
Mapping of services
Auditing
and compliance
Control of obsolescence or versions
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.
By using IOMETRICS®, we can identify which devices are running software that is reaching its End of Life (EOL) and take the necessary steps to update them. In this way, we ensure the protection of our infrastructure against potential threats, as we will have the latest security updates in our environments.
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.
Here are the top 4 benefits of using IOMetrics Context:
Mean time to repair (MTTR)
Integrationwith ITSM tools
Planificación general
Facilitates audits
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.
By integrating IOMETRICS® Context with an information technology service management (ITSM) platform, the efficiency of ITSM tools can be improved by having a centralised and up-to-date catalogue of configurations, relationships and asset dependencies.
An ITSM solution provides workflows and processes for service delivery, covering service management, change management, incident management, asset management and knowledge management.
IOMETRICS® Context captures data that can feed ITSM applications such as Jira or ServiceNow:
By gaining a deep understanding of the infrastructure, it is possible to plan its evolution effectively. IOMETRICS® Context plays a key role in managing service status, monitoring consumption and associated costs, and provides companies with a complete view of their entire infrastructure.
With this detailed understanding of services and costs, business priorities can be planned strategically, adjusting different aspects of the infrastructure to best suit the needs and objectives of the customers and the business. In this way, better alignment between infrastructure and business objectives is achieved.
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.
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