The Challenge of Understanding Your Application and Data Center Landscape
Data centers are complex ecosystems comprised of many components: applications, databases, middleware, servers, storage, and networking hardware. The accelerating adoption of cloud and software-defined data centers makes understanding how it is all assembled even more difficult. Today, IT organizations rely on a variety of different sources to make sense of it all, including CMDBs, network monitoring software, asset management tools, spreadsheets, and the tribal knowledge of key individuals. Few organizations have achieved a fully-automated mapping of applications to supporting infrastructure, with interdependencies clearly documented.
Common Projects Require Discovery
Virtually every IT project requires some level of discovery to reduce risk and ensure a successful outcome.
Automated discovery facilitates:
- Improved change management processes, reducing likelihood of outages
- Faster Time-to-Recovery (TtR) in the case of an IT failure
- Security program development, identifying which assets need to be secured and how they interoperate
- Cost savings by identifying underutilized assets
- Disaster recovery planning by identifying dependencies between applications and the infrastructure that needs to be available to restore normal operations
- Data center or cloud migrations by identifying all application components that need to move together in order to avoid unplanned outages and performance impact
How Can Datatrend Help?
Datatrend has decades of real-world experience with IT Discovery, specifically with BMC’s Discovery software, formerly known as ADDM. Over the past 10 years, Datatrend has developed best practices applicable to companies of all sizes.
Datatrend’s IT Discovery Services include:
- Discovery Program Implementation: Plan and implement Discovery capability including people, process, and technology
- Configuration Management Database (CMDB): Move beyond spreadsheets to an enterprise system that can be automatically updated and feed information to key consumers
- Application Modeling: Discover what applications are running and on what hardware
- System Dependencies: Identify how changes to one system can affect others
- Service Impact Modeling: Understand every application and infrastructure component needed to successfully execute key business process
- Managed Services: Perform day-to-day administration of discovery tools, freeing up resources for strategic projects