Applications, web services, and enterprise dependencies are items essential to the everyday execution of services, and if IT asset inventories are not visible, not being monitored correctly, or if information related to each item is unspecified, problems can occur, significantly impacting your organization's livelihood.
Imagine sitting in the weekly change management control meeting, and a critical stakeholder is not present to alert the attendees about a crucial application’s interdependency to a proposed change. Left out of the conversation is the fact that processes on a legacy server -- critical to point-of-sale transactions -- are intimately connected to the executed system change. Although the asset relationships and application dependencies to other systems are unknown, the change is approved and executed, causing a domino effect of errors, interruptions, and outages.
As issues and problems mount and the enterprise begins to feel the impact of the completed change, the network administrators and IT leaders ask one another, “What went down? What changed?” It is not a pleasant experience explaining to the operational leadership why something happened and when it will be fixed. In all actuality, without the right tool, this scenario can be extremely common.
As an organization matures, visibility into its network and its IT assets, resources, and devices should as well. Using an IT discovery tool is becoming paramount as the traditional workforce scenario continues to shift dramatically and new appliances and dependencies are introduced into the equation. By implementing an IT discovery and automation solution, an organization can manage an environment where all enterprise services and applications are fully mapped. This allows IT leaders to have a readily accessible picture of the landscape at a moment's notice, allowing decisions to be made efficiently, effectively, and timely.
The information provided by a discovery and automation tool can feed an organization's Configuration Management Database (CMDB) and align internal practices more closely with Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) best practices, introducing a level of maturity not previously experienced.
Knowing where resources are and understanding the dependency mapping of processes, applications, and devices are imperative when connecting asset relationships and ensuring critical relationships are not overlooked. Having dependency mapping in place helps an organization reduce the risk of making mistakes by lacking knowledge regarding the 5Ws. Also, it can lower response times and reduce overall incidents from happening.
To truly understand your network dependencies, implementing a discovery and automation tool to map all assets is the best way to save yourself the headache of trying to figure out—after a problem has occurred—what the problem is. If you want to be proactive and overcome these challenges, contact Flycast Partners to discuss options unique to your organization.