Service Discovery - Overview

IT is under enormous pressure to minimize the cost and risk of supporting mission-critical business applications. As a result, IT management and automation initiatives such as Business Service Management (BSM), data center automation (DCA), configuration and change management, resource consolidation and ITIL have become top priority for IT operations managers. Unfortunately, the complexity of the IT infrastructures that power business-critical applications makes it difficult to ensure application availability, improve service levels and reduce operating costs. The success of all these initiatives is hinged upon an organization’s ability to understand the complex relationships between applications and technology infrastructure.

Business Drivers For IT Service Discovery

The need for IT Service Discovery is driven by 3 main forces:

1. Economy pressure – The bubble burst brought many organizations to push IT to “do more with less”. With 70% of an IT organizations budget spent maintaining inefficient systems, the first step an organization must take to drive down IT costs is to understand what they have installed, what the interdependencies are, as well as, what the demands and usage of these resources are.
2. Government regulation – Regulations like SOX, GLBA & HIPPA brought to the CxO attention their liability to their IT systems compliancy. No more it is the system administration responsibility to know who has access to finance application, and that the only programs that allowed access to the main data base are those who are running on the mainframe environment. Today this is the liability of the CEO, CFO and CIO.
3. Process renovation (ITIL) – With ITIL and other best practice framework initiatives, driving projects to help IT organizations gain control of their infrastructure, the need for automated discovery and mapping solutions is rising, as is the need to implement a CMDB strategy to hold configuration item (CI). Helping organizations build a logical model of their IT infrastructure so they can identify, catalog, track, optimize, and manage their CIs has intrinsic value to IT in reducing risk and lowering costs.

IT Discovery Methods

Over the years, enterprise management suites vendors have taken either an agent-based or an agentless approach to providing data collection and system monitoring solutions. There are distinct differences between the two approaches from the installation of agents on target systems to the active scanning of these systems over the network on a periodic schedule.

New technology from nLayers has added a third dimension to enterprise management agent technology and is classified as a “passive” agentless solution.

Agent-based Tools

Agent-based management solutions require the installation of software on each target systems as part of the overall management infrastructure. As each agent adds another piece of software to the system, architecture it also means that it must be maintained as well. Most IT organizations avoid adding more software to their systems due to the cost of resources required to manage their existing systems.

Agentless Scanners

Agentless scanners do not require the installation of software as they rely entirely on commands and operating system calls that are generated from the  management server and sent periodically across the network to the target system. This process is repeated for each target and results in thousands of calls across the network (network storms). The time to complete this data collection grows significantly with the size of the network. Agentless scanners are not real time and therefore miss many of the changes that occur in a data center when they happen.

Passive, Agentless Technology

Passive discovery solutions observe packets on the network without scanning, spidering, or probing network devices, by connecting to multiple switches or routers across the enterprise. As it is also agentless, there is no need to install agents on the servers nor is there a need to configure the product with user names and passwords to perform “active” or “credential-based” probing of applications.

nLayers Hybrid Passive/Active Discovery

nLayers InSight provides the visibility organizations need to accelerate and increase ROI on today’s highest- priority IT service and cost management initiatives. nLayers has developed the easiest, most comprehensive solution for discovering, understanding and mapping the complex relationships between business processes, applications and technology infrastructure. Unlike incomplete point discovery solutions that use difficult to- deploy agents to provide real-time intelligence, or those that employ difficult-to-configure agentless scanners that only render periodic “snapshots”, nLayers InSight is the only solution that offers instant, passive discovery for immediate, end-to-end real time visibility and the flexibility to selectively “drill down” and compile more detailed information on specific servers or services.

What is a Federated CMDB?

A configuration management database (CMDB) strategy is central to the IT Service Management framework implementation described in the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL®) documents. ITIL outlines two main areas of this framework: service support to enable effective delivery of IT Services and service delivery, which outline the management of these services. Projects require this CI (configuration item) data in order to begin to take advantage of these best practice frameworks, hence the CMDB.

By adopting a federated CMDB approach, IT organizations can leverage data repositories throughout their environment through integration and utilization of open interfaces to share data. However, this is just a portion of the information needed and does not begin to give the organization the continuous application infrastructure data required to effectively build out their overall best practice strategies.

nLayers provides a robust federated CMDB solution that can be used stand alone or in conjunction with other CMDBs or Repositories (see partners[link]). nLayers InSight is not necessarily the only or even the main CMDB used by an organization, but it adds a flexible easy to use integration point into nLayers discovery engines.