How to capture 3rd party hosted Applications

[TWine]

Hi

We need to capture how and where our applications are hosted in the CMDB and I'm looking for some advise on how to capture applications that are hosted externally.

We capture the relationships between Application Service and the supporting downstream infrastructure configuration items and cloud resource groups and this works great for internally hosted applications as we can then track back to our data centers.

So this brings me to the question of how best to capture in the CMDB that an Application Service is hosted externally outside of our network?

thanks

[CMDB Whisperer]

I would still capture these as Application Services, as it will allow you to distinguish between different deployed instances of the hosted application (Prod and non-Prod).  The difference is that while you may have an Entry Point like HTTP that you could add to the Service Map (if you own Service Mapping) it's not going to be able to discover any of the hosted infrastructure.  So basically you have a "stub" of an Application Service with no supporting infrastructure.  But that's fine, since your service provider is managing the infrastructure and you don't need to have that visibility.  The Application Service itself will still serve the same purpose in your overall dependency maps, and will still align to CSDM.  You can define additional attributes such as Vendor for the service provider, and Location if you know where it is actually being hosted (that may be difficult, depending on the vendor and how the application is deployed). 

[TWine]

Thanks for your response. We currently are capturing the applications services for the deployed instances and like you mentioned they do not have any relationships with hosted infrastructure. Although adding an attribute for the hosting vendor is an option, I was querying whether this would be the most effective approach or whether creating the service the vendors provide (either as a business or technical service) would be a better approach as we would then be able to establish relationships between the Application Services and the vendor service which feels more consistent with applications that are hosted on prem. 

[CMDB Whisperer]

In short, my recommendation would be to define only the services that your company is managing (or has some role in the management of that service) as a true technical/business service and related offerings.  If, for example, I have a technical service called Data Warehousing that I offer to internal consumers, and I decide I need to use a specific business application called ACME Enterprise Data in the delivery of that service, and it is a hosted SaaS solution, then I would define the Prod (as well as non-Prod) instances of the ACME Enterprise Data instances as Application Services, with no infrastructure dependencies, and I would associate all of them with the Business Application called ACME Enterprise Data.  But the only Service I would have would be the Data Warehousing service that I manage, and I would have a dependency (via a Data Warehousing Offering) on the Production ACME Enterprise Data app service (which would specify ACME as the Vendor, which is an OOB attribute).  I would NOT define a service called ACME Enterprise Data Services, because I'm not managing that service.  ACME is managing that service.  It probably wouldn't provide much value for me to define it as a Service, unless I want to actively manage it at that level (e.g. the specific SLAs, Availability, etc. from the Vendor's perspective), but in that case I'm saying it's a service that I would have a role in actively managing.  That is the question I would ask to make your final determination.  If your vendor is managing the application delivery service for you, what role/value does your management of that service entail/provide?

[Ali543]

1. Window capture: Some screen recording software allows you to capture individual windows. Check if your screen recording tool provides a "window capture" or "application capture" feature. This enables you to select the specific application window you want to record, excluding other elements on the screen.

2. Virtual machine recording: If the hosted application is running on a virtual machine (VM), you can use screen recording software that supports capturing the VM window. Install screen recording software on the host machine in pdf and configure it to record the virtual machine window. This method allows you to isolate the application within the VM for recording purposes.

3. Remote access software: If you have remote access to the server or machine hosting the application, you can connect to it using remote desktop software (e.g., Remote Desktop Protocol or VNC) and then capture the screen or window as mentioned in the previous methods.