Infrastructure software and CSDM

[Mitch23]

Hey, great brain trust and fellow CSDM enthusiasts. Infrastructure teams purchase all kinds of applications to support the infrastructure. In some cases, those applications are part of the network/hardware gear

- Network monitoring tools

- Load balancing

- DNS management tools

- VPN (Cisco)

-etc

These are installed on devices so do we treat them like software packages (e.g. adobe installed on a laptop) or a business application?

[CMDB Whisperer]

Potentially both (sort of).  

To track the fact that you are using Cisco as your corporate solution for VPN, you should track it as a Business Application (cmdb_ci_business_app).  At some point your enterprise architects will want a view of all of the items in your technology portfolio that are used for VPN.  Perhaps you have multiple, but these could be consolidated into one.  That is what the Business Application provides: a view into the fact that your company relies on this solution to provide the capability to remotely connect to corporate networks. 

Along with that, you will want to be able to see the specific instances of that business application, which would be the Application Service CIs (cmdb_ci_service_discovered or a related class).  For example, you may have a Cisco instance that is primary for your headquarters, and separate instances to provide failover connectivity, and others dedicated to individual regions.  Each one represents the entry point that your Cisco Anywhere clients would use to connect to the VPN. 

Finally, within each instance, there is the Application itself (cmdb_ci_appl), which represents the actual running process that is installed and running on a server and managing connections from clients.  At this level also you have visibility to the Software Installation record (and depending on whether SAM is installed, and which version, you may also have a Software Package or a Software Model associated with the Software Installation record).

In summary, we're talking about several distinct things when we talk about an "application".  We're talking about the software technology itself (Business Application), the deployed instances of the application stack (Application Service), the processes that actually run on a specific server within each instance (Application), and the installation records for those individually installed software components.