Who doesn't love a good summer road trip?
You usually know where you're going before taking off on a road trip. The question is what's the easiest, most efficient way to get there? To solve this challenge, it always makes sense to first review a map. Not just an old paper map that my dad used to get from AAA before heading out on a road trip, but a map that comes alive with information on route options, traffic and possible road construction that could affect your drive time. Luckily for today's road warriors, there are plenty of options — such as mapping apps on your smartphone or a dashboard GPS system.
The same kind of logic applies to IT departments looking to successfully and efficiently implement changes in the data center. We know the desired outcome: enhanced functionality with no negative impact to service availability or performance. To ensure the outcome, data center operations teams need the IT equivalent of a GPS — a 'smart map' that clearly shows the cross-domain relationships between all the components which work together to comprise a business service, regardless of whether it's an application, database, web server, storage or networking component.
When looking at a road map, you're able to determine exactly where the roads, freeways and highways intersect. You can take note of where off ramps are located and determine alternate routes to your destination.
With an accurate and always up-to-date application dependency map, IT teams are able to see how applications and infrastructure components interact together to provide the service. This is crucial in determining which components affect one another so that IT operators have a clear and unobstructed view of what to expect as they move forward with planned changes or try to quickly isolate and repair component failures.
ServiceWatch is an application dependency mapping tool that automatically creates and maintains a map of business services including underlying physical, virtual, network and storage infrastructure. ServiceWatch's run-time service map is focused on quickly ascertaining the business impact of changes or events. Realizing that IT should monitor only what matters, the ServiceWatch service map is enriched with event management and monitoring information by binding domain-specific component data to the service map, thereby allowing data center operators to view events and changes in the context of the business service. The result is improved control of IT change and configuration management activities, faster topology-based problem isolation, and unified service health monitoring.
Just like with any good road trip, effective IT should always start with a map. Having a solid grasp on the lay of the land reduces the chance of encountering unexpected roadblocks or traffic jams. The 'smart map' that ServiceWatch provides allows IT to finally take a service-centric view of the world — aligned with their internal and external customers — and offers the opportunity to prioritize activities based on business impact when challenges inevitably arise.
Next… What to Do When the Bugs Bite
