How to handle application URL

[steve_sutton]

Has anyone come up with a good way to handle application URL's or alias's that sit on a load balancer?  What we are looking to do, outside of Service Mapping, is find a way to show what servers are sitting behind the load balancer that the application URL sits on.  Our Operations team is looking for a quick way to see what servers are related to the app URL.

Is there an easy way to get this done?

[robpickering]

Steve,

The Application (or URL) would be at the top-level of your Business Service Map.

That application would "Depends::On" the Load Balancer itself for operation, setting up that relationship.

The Load Balancer in turn would "Depends::On" the individual servers that are sitting behind it.   That would then build a dependency map that you would be able to inspect, to see the servers supporting the application.

If a server were to have Incidents logged against it, the Load Balancer would become degraded, which is what you'd want to see.

Does that help?

-Rob

[Aditya Telideva]

Hi Steve,

The entry point of your service should be the same one that it's used by your users to access the application/service. In other words, the url that defines the application.

In regards the CDN, just as ServiceNow has patterns to understand how an a given ip is load balanced through a F5, you can also define your patterns so that you can take a look within your CDN service an understand how a given ip should be resolved to other ones according to the regions you have defined. Of course, that will imply that you have the right security credentials for your CDN Service to interact with it and understand internally how it resolves each ip.

Thanks,

Aditya Telidevara

[robertgeen]

Hello Steve,

Depending on the load balancers you are using if they are supported out of the box then discovery can actually get you that information. Out of the box I believe Net scaler and F5 load balancers topology is discovered and propagated in the cmdb by discovery. This should get you all the VIPs, services, and depending on the rest of the data in the CMDB it will tie it back to software instances in the cmdb_ci_appl table. Hope this helps.