How to map applications to CIs without Business Service Mapping

[David Carlin]

Hello,

I am looking for some guidance on my issue below.

For the past 5 months, my company has been sitting on our CMDB but have never utilized it. We set up discovery and then had a major acquisition so we were not able to put the proper effort into it. Now that everything has calmed down, they have come to me to start mapping applications and business services to CIs.

The issue is, I do not know where to start. Everything I read online talks about using 'Business Service Mapping' but my company does not own that. We currently do not have it in our budget either to purchase it.

I know there must be another way, even if it is manual. I am looking for advice on how to start this project or some helpful resources that can send me in the right direction.

Thanks!

David

[stevemacamway]

Assuming you are talking about 'custom' applications that do not automatically get picked up by Discovery, you can add a 'runs on' relationship to the Application CI. i.e. If I I have a 'Steve's application' that runs on 'Car-1' and 'Car-2', I can add relationships to the Application CI that point to the servers. 

[Andrew Westerv4 · Accepted solution]

Without Service Mapping, you still have the opportunity to manually associate your Business Services to your discoverable hardware and application CIs. As stevemacamway mentions, you would use the Relationship Editor to connect the CIs together to build out your Dependency Map. In this regard, you would create a Business Service [cmdb_ci_service] "Depends on::Used by" Server [cmdb_ci_server] or Application [cmdb_ci_appl] relationship.

From a first approach, I'd suggest taking a cut at your active servers and grouping them by Business Services. As example, create a Business Service called "Active Directory" and associate all of your domain controllers with the "Depends on::Used by" relationship. Keep going in this same method of well known services of your environment until most or all of your servers have at least one relationship.

Once you get past that, you'll be ready to start tackling in the same regard your applications (web servers, databases, etc) and do the same thing. In most regards you'll already have this available to you as the same server with a database installed on it likely supports that same service. This area usually gets complicated with consolidated database farms, if that's something your environment is architected to do.