Managing the Technology Portfolio Management (TPM) in Enterprise Architecture Workspace
Summarize
Summary of Managing the Technology Portfolio Management (TPM) in Enterprise Architecture Workspace
Technology Portfolio Management (TPM) within the Enterprise Architecture Workspace assists Enterprise Architects in managing the life-cycle risks and exceptions associated with technology. It enables evaluation of business applications and services by providing access to discovered technologies and auditing information. Proper management of technology life cycles is crucial to mitigate risks associated with outdated software and ensure continued vendor support.
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Key Features
- Technology Inventory: Maintain an inventory of all technologies to track software versions and support dates, assess risks, and plan for retirement.
- Integration with CMDB: Automatically pulls data from CMDB tables such as Computer, Docker Container, and Serverless Hardware to populate software product information.
- Scheduled Updates: Regularly update TPM lifecycle data for business applications through scheduled jobs, ensuring timely insights into technology risks.
- Risk Management: Assess and track technology life-cycle risks using insights and reports that can be filtered by timeframes.
- Data Visualization: Utilize Gantt charts for visual representation of application services and their lifecycle timelines.
Key Outcomes
By effectively managing the Technology Portfolio Management, customers can expect:
- Improved tracking of software life cycles leading to reduced risks associated with unsupported technologies.
- Enhanced decision-making capabilities regarding technology upgrades and retirements.
- Access to detailed insights and analysis of technology lifecycle risks, facilitating proactive management.
- Ability to visualize technology timelines, aiding in strategic planning and resource allocation.
Overall, TPM empowers ServiceNow customers to maintain a robust technology environment, ensuring business applications remain supported and effective throughout their life cycles.
Technology Portfolio Management helps Enterprise Architects to manage technology life-cycle risks and technology life-cycle exceptions. Enterprise Architects can evaluate all their business applications and application services by accessing the discovered technologies and auditing information in the Enterprise Architecture Workspace.
The underlying technologies of the business applications used in your business enterprise have a shelf life that must be actively managed and diligently monitored to track their versions and life-cycle.
The software products used in your business applications can be operating systems, database management systems, development tools, and middle ware, each of which has a life cycle. If these life-cycle stages aren’t tracked, there are risks where the vendor may not support them any longer and the business applications that run on these technologies are at stake.
- Track the versions of the software and manufacturer support dates for the software
- Set an internal life-cycle guidance for the software
- Assess the risks in using outdated software
- Plan to retire them just like the applications they support, at a definite date
- Support upgrade processes
The data for the software products are populated from the Computer (CMDB_CI_Computer) and all similar instances of the table, Docker Container (CMDB_CI_Docker_Container), and Serverless Hardwares (CMDB_CI_Serverless_Hardware) tables, by default. However, if you want to include other CMDB tables that contain software products, you must update the system property sn_apm_tpm.configurationItemsWithSoftwareInstalls. For information on how to update the system property, see Update the system property to gather software products from a CMDB table.
Installing the Technology Portfolio Management plugin
For instructions to install Technology Portfolio Management, see Activate the Technology Portfolio Management (TPM) plugin.
TPM indicators in EA Workspace
| Indicator | Description |
|---|---|
| Technology Lifecycle Risk [sn_apm_tpm_technology_risk] | Calculates the lifecycle risk score for business applications. |
TPM reference model in EA Workspace
Technology discovery process in EA Workspace
The following is the technology discovery and alignment process for business applications in the EA Workspace.
- Query and fetch the Consumes::Consumed by Application Services.Note:It must be an Application Service and these Application Services must be mapped. The Service Configuration Item Associations [svc_ci_assoc] table is populated for each Application Service and its Computers.
Figure 2. Service Configuration Item Associations - For each computer identified in the Service Configuration Item Associations [svc_ci_assoc] table, you can see the installed software by selecting the Software Installations tab. Also, if a Hardware Model is associated with the computer, you can see the Hardware type details in the TPM Discovered Technologies tab.
- For each software install, you can see the associated discovery model. The software discovery models must be of a product type Licensable or Unknown and they must be normalized or manually normalized to get any appropriate information. You can also also use the sn_apm_tpm.softwareDiscoveryModelProductFilterForTPMsystem property to gather data on non-licensable software products. For information see, Filter software results using an encoded query in TPM.
- For each discovery model, create a TPM Discovered Technology record.
- When you create a record for the TPM Discovered Technology, it triggers the creation of an associated TPM Technology Lifecycles record and it fetches the lifecycle information for the hardware or software technology.
- Business Application [cmdb_ci_business_app]
- CI Relationship [cmdb_rel_ci] - Consumes::Consumed by
- Application Service [cmdb_ci_service_auto, discovered, calculated, query_based, tag_based, manual]
- Service CI Association [svc_ci_assoc] - note: Only table used to find App Service
- Computers/Hardware Computer [cmdb_ci_computer]
- Software Installation [cmdb_sam_sw_install]
- Software Discovery Model [cmdb_sam_sw_discovery_model]
- Software Product [samp_sw_product]
- Software Product Lifecycle [sam_sw_product_lifecycle]Note:Depending on your how you have setup your instance, other tables can also contain software records. Check with your administrator.
Update TPM Data for a business application or application service
You can manually refresh the TPM life-cycle data manually for a selected business application or application service. A scheduled job Populate TPM Discovered Technologies and Life-cycles is also run on schedule or on-demand to update the life-cycle data for all business applications and application services. For more details, see Update TPM Data for a business application or application service and Run a scheduled job to generate TPM lifecycle data
View insights for technology life-cycle risks
You can track the technology lifecycle risk for business applications, application services, servers, software products, and hardware models. The Populate TPM Discovered Technologies and Life-cycles scheduled
job shows the lifecycle results in the Insights section of the EA Workspace home page. Select the Technology Portfolio tab in the Insights section and then select the View all technology lifecycle risks.
- Use this filter to see the risks for the next 1 month, 3 months, 6 months, 12 months, and 18 months. By default, the 1 month filter is applied.
- Use the Show only production instances toggle button to see only production instances that are having technology lifecycle risks. By default, this filter is off.
- Select the View all technology lifecycle risks link to see the list of all technology lifecycle risks sorted by earliest lifecycle date, which means the earliest date when a technology lifecycle risk is
to happen. You can also export the Technology lifecycle risks information to Excel, CSV, JSON, or PDF as required.
The data in the Technology lifecycle risks table is fetched from the TPM Discovered Technologies [sn_apm_tpm_discovered_technology] table.
- Execute the Populate Technology Lifecycle Risks scheduled job to generate the TPM technology lifecycle risks. This scheduled job populates the risk scores for business applications (BA), application services (AS), software products, and hardware models for a fiscal period of type month in the Technology lifecycle risks (sn_apm_tpm_technology_risk) table. For more details, see Schedule a job to generate TPM technology risk.
View TPM analysis run logs
You can track the progress of TPM analysis by examining the TPM Discovered Technology Run Logs [sn_apm_tpm_discovered_technology_run_log] table. Each time the analysis is run, an entry is added to this table. Navigate to section view the logs.
TPM lifecycle timelines on Gantt chart
For the Technology Portfolio Management (TPM), the business applications and their related application services (associated hardware models and software products) are displayed in a hierarchical structure. The corresponding timelines of the application services are displayed as bars on the Gantt chart.
The application services (composed of software products and hardware models) have lifecycle timelines determined for them. On the Gantt chart, the earliest TPM phase start date of either the software products or hardware models are rolled up to calculate the TPM phase start date of the overall application service. That is, the earliest TPM phase start date of any software product or hardware model is taken as the TPM phase start date of the application service, overall. For more details, see TPM lifecycle timelines on Gantt chart and View TPM and TRM lifecycle timelines on the Gantt chart.
Data visualization for TPM data
In the Enterprise Architecture Workspace Dashboard, the 'Top 10 business applications with normalized TPM risk' widget shows the top 10 business applications having normalized TPM risk. For more details, see Working with the Enterprise Architecture Workspace dashboard.