Getting the IT Discovery Job Done

Manual discovery of all IT assets is a time-consuming, cumbersome, error-prone job. And by the time it’s completed, assets may have been changed, added, or removed. A tool that automates many discovery processes is necessary to make the task both cost-effective and comprehensive.

What Are Existing Tools Good For?

Many contemporary tools are good at discovering the existing technologies in your data center, but may be less efficient, or possibly ineffectual when it comes to matching those assets with the people and business processes they serve. To achieve this objective, the tool must automate as much of the discovery as possible., Simultaneously, the tool must but also allow for the input, mapping, and organization of information gathered from those with “tribal knowledge” of how things really work. This extends to application infrastructure as well — effective web server discovery ensures that Apache, Tomcat, and IIS instances are captured in your CMDB alongside the rest of your environment.

Tools that provide scanning for network and security purposes are common, but typically don’t show the big picture. Data collected by these tools must be correlated to provide a better view of the enterprise-wide infrastructure. It includes the interrelationships among the various components and people who use those components. Coverage of middleware and data tiers is equally important — Virima database discovery extends to Oracle, MySQL, Apache, Tomcat, and other application server layers that traditional scanners routinely miss.

Since departments usually deploy these tools at the departmental level, the discovery team often finds it challenging to gain access. It is especially if they are unaware of their existence in the first place. Unfortunately, turf wars are not uncommon in data center transformations. Broad Virima OS discovery across macOS, Linux, and Windows devices helps ensure no endpoints are left out of scope regardless of which team owns them.

Dependency Is Critical for Discovery

Tools can also miss dependencies. Scans may occur at the wrong time to catch an occasional communication flow, so it is important to let dependency mapping scans run over long periods or at different intervals. Virtualized environments are particularly prone to this gap — esxi discovery network coverage through vCenter and ESXi integration ensures that VM-to-host relationships and virtual network flows are captured as part of ongoing scans.

And since an enterprise data center does not remain static during or after a discovery project, any tool should refresh the data on an ongoing basis. Likewise, the actual transformation doesn’t take place overnight so it’s critical that operations and support teams are aware of changes as they occur. The initial discovery of assets and relationships should dovetail into a thorough change management program. For teams running Xurrent as their ITSM platform, Xurrent asset discovery through Virima closes the loop between live infrastructure data and the service desk in real time.

Without a highly automated tool, a data center discovery process requires particular expertise and can consume considerable time and resources. This often results in the need for external consultants to perform the work, which can be expensive. And as with any manual/point-in-time discovery, the information is static while the data center remains dynamic. The ability to automatically discover Oracle and MySQL databases in your CMDB is one concrete example of where automation replaces consultant-dependent, point-in-time effort.

In Conclusion

At the end of the day, IT organizations are held accountable to rapidly respond to and support the goals of the organization, delivering the best return on investment as they do so. 

A comprehensive, automatic discovery tool that keeps the IT inventory Configuration Management Database (CMDB) and relationship/dependency map up-to-date should be one of the lasting deliverables of any data center discovery. Part of that completeness is network topology discovery, which lets IT teams automatically map every device and connection rather than relying on diagrams that go stale the moment an engineer makes a change.

Virima features can automatically discover and map your critical IT resources and the interconnections that link them to one another, your applications and services, and your users. That includes virtualization layers — ESXi host discovery gives you complete visibility into VMware vCenter environments and the VMs running across your ESXi hosts.

Virima is here to help. To get started, contact us today to schedule a demo and explore the possibilities!