Introducing ViVID Service Maps
Table of Contents
CMDB service maps are visual depictions of hierarchical relationships among business services (sometimes also major applications) and their supporting Configuration Items (CIs). Service maps offer an instant bird’s eye view of critical dependencies and relationships. Their utility is evident in planning for change or responding to outages.
This improvement avoids the need to create a mental picture from thousands or even millions of CIs in the CMDB. However, service map viewers still need to apply significant interpretation and research. This is essential to complete tasks related to change-related risk management and incident resolution. That’s where ViVID comes in.
Virima Visual Impact Display (ViVIDTM) enhances CMDB user experience with visual depictions on service maps, reducing guesswork. “Additional research, still required with standard service maps, is minimized by ViVID’s added layer of visual depictions. While a map directs you, ViVID provides turn-by-turn instructions for a faster and more effortless navigation.
This efficiency aids change managers and incident responders in quicker risk, root-cause, and impact analysis. ViVID ensures longer MTBF (Mean Time Between Failure) for change managers and incident responders. It also facilitates faster MTTR (Mean Time To Repair) in performing risk, root-cause, and impact analysis.
The ViVID Difference
Automated Infrastructure and Dependency Mapping
The power of ViVID starts with Virima’s automated Discovery and Service Mapping capabilities which eliminate 90% of effort required with traditional service mapping technology. Virima Discovery inputs time-of-scan and historical data points into the CMDB. This process creates dynamic relationships and dependencies among infrastructure components, applications, and services. Discovery ensures that the CMDB, CI’s, and their relationships are kept current so the data can be trusted.
Dynamic Service Maps
Next comes all of the map view options. ViVID offers CMDB users dynamic views of infrastructure relationships, Application Dependency Mapping (ADM), communication flows, network and storage topology and so much more. Users are able to filter, sort, save and share views that provide precisely the visual depiction of data they need to be more effective in their job. Any change to the CMDB data, whether automatically discovered or manually generated, is immediately reflected in the ViVID Service Maps. It keeps your team up-to-date with the latest CI and relationship information in order to make timely and effective decisions. ViVID Service Maps work with on-premise, cloud-based and hybrid services as well. ViVID Maps can map the service in real-time, whether it’s an application, website, or a combination of the two.
ITSM and Event Management Integration
What really makes the ViVID difference is Virima’s integration with event management alerts and ITSM functions. This enables overlaying critical and relevant information onto the service maps, automatically displaying details such as recently completed changes and open incidents. This easily answers the question of ‘what changed. Just imagine how this would make planning for your next big change easier or how ViVID would have helped you recover from the last P1 outage sooner.
Supported event management platforms include Solarwinds, Nagios and Logic Monitor. ITSM integrations of course include Virima and also other major ITSM providers – ServiceNow, Cherwell, Ivanti and very soon Jira. Many users don’t need to replace their current tools, thanks to the extensive Virima integrations. Virima and ViVID will just make it better.
The ViVID Effect
So now that you have the basics of what ViVID does let’s run through some examples of how it can make a difference in many job functions including change managers, incident responders, solution architects and application developers.
Change happens, that’s a given, and the pressure on IT to support evolving business needs has never been greater. However, too many organizations have learned the hard way that a rush to change can have dire consequences. The push in many organizations over the past decade has been towards maturing the change management processes in order to avoid these unforced errors. The business may not always appreciate the speed in which some changes occur but the old racing adage- slow is smooth and smooth is fast- generally applies to IT as well. Just remember the other adage- keep up or die- also applies.
Furthermore, it empowers your team to notify the relevant stakeholders for informed planning. Change planners gain visibility into other scheduled changes that may pose additional risk or need completion first.
While not directly related to ViVID, Virima Discovery also ensures that configuration changes are approved and documented correctly in the CMDB.
Increased MBTF
As just discussed, ViVID helps take risk out of making changes. Since over 80% of unplanned downtime is attributed to intentional changes, significantly reducing bad changes from ever happening will go a long way to increase mean time between failures (MBTF). ViVID helps improve up time in other ways as well. Application owners and network architects can leverage ViVID service maps to identify weak links in a business service, such as a non-fault tolerant design, old versions of software, or out-of-support critical components. Readily available access to this kind of information propels the decisions and actions needed to make sure faults within the underlying infrastructure don’t bring critical business services down as well.
More Efficient Incident Management
Then there is the value of displaying open incidents on service-supporting CI’s or the business service itself. Consider a common scenario where a system monitoring tool alerts to a hardware issue, such as excessive CPU or RAM utilization on a server. Generally that alert gets sent to an individual or team to assess the criticality of the event (based on importance of the server) and determine the appropriate course of action. If it’s a large IT shop that usually means the initial responder logs an incident which then gets assigned to another department queue to handle. Already there has been too much reliance on manual processes that increases the chances that very soon users will start to notice a degradation on the service or services that server supports.
Now imagine a scenario where the initial alert is automatically tied to the correct CMDB CI and an incident with rule-based priorities and assignments is created and displayed on a ViVID service map. Now anyone responding to the alert-generated incident can perform a rapid assessment of what impact the CPU issue could have on the business before anyone starts to notice any disruption.
Accelerate MTTR
Unfortunately, even with much preparation and planning and automated alerting and incident management, sometimes things still go really wrong, really fast. Maybe it was a significant hardware failure to a critical asset or an unapproved change (we’re not judging just recognizing reality). The fact is you’ve got a P1 situation and users are feeling the pain.
Depending on the demand for the service and the significance of disruption, it could require an all-hands response to resolve. Perhaps multiple services are down as a result of whatever just occurred. That’s going to make it even tougher to diagnose the root cause. The first question always asked is what changed? There must be a common link to all service disruptions being reported but what is it? Was it something out of our control (critical failure) or was it an unforced error (we screwed up)?
A standard service map might not be of little help here too. As stated in the opening paragraph, a standard service map is much like a road map. Sure it connects the points you want to drive to but it still requires a lot of pre-planning and is hard to follow while driving. You couldn’t always count your co-pilot for good turn-by-turn instructions either (you might need a little bit of gray on the sides to remember, just saying). You eventually got there but not always on-time or on friendly terms with your company.
Also Read: Enhance Collaboration with Virima Visual Impact Display (ViVID™)
A ViVID service map on the other hand can quickly help answer the “what changed” and “what does one have to do with the other” questions. When tightly integrated with event management and ITSM, Virima’s ViVID service maps show open incidents tied to the underlying infrastructure components. So too would any recently completed or planned changes on those components. Is the common thread to all of the felt disruptions a hardware failure or did another shared service go down? Could both be true? Whatever the cause, ViVID can provide the necessary information to help accelerate the recovery.
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