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Service Mapping in 2023: Predictions

ByTeam Virima

Table of Contents

Service mapping is a critical element of service provider networks. It’s becoming increasingly important as the Internet of Things (IoT) and other trends continue to reshape global networks. 

Service maps aren’t just about having a map that shows all the different services in use across the network. It requires an automated process for building those maps, visualizing them, and updating them in real time. As the network becomes more complex and the demands placed on the business customers increase, service mapping becomes more critical. Information will be delivered through multiple applications and channels. Thus making it necessary to consider a combination of new and traditional approaches to meet customer needs.

Read about: 5 key benefits of service mapping

In 2023, service mapping is all set to become an integrated part of service planning, provisioning, and lifecycle management. Thus enabling operators to map all services in their IT and business networks, moving seamlessly from a service-focused world to an experience-focused one.

Let us take a look at how it has evolved over the last decade. Also, look at IT service map trends for the next few years as new technologies come online.

Read: How service maps can be leverage for risk assessment and analysis

1. Creating unified IT and moving beyond traditional application dependency mapping tools

Service mapping is a key component of unified IT. It is because it provides visibility into the state of assets and services across the entire enterprise. Service mapping has become more important as connectivity increases, with more sources of data. It includes humans — contributing to the volume of information that needs to be managed. 


As new service architectures emerge, and application environments become more automated, we will see a shift in how IT teams plan. They will also shift how they provision and manage the resources supporting their applications. To maximize the value of their applications, they need a clear picture of application requirements. Additionally, they require means to optimize performance and cost.

We’re dealing with a high number of applications, new services, and unknown dependencies. It’s virtually impossible to manually map every application and its location in the physical environment. A traditional CMDB won’t cut it either because it will miss data that can have a meaningful impact on your IT strategy and business objectives.

The first step in achieving a unified IT organization is the integration of application and network technologies through an accurate and current dependency map. This involves creating a knowledge base around all applications within the ecosystem, creating a true end-to-end picture of your enterprise.

The only way to truly manage a complex application estate is through automation. The goal is to build an accurate and current dependency map of everything related to the business service you are migrating to, including networking data. 

2. Rapid evolution of Application Discovery and Dependency Mapping (ADDM)

Application and service discovery tools help organizations determine the service-richness of an application and where it sits in relation to other applications, or other services within or outside of the enterprise. With the rapid evolution of software and cloud models, the ability to quickly discover, map and analyze applications is critical to achieving competitive advantage.

The ADDM market is evolving rapidly and in multiple directions. However, it continues to be a complex task that requires access to deep application insight across cloud and on-premises environments. Integrating more application data sources into service mapping helps anticipate changes and dependencies before they are deployed, which can reduce disruption, improve customer experience and increase overall revenues.

Today, applications are expected to have high availability and performance at all times. They need to be able to recover from failures quickly, scale as demand escalates and maintain tight integration within their ecosystem of IT services. Service mapping is transforming from a reactive service monitoring tool used primarily by IT to a strategic decision-making tool for business stakeholders.

3. Performance-optimized application dependency mapping

The Application Dependency Mapping (ADM) process identifies all IT and application elements and services across an organization’s IT environment. Using data gathered from the organization in real-time, ADM can assess health, identify potential problems and proactively make improvements.

As cloud deployments become more complex and multi-cloud environments continue to expand, more focus needs to be placed on next-generation application dependency mapping solutions that not only provide more context around application dependencies, but offer a deeper level of analysis into the transactional aspects of the infrastructure.

It’s now a given that enterprises need deep visibility into their applications, but the question is how they’ll get it. The leaders in this field are focusing on providing more insights into interdependencies and performance drivers, as well as automating the discovery of these dependencies. This is what service and application dependency mapping in 2023 will be all about.

Also read: Service mapping challenges and how to overcome them

The next-gen service mapping tool

As you can see, the world of service mapping is changing quickly. The technologies and strategies that we use today will likely look very different in just a few years. But there’s one thing that won’t change: the importance of having as much information as possible about your network and its connections to other systems. Service mapping helps you to get this information, so it will always be valuable!

ViVID (Virima Visual Impact Display) Service Mapping is an interactive, visual way to map your IT infrastructure, applications and services on a single platform. Mapping in ViVID gives you the ability to view the physical, logical, and business relationships between these objects in a graphical form. This enables you to trace service dependencies (identifying critical services), identify the root cause of IT problems and create holistic measurement metrics for those services.

With an intuitive interface and built-in templates, Virima makes it easy to understand your current IT environment. Customers are able to map on-premise, cloud-based, and hybrid services as well as drill down into details on how changes impact the entire architecture.

Planned IT service changes can be identified using Virima’s application dependency maps, which map the interactions between different applications and services. These maps help visualize the impact that a change will have on other services and highlight potential problems before they happen. With this functionality you can identify what could be impacted during change windows or if something could go wrong as a result of the change, and coordinate with necessary stakeholders and involve them in the approval process.

Learn more about ViVID Service Mapping and other offerings by Virima by scheduling a demo right away! 

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