Virima: A powerful alternative to Jira asset discovery for IT asset and configuration management
Table of Contents
- Why look for an alternative to Jira asset discovery?
- Introducing Virima as a powerful alternative to Jira Discovery
- Virima’s advantages over other alternative to Jira asset discovery
- Experience the Virima difference: A powerful alternative to Jira asset discovery
Managing IT assets in today’s hybrid IT landscape is crucial. Jira asset discovery aims to help, but its limitations (limited asset types, lack of deep discovery and discovery options, limited scalability) can hinder complete visibility. Virima is a superior alternative to Jira asset discovery, offering comprehensive IT asset discovery and service mapping that seamlessly integrates with Jira Service Management. Virima empowers organizations with deeper insights, enhanced automation, and secure discovery processes.
This article explores how Virima outperforms Jira asset discovery and other Jira asset discovery alternatives like Lansweeper and Device42, optimizing IT operations, assets, and configuration management.
Why look for an alternative to Jira asset discovery?
Limited asset-type coverage
Jira asset discovery does not support the complete range of IT assets found in modern environments. Specifically, the tool struggles to identify and manage cloud resources, IoT devices, and network infrastructure elements like firewalls and load balancers. This limitation restricts the ability to maintain a comprehensive inventory of all IT assets, thereby preventing full visibility and management control.
Lack of deep discovery
While Jira asset discovery can identify basic information about assets (e.g., CPU, RAM, OS versions, and installed applications), it falls short in providing detailed insights into configurations and interdependencies. Importantly, it does not discover intricate relationship data between assets, such as dependencies between applications, hardware connections, or network topology. Understanding these deeper details is crucial for effective IT asset management, incident resolution, change risk assessments, and proactive problem management.
The lack of in-depth discovery and relationship data means that administrators may miss critical relationships and configurations, potentially leading to gaps in management and security.
Lack of discovery options
Jira asset discovery, predominantly an agentless network scanner, necessitates significant manual effort for comprehensive asset management while offering limited ability to gather detailed information about devices and software. Its accuracy and reliability is diminished in dynamic environments with frequent device changes, and it is susceptible to security obstacles such as network and device firewalls, unknown credentials and prohibited discovery methods (i.e. WMI and PAExec). Agentless scanning also makes it impossible to discover off-network or frequently roaming and/or powered down devices such as laptops and desktops.
The absence of a true, multi-OS agent-based discovery option (only basic Windows capabilities exist) hinders the ability to overcome these limitations, limiting data collection depth and reliability, and restricting access to granular data and continuous change or software usage monitoring essential for proactive hardware and software asset management. Furthermore, the lack of API discovery methods requires the dependence on 3rd party discovery tools for critical assets like cloud resources, hypervisors, and other assets that do not respond to command-based probes.
Limited scalability
In large enterprises or environments with rapidly changing assets, Jira asset discovery like many other discovery tool alternatives struggles with effective scaling. As the number of assets increases, performance and reliability might degrade, leading to slower discovery times and potential inaccuracies in the asset database.
Also, with an increase in the number of locations, many discovery tools require additional software deployment which can be costly and difficult to maintain. Scalability issues can cripple IT operations, especially in dynamic IT environments where asset inventories need to be updated continuously and reliably.
Introducing Virima as a powerful alternative to Jira Discovery
The Jira Service Management integration from Virima is a comprehensive solution that addresses the limitations of Jira discovery with its core asset discovery capabilities and provides unmatched visualizations through features like advanced service mapping and the Virima Visual Impact Display (ViVID). The following are the advantages of Virima’s discovery solution over Jira asset discovery.
Broad asset discovery
Virima’s IT Discovery is designed for comprehensive discovery across a wider range of IT assets than Jira asset discovery can handle. While Jira may struggle to fully identify and manage cloud resources, IoT devices, and network infrastructure like firewalls and load balancers, Virima excels in these areas. Virima’s solution effectively discovers data center infrastructure (servers, network, storage), virtual assets (applications, virtual machines, hypervisors, containers), edge devices (desktops, printers, IoT), and cloud resources from providers such as AWS and Azure.
Flexible discovery with agentless, agent-based, and API integration options
Virima combines agentless, agent-based, and API discovery methods, offering flexibility and thorough data collection. The agentless discovery option simplifies deployment, making it ideal for recurring scans of always on/always connected devices such as servers and network infrastructure. The agent-based discovery methods provide continuous, real-time monitoring of assets, capturing changes, and usage patterns, and ensuring accurate data for devices that may intermittently connect to the network. Whereas the API integrations ensure seamless discovery from cloud resources, hypervisors, and other asset management systems.
This combined approach ensures thorough data collection, covering a wide range of devices and environments while maintaining flexibility and adaptability to suit various IT infrastructures and management needs.
Deep discovery including relationship and dependencies
Virima provides a deeper discovery experience than Jira, capturing detailed insights into IT assets and their interactions, including network topology and application dependencies. Virima’s service mapping solution leverages this data to create dynamic and interactive visualizations of IT services and their dependencies. This comprehensive view is crucial for effective IT asset management, change risk assessments, and root cause analysis for incident response, where overlooking these connections due to less comprehensive discovery could lead to management and security gaps.
Furthermore, Virima’s advanced ViVID feature overlays ITSM records (which we’ll discuss later) onto these service maps to provide operational intelligence.
Secure discovery
Virima employs strong encryption and methods to safeguard sensitive data throughout the discovery process, something that Jira does not extensively highlight. The platform is purpose-built on AWS with multi-tenancy and full data segregation between tenants. Additionally, asset credentials are never stored in the cloud, agentless commands can be granularity restricted, and discovery data is encrypted in transit, ensuring secure transmission and storage. Customers have additional peace of mind knowing that Virima adheres to safe business practices as evidenced by yearly AICPA SOC 2 Type 2 certification.
Scalability
Virima’s IT Discovery solution overcomes scalability limitations inherent in Jira asset discovery and many other tools. It seamlessly scales to handle the demands of large enterprises and rapidly evolving IT environments without compromising performance or reliability. Unlike tools that struggle with increasing asset numbers and require costly software deployments, Virima maintains consistent speed and accuracy, making it ideal for dynamic environments. This robust scalability ensures efficient and seamless IT operations even with an expansive number of locations, cloud environments, and asset classes.
Cost-effectiveness
Virima offers competitive pricing of the discovery bundle (which includes a CMDB, service mapping, and the innovative ViVID feature) compared to other alternatives to Jira asset discovery tools. Also, unlike many discovery solutions, Virima’s pricing is transparent and predictable, with no hidden costs for adding service mapping or discovering additional locations. Virima offers faster time to value and higher ROI while offering robust and impactful capabilities at a lower TCO. Virima’s ability to deliver extensive features without unnecessary expenditure stands out as a benefit for cost-conscious organizations.
Bi-directional integration capabilities
Virima goes beyond basic one-way integrations with Jira Service Management. Virima’s bi-directional integration allows for a dynamic exchange of data between Virima and the Jira Service Management platform. This enables Virima’s ViVID feature to overlay real-time operational data, such as incident tickets, and change requests directly onto service maps. This provides IT and security teams with valuable insights into the impact of IT events on service performance and helps them proactively identify and address potential issues and access change risks.
Automation
Virima significantly enhances IT discovery efficiency through robust automation. Automated scan schedules ensure consistent and timely data collection. It streamlines agent deployments and check-ins, providing continuous monitoring and accurate inventory. The automation of data normalization and enrichment ensures consistency while adding valuable context to asset information.
Further, the Bi-directional CMDB syncing is automated to maintain up-to-date asset information across the IT infrastructure. Real-time insights into the impact of IT events on service performance are provided through automated ITSM record syncing. Also, the automated report generation and sharing simplify data analysis and distribution, enabling proactive decision-making.
Automated relationship mapping visualizes complex IT dependencies, aiding in proactive risk assessment and incident response. These automation capabilities not only improve efficiency and reduce manual effort but also enhance the accuracy and reliability of IT discovery data.
Virima’s advantages over other alternative to Jira asset discovery
Two often considered alternatives to discovery for Jira Service Management are Lansweeper and Device42. The following sections break down how they stand against Virima.
Virima vs Lansweeper
Lansweeper is an alternative to Jira discovery. Our Virima vs Lansweeper comparison highlights Virima’s superiority in IT discovery and service mapping. While Lansweeper offers basic agentless scanning, it struggles with hybrid IT. Virima excels in both on-premises and cloud, providing advanced discovery of intricate relationships. This enables full lifecycle visibility, crucial for managing dynamic environments.
Lansweeper’s manual service mapping lacks depth and automation. Virima delivers automatically updated, multi-layered service mapping that visualizes dependencies. ViVID integrates JSM ITSM records and NIST NVD vulnerabilities, enhancing operational intelligence. Finally, Lansweeper’s scalability can be an issue in large environments.
Virima vs Device42
Our Virima vs Device42 vs ServiceNow comparison highlights Virima’s advantages over Device42 in discovery, service mapping, cost, and implementation. As a cloud-native SaaS platform, Virima offers advanced discovery for hybrid IT and greatly surpasses Device42 with real-time bi-directional ITSM integrations and automated CMDB updates.
Device42 relies on on-premise resources, while Virima’s low complexity streamlines deployment. Virima’s ViVID visualization enhances incident, change, and vulnerability management, a feature lacking in Device42.
Furthermore, Virima’s budget-friendly pricing includes service mapping without hidden costs, offering significant cost advantages. Virima’s combination of low TCO and simplicity provides a decisive edge. The final consideration is Device42 is now owned by Freshworks, who’s Freshservice ITSM solution directly competes with JSM. Given their new ownership, JSM customers would be right to have concerns about Device42’s future integration plans (or lack thereof).
Experience the Virima difference: A powerful alternative to Jira asset discovery
Virima stands out as a next-gen IT asset discovery solution that addresses the limitations of Jira asset discovery with ease. Its ability to discover a broader range of assets, automate discovery processes, and provide deep visual insights into IT environments through service mapping and ViVID empowers organizations to achieve full visibility and control over their IT landscape. With secure, scalable, and cost-effective capabilities, Virima ensures that IT and security teams stay ahead in managing complex IT infrastructures.
Choosing Virima means embracing a smarter, more efficient approach to IT asset management that supports growth, operational excellence, vulnerability remediation, and proactive incident, change and, problem resolution.
Contact us to learn more!