The most impactful Jira Service Manager tool examples: Virima
| |

The most impactful Jira Service Manager tool examples: Virima

Table of Contents

Jira Service Management (JSM) is a powerful tool for IT service management, but like most ITSM tools it has some weaknesses. For Jira Service Management, the biggest weakness is the absence of a true CMDB. Though it offers Jira Assets as a CMDB, it lacks robust capabilities for automated discovery, real-time updates, and complex relationship mapping, particularly for organizations with large and complex IT infrastructures. 

Virima is one of the most impactful Jira Service Manager tool examples that addresses these limitations by offering advanced discovery capabilities and a powerful service mapping solution that seamlessly integrates with Jira Service Management. This will have an overall uplifting effect on MTTR, change risk assessments, and service availability within the JSM platform. 

Before diving into the specifics into how Virima turbocarges the Jira Service Management platform, let’s explore in detail on why you need to extend the JSM platform with Jira Service Manager tool examples like Virima for managing IT services with Jira Service Management.

Why extend Jira Service Management with additional tools?

1. Limitations of Jira Assets and Discovery

While Jira Assets provides a structured approach to asset and configuration management, users often encounter significant challenges when relying on it as the Jira CMDB:

  • Performance issues: As data structures grow in size and complexity, users often report Jira Assets slows down, making it inefficient for larger environments.
  • Structural limitations: The recommended data structures limit users’ ability to scale and flexibly model their IT ecosystems.
  • Limited CMDB schema: The lack of pre-defined CMDB schemas makes it challenging to implement a functional and effective CMDB quickly because they have to manually create and configure these schemas themselves.
  • Reliance on workarounds: Users often resort to workarounds, such as creating multiple helper status fields, to bypass execution limits, leading to clunky and inefficient configurations.
  • Inability to handle complex data relationships: Managing sophisticated data relationships or automation becomes difficult, which reduces its utility in dynamic IT environments.
  • Concerns over robustness: Many users question whether Jira Assets can adequately function as a CMDB for larger, more complex setups.

Additionally, challenges like complex configuration processes, unintuitive interfaces, insufficient documentation, integration difficulties, and limited support further underscore the need for solutions like Virima to address these gaps in Jira Service Manager effectively.

2. The need for advanced discovery and service mapping

Advanced IT discovery and service mapping capabilities are essential for modern IT operations to run efficiently, however, Jira Service Management doesn’t offer a powerful discovery and service mapping solution that can handle the visibility needs of a complex hybrid IT environment. Here are the nuances into why the need for advanced discovery and service mapping have to be met with Jira Service Manager tool examples like Virima. 

Why advanced discovery matters

  • Comprehensive asset visibility

A robust IT discovery is capable of detecting thousands of physical and virtual assets, hardware configurations, and installed software across various operating systems. This holistic visibility is crucial for effectively managing hybrid IT environments, which may include on-premises infrastructure, edge devices, and cloud resources.

  • Accurate and up-to-date configuration management

A robust discovery solution ensures that your configuration management database (CMDB) is always accurate and current. This is essential for planning changes, responding to incidents, and conducting audits. The solution’s ability to perform ongoing scans helps capture new assets and configuration changes continually.

  • Enhanced security and compliance

By identifying all network-connected devices and performing deep hardware and software configuration analysis, advanced discovery tools can pinpoint vulnerabilities and unauthorized devices. Integration with the National Vulnerability Database (NVD) can allow for the automatic checking of known vulnerabilities. Thus helping to prioritize remediation efforts and improve overall security posture.

  • Efficiency in hybrid and remote work environments

The ability to handle both agentless and agent-based discovery provides flexible options for managing diverse environments. This includes on-premises, cloud, and remote work assets. Tools like Virima’s Work from Anywhere (WFA) solution (part of Virima’s discovery agent feature) enable daily configuration tracking and software usage monitoring for remote PCs. Hence, addressing the unique challenges posed by hybrid and remote work scenarios.

Why advanced service mapping matters

Using Jira Service Manager tool examples like Virima can unlock the full potential of visualizing and managing service dependencies. 

  • Identify single points of failure: Visualize dependencies to preemptively address weak links in your system.
  • Improve change management: Analyze potential impacts of changes to reduce failures and downtime.
  • Enhance incident response: Simplify root cause analysis with real-time visibility into system health statuses.
  • Reduce operational risks: Gain clarity on system dependencies and maintain accurate change logs.
  • Strategic IT planning: Optimize resources and plan IT strategies by understanding asset ownership and interdependencies.

Why Virima is one of the best Jira Service Management tool examples

Virima emerges as a standout solution in the Jira Service Management (JSM) ecosystem by offering two things. One is the robust CMDB with automated asset discovery and the other is service mapping capabilities that add velocity to the IT service management and IT asset management in JSM.

1. Virima’s comprehensive CMDB with automated discovery solution

Virima’s powerful Configuration Management Database (CMDB) offers the following key capabilities:

Automated discovery: Comprehensive asset identification across hybrid IT environments

  • Wide and in-depth scanning: Virima Discovery performs deep scans of the IT environment to discover all connected devices, applications, and dependencies whether they are on-premises, in the cloud, or at the edge of the network.
  • Up-to-date asset visibility: Continuous and scheduled scans allow the CMDB to stay updated in near real-time as new assets come online and changes to existing assets occur, ensuring an accurate reflection of the current state of IT assets.
  • Broad asset coverage: The discovery functionality encompasses a broad range of assets, from traditional devices and services to virtual machines, containers, IoT devices, and various cloud services, thereby providing an overarching view of the IT environment.

Intelligent population: Automatic and continuous CMDB updates

Virima leverages intelligent automation to populate and maintain CMDB accuracy, ensuring that data is continuously updated without the need for extensive manual intervention. This includes:

  • Automated change detection: Automatically detects and tracks changes to configuration items (CIs), enabling insightful change impact analysis and ensuring accurate data.
  • Seamless bi-directional integration: Integration with the Jira Service Management platform provides consistent updates and synchronization.
  • Data normalization and reconciliation: The solution includes mechanisms for data normalization and reconciliation to maintain consistency, eliminate duplicates, and provide a single source of truth for configuration data.

Flexible discovery mechanisms: Supporting multiple discovery approaches

Virima CMDB supports various discovery methods to maximize its reach and compatibility with different IT environments. These mechanisms are:

  • Agent-based and agentless options: Offers both agent-based discovery and agentless discovery modes, allowing flexibility based on the organization’s operational needs – whether for detailed inspections or minimal system intrusion.
  • Multi-protocol support: Supports multiple communication protocols including SNMP, SSH, and WMI among others, ensuring compatibility with a wide range of devices and systems.
  • Customizable and extensible discovery tools: The discovery tools can be tailored to fit specific organizational needs, such as accommodating unique assets or proprietary systems, and are extensible to adapt to evolving IT technologies and processes.
  • Multi-source discovery data ingestion: Virima offers API integrations with multiple discovery tools and data sources. Examples include sources such as AWS, Azure, SCCM, Intune, hypervisers, and other management consoles.

Scalability: Enterprise-level functionality supporting extensive device discovery

Virima provides enterprise-level scalability, which is crucial for large organizations managing extensive device inventories. This includes:

  • High-volume asset management: Capable of discovering and managing a vast number of assets without performance degradation.
  • Scalable architecture: Designed to grow with your organization, ensuring that the CMDB can handle increasing amounts of data and a growing number of configuration items seamlessly.
  • Robust performance: Ensures that all discovered data is processed and updated efficiently, maintaining optimal performance even in large-scale environments.

Autonomic Social Discovery: Automating intelligence gathering

Virima’s unique Autonomic Social Discovery (ASD) automates the process of gathering human intelligence, providing deeper insights into various aspects of IT and cyber asset inventory. This addresses critical knowledge gaps that traditional discovery probes and agents cannot fill. ASD enables comprehensive and accurate asset management by offering insights into the asset lifecycle status, ownership information, business criticality, organizational policies, and SLAs. 

2. Virima Visual Impact Display (ViVID™): Service Mapping revolutionized

What makes Virima one of the brightest Jira Service Manager tool examples is its advanced service mapping capabilities that include:  

Dynamic visual representations of complex IT infrastructures

  • Infrastructure relationships: Provides a detailed mapping of hardware connections to identify and manage physical dependencies.
  • Application dependencies: Visualizes intricate software interactions, enabling better understanding and management of application layers.
  • Network topology mapping: Offers comprehensive network relationship mapping to enhance network monitoring and management.
  • System communications: Illustrates CMDB completeness as well as raises attention to unauthorized communications. 

Advanced overlay and analysis

The Virima Visual Impact Display (ViVID™) solution uniquely enhances Jira Service Management by:

  • Overlaying JSM records: Integrates incidents and planned changes directly onto service maps for enhanced situational awareness.
  • Accelerating impact analysis: Facilitates rapid assessment of potential change consequences through dynamic visualization.
  • Root cause identification: Quickly traces the origins of service disruptions for efficient problem resolution.
The ViVID feature 

Vulnerability management enhancement

ViVID™ enhances vulnerability management by:

  • Providing vulnerability awareness: ViVID overlays vulnerability data directly onto service maps. This visual representation allows for a clear understanding of how vulnerabilities impact business services.
  • Prioritizing remediation efforts: By considering both vulnerability severity and the criticality of impacted assets, ViVID enables prioritization of remediation efforts. This ensures that the most critical vulnerabilities impacting business-critical services are addressed first.

Virima discovery and service mapping: Jira Service Manager tool examples you shouldn’t be without

Successfully managing IT services within Jira Service Management necessitates addressing the limitations of Jira Assets. This blog post highlighted the shortcomings of Jira Assets as a CMDB for complex IT environments while also emphasizing the critical need for advanced discovery and service mapping capabilities.

Virima emerges as a leader of many Jira Service Manager tool examples, seamlessly integrating with JSM to deliver exceptional value. By providing real-time visibility into service dependencies and enabling rapid root cause analysis, Virima accelerates incident resolution and reduces Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF).

Furthermore, Virima streamlines change risk assessments and prioritizes vulnerability remediation efforts through its innovative service mapping and vulnerability data overlay features.

Virima offers powerful CMDB, discovery, and service mapping capabilities with robust scalability and enterprise-grade features at a competitive price point, providing organizations with unparalleled visibility into their IT infrastructure and significantly improving the efficiency and effectiveness of their IT service management operations.

Contact us to learn more! 

Similar Posts