Effective business service management (BSM) requires visibility into business service performance and availability, as well as understanding the dependencies on the underlying infrastructure components. Application dependency mapping provides the contextual application/infrastructure views that enable IT staffs to target and prioritize their efforts at the infrastructure level, to keep critical business services running reliably.

Several years ago, with the adoption of ITIL and CMDBs, automated discovery and dependency mapping became the new capabilities that management vendors, such as BMC, added to their offerings. BMC embedded these capabilities in its Atrium core technologies as the Atrium Discovery and Dependency Mapping (ADDM) function. The ADDM technology automatically discovers infrastructure components and captures associated configuration information, which it stores in the Atrium CMDB. It also detects the relationships and dependencies between infrastructure components, which provide the valuable “raw data” for building application maps.

Application Mapping is not an easy task, and using technology like ADDM makes it much easier by finding the components and dependencies. However, like most difficult IT tasks, it also requires people and process elements to complete effectively. The people and process elements for application mapping have been predominantly manual efforts.

This all changed when BMC announced new capabilities to ADDM. The Collaborative Application Mapping capabilities help reduce the manual effort. They are designed to facilitate the process for application owners and application mappers as they work together to build, fine-tune and complete application maps.   

BMC’s Collaborative Application Mapping capabilities address the people and process elements to help IT work collaboratively to complete their application mapping efforts more efficiently. Other solutions stop at the technology level, only providing the “raw” discovered dependency data, while leaving the remaining steps for IT staffs to do manually. Without a process for completing these steps, it can be a frustrating and slow task to coordinate this effort. BMC has proactively acted to assist customers in leveraging technology-provided dependency data. This speeds completion of the task of creating the accurate application maps that IT uses to deliver better service to the enterprise.          

Human knowledge about the application is required to “fine-tune” and filter the “first-draft” dependency mapping provided by ADDM. Application maps must be accurate and up-to-date to be useful and effective. Once ADDM finds all servers and components connected to the application, which is what it’s supposed to do, the job is not yet finished. It takes human knowledge to understand and provide additional perspective for the application map, such as noting that one of the connected application servers is used by the development team and another connected server is the production application server. These distinctions are important because the application mapping will help IT application problem response teams to know that their response efforts should be focused on the production server, and not the development server.

BMC’s Collaborative Application Mapping solution enables users to capture the human knowledge that builds and fine-tunes each application mapping through the definition of policies or rules. Because the discovered data is constantly updated as the infrastructure environment changes, the policy definitions ensure that the application maps are also kept up-to-date automatically and the human knowledge is not lost when the data is updated.     

Process is important to coordinate the fine-tuning efforts of the persons responsible for the application and for managing the application mappings. BMC’s solution streamlines the process by making it easier to coordinate, communicate and review application mapping prototypes. It will enable IT teams to complete application mapping more quickly so the maps can be used by IT staffs to help prioritize response efforts. In addition, the Collaborative Application Mapping solution also enables easier communication with application owners by providing convenient PDF copies of the application maps for review.

The Final Word

BMC’s Collaborative Application Mapping takes an important next step, by providing additional capabilities to help IT and application owners build, fine-tune and complete accurate application mappings. These application mappings play a critical role in providing valuable business service impact and infrastructure dependency insight to IT teams. This allows them to correctly prioritize their application and infrastructure response efforts. But, in order to be effective, the application mappings must be complete, accurate and up-to-date, which is the intent of Collaborative Application Mapping.

Application Mapping is not a trivial task. Although major management vendors provide automated discovery and dependency mapping technology to gather a wealth of configuration and dependency data, the job is not complete. BMC recognized the need to facilitate collaboration between the various people responsible for applications and application mapping. They filled that need with Collaborative Application Mapping. Hopefully, this will clear the way for IT organizations to map more of their applications, so they can prioritize and better manage their companies’ business services.       

Authors: Audrey Rasmussen and Rich Ptak