Gone are the days when it was hard to keep track of your assets and databases being located at different locations and you faced difficulty in accessing the same from a single point. In this era of technological advancement, tools like Service Mapping have come to your rescue. With the help of this tool, we improved the CMDB usability and visibility of configuration items to ensure quality incident, change, and management processes for a client. It also helped to point out where outages occurred and what was the impact of those outages to make better-informed business decisions.
A lot of different company’s environments use the same kind of business service map. There are quite some technicalities involved in this process to get the end result. These include challenges like as following:
For this process of Service Mapping to be brought to the “virtual” reality, there were a couple of things needed like access to ServiceNow instance, MID Servers provisioned, IP Ranges defined or verified, server credential deployed, and so on. The implementation of Service Mapping was a long process which began with the entry points being configured and the top-level application being mapped. Then we had a couple of steps where the target host is discovered or already existed in the CMDB in which the service mapping process continued to determine whether there was a pattern match on the target application which was then added to CMDB with a connection relationship from the source host and application upon finding the match. In case of no match, the process stops itself. In this case, the service map was supported by an HAProxy, clustered Tomcat instances, and 2 Mongo databases.
For the challenges, we rediscovered the load balancers after getting proper access and permissions. De-duplications of duplicate CI and removed all duplicate entries and validated the service map. The Service Maps were validated by application owners and stakeholders. All the critical service maps were validated with SME’s to ensure the maps being configured properly and each dependency being captured accurately.
Service Mapping gave the customers visibility of all business services for each server in their supporting data. It gave the ability to determine the root cause of outages and related the top-down mapping of services in dynamically changing cloud environments.
