CTM Technology Group’s application mapping methodology will identify your infrastructure assets and align them with the appropriate business applications. Most organizations have a CMDB, an application portfolio and disparate inventories to leverage, but bringing all this data together to provide a cohesive inventory and interdependency mapping takes a well-thought-out process and attention to detail. Flexera’s, 2021 State of the Cloud Report, noted dependency mapping as a top challenge to cloud migration.
Our team leverages common tools and works with your infrastructure teams to detect all infrastructure components and then maps them to the correct business applications. The discovery process can be a standalone activity for a CMDB effort or as a precursor to a consolidation, transformation, or migration activity.
To create a comprehensive inventory and mapping, we start by leveraging the subnet ranges for the IT assets to be mapped and complete a ping sweep to obtain a full inventory of IP addresses in scope. By completing this fundamental activity, we have an exhaustive list to build upon and minimize any gotchas that could negatively impact your program.
Next, we utilize cloud and/or other discovery tools, Active Directory, vCenter, monitoring, server, storage, and networking inventories as well as existing CMDB records. We reconcile the data collected against the IP address inventory. If you have conflicting data, we determine what data is the most accurate. If, for example, CMDB records have different information than Azure Migrate, is the information in CMDB manually updated through a process or systematically updated? Data that is automatically collected by a system should be more accurate than manually entered data.
Enabling database listener logs and deploying Azure, AWS, or Google Cloud discovery tools provides details on communication between systems, databases, and other components in the environment. Layering this on top of the system inventory will enable us to begin to group systems together.
What applications and business services do these infrastructure components belong to? Discovery tools and system inventories may give some insight into the application, however official application names, business services and application owners must be verified. Starting from an application portfolio if available, we verify and expand on this information through URL reports, SME interviews and DNS query reporting.
We confirm the connection points captured through the discovery tools and system reports and add any missing components. We capture additional details including: the hours the application is in use, where are the primary users located, how critical is the system, how long of an outage can be sustained without negatively impacting the business, are there any compliance, data privacy or regulatory requirements?
CTM Technology Group combines all this discovery information to provide a complete application to infrastructure component mapping. The relationship mapping and system clustering feeds into move group planning for cloud and data center migration and consolidation efforts.
For details on the timeline to complete dependency mapping, please see our IT Discovery and Mapping Services.
Contact us for more information on our Application Mapping Methodology and our IT Discovery and Mapping Services.
CTM Technology Group delivers asset discovery, analysis, and recommendations to guide upcoming data center and cloud migration, consolidation, and transformation programs.
In 21 Move Groups, CTM migrated or cloned 226 application instances and 800 servers. We separated and split off 22 of 41 corporate domains, 4 of 8 global data centers and 175 of 300 global sites in support of the divestiture.
Consultants with expertise in migrating systems and applications to new data centers and the cloud will accelerate your program and reduce business impact and costs.