nLayers for IT Executives, Financial Executives and Data Centre Architects

Overview

It All Starts with Discovery

From ITIL and Business Initiatives to Populating CMDBs

An age-old problem for IT Executives is knowing what they have and how it works together. The process of collecting this information has carried with it a high cost burden, as the average time to collect and document each server takes eight hours. Additionally, the information collected cannot keep up with the dynamic and ever-changing application and server environment. 

Most IT organizations have existing investments in enterprise management applications (EMA) that contain different levels of system and network information in their repositories. These tools may also utilize both resident and passive agents to collect this data. However, understanding “what you have” and “how these elements are working together” is not something these tools can deliver by themselves. They lack real-time visibility of the application infrastructure, the dependencies, and demands.

With ITIL and other best practice framework initiatives, driving projects to help IT organizations gain control of their infrastructure, the need for automated discovery and mapping solutions is rising, as is the need to implement a CMDB strategy to hold configuration item (CI). Helping organizations build a logical model of their IT infrastructure so they can identify, catalog, track, optimize, and manage their CIs has intrinsic value to IT in reducing risk and lowering costs.

Agent-based or Active Probing Discovery
Over the years, EMA vendors have taken either an agent-based or an agentless approach to providing data collection and system monitoring solutions. There are distinct differences between the two approaches from the installation of agents on target systems to the active probing of these systems over the network on a periodic schedule.

Understanding the different technologies available is critical, as most IT organizations avoid adding additional overhead or agents to their existing environment. Not only are these solutions time consuming and costly to deploy, but they are also limited, as they cannot see the usage and demands of resources.

End-to-End Passive, Agentless Discovery
New technology from nLayers has added a third dimension to enterprise management agent technology and is classified as a “passive” agentless solution.  

nLayers’ passive approach listens to, inspects packets on the network without scanning, spidering, or probing network devices, and takes advantage of “monitoring port” technology to passively observe bi-directional communication between servers and clients. This unique discovery methodology sees and identifies everything that crosses the wire automatically building a complete picture of the networked infrastructure in 24 hours.

As it is also agentless, there is no need to install additional agents on the servers nor is there a need to configure the product with user names and passwords to perform “active” or “credential-based” probing of applications.

nLayers’ solution gathers data at a rate of 500 application components per minute including hosts and services. Each of these entities are cataloged, stored, and tracked in a federated configuration management database (CMDB). The CMDB is continuously updated with real-time information discovered including the usage and demand changes that occur over time.

Once the data collection process starts, nLayers begins to build a 3D map of the application infrastructure that shows the dependencies, usage, and demands of these resources. This is a crucial element to optimizing the application infrastructure and an enabler to many best practice initiatives. 

Example Map of Interdependencies of a Siebel Application

In addition to discovering the core infrastructure services such as databases, application servers, and web servers that build up your data center, nLayers InSight automatically detects mainstream business applications, further reducing the amount of manual work involved in modeling your data center.

Depending on the project, having a federated CMDB strategy allows organizations to combine existing network and system data with the application infrastructure data collected by nLayers passive, agentless discovery process.

IT Executives

The age-old problem for IT executives has been gaining visibility into their application infrastructures for resource optimization, compliancy, and business continuity controls.

For IT organizations to gain visibility and take action to optimize their application infrastructure, they need high quality, real time comprehensive information about the applications running in their network. This growing complexity includes the convergence of data and voice leaving existing tools lacking when it comes to providing a view into how your systems are being utilized.

IT organizations need to understand what they have, including what the logical and physical locations are, what the interdependencies are, and most importantly, what the usage and demands are on a continuous basis.

With ITIL and other best practice framework initiatives, driving projects to help IT organizations gain control of their infrastructure, the need for automated discovery and mapping solutions is rising, as is the need to implement a CMDB strategy to hold configuration item (CI). Helping organizations build a logical model of their IT infrastructure so they can identify, catalog, track, optimize, and manage their CIs has intrinsic value to IT in reducing risk and lowering costs.

Combining nLayers’ auto-discovery and mapping technology with existing data stores from other EMA tools is the fastest way for IT organizations to begin to understand what they have and what the utilization of these resources are. This visibility is vital, as the next step to best practice initiatives is to optimize the environment before implementing change and configuration management controls.

Improving the Processes Around IT
IT executives can begin to take control of their infrastructure by starting with the discovery process and gaining visibility today. Having this information will enable IT organizations to begin to:

1. Improve resource utilization
   • Reduce waste and over-provisioning
2. Improve project deliverables and time
   • Up-to-date information on CIs, including where they are deployed, and what the dependencies  and usage are for these elements
3. Reduce risk with improved availability, reliability and security of IT services
   • Know what is running and how it is configured
   • Eliminate rogue applications
4. Provide services that meet business, customer and user demands
   • Know what the usage and demands are every minute of every day
5. Lower costs related to the day-to-day business of running IT
   • From optimizing provisioned systems and services to improving up-time

    

Financial Executives

Automating the discovery process gives back control to IT organizations and enables them to know what they have, how it is being used and then how to optimize their resources

An age-old problem for IT Executives is knowing what they have and how it works together. The process of collecting this information has carried with it a high cost burden, as the average time to collect and document each server takes eight hours. Additionally, the information collected cannot keep up with the dynamic and ever-changing application and server environment.

Most IT organizations have existing investments in enterprise management applications (EMA) that contain different levels of system and network information in their repositories. These tools may also utilize both resident and passive agents to collect this data. However, understanding “what you have” and “how these elements are working together” is not something these tools can deliver by themselves. They lack real-time visibility of the application infrastructure, the dependencies, and demands.

Example of costs associated to manual discovery process per 500 servers

With ITIL and other best practice framework initiatives, driving projects to help IT organizations gain control of their infrastructure, the need for automated discovery and mapping solutions is rising, as is the need to implement a CMDB strategy to hold configuration item (CI). Helping organizations build a logical model of their IT infrastructure so they can identify, catalog, track, optimize, and manage their CIs has intrinsic value to IT in reducing risk and lowering costs.

Combining nLayers’ auto-discovery and mapping technology with existing data stores from other EMA tools is the fastest way for IT organizations to begin to understand what they have and what the utilization of these resources are. This visibility is vital, as the next step to best practice initiatives is to optimize the environment before implementing change and configuration management controls.

Data Center Architects

Data Center Architects can quickly gain visibility, optimize, and maintain their application infrastructure by using passive, auto-discovery technologies that do not add software or overhead to their existing environments

For IT organizations to gain visibility and take action to optimize their application infrastructure, they need to understand what they have, including what the logical and physical locations are, what the interdependencies are, and most importantly, what the usage and demands are on a continuous basis.

End-to-End Passive, Agentless Discovery
New technology from nLayers adds a third dimension to enterprise management agent technology and is classified as a “passive” agentless solution.

nLayers’ passive approach inspects packets on the network without scanning, spidering, or probing the network or servers, and takes advantage of “monitoring port” technology to passively observe bi-directional communication between servers and clients. This unique discovery methodology sees and identifies everything that crosses the wire automatically building a complete “big picture” of the networked applications and services around the clock.

As it is also agentless, there is no need to install additional agents on the servers nor is there a need to configure the product with user names and passwords to perform “active” or “credential-based” probing of applications.

nLayers’ solution gathers data at a rate of 500 application components per minute including hosts and services. Each of these entities are cataloged, stored, and tracked in a federated configuration management database (CMDB). The CMDB is continuously updated with real-time information discovered including the usage and demand changes that occur over time.

Once the data collection process starts, nLayers begins to build a 3D map of the application infrastructure that shows the dependencies, usage, and demands of these resources. This is a crucial element to optimizing the application infrastructure and an enabler to many best practice initiatives.

Example Map of Interdependencies of a Siebel Application

In addition to discovering the core infrastructure services such as databases, application servers, and web servers that build up your data center, nLayers InSight automatically detects mainstream business applications, further reducing the amount of manual work involved in modeling your data center.

Depending on the project, having a federated CMDB strategy allows organizations to combine existing network and system data with the application infrastructure data collected by nLayers passive, agentless discovery process.