Today’s IT environments have never been more complicated. With the ever-growing use of public cloud and container technologies and the frequent delivery of modern, microservices-based applications, IT faces a daunting task in understanding all of the assets it has and how they support the business.

BMC Helix Discovery recently added the ability to discover Infinidat’s InfiniBox^® enterprise storage system. InfiniBox delivers faster-than-all-flash performance, multi-petabyte capacity, and 100 percent availability for a broad range of mixed application workloads, which empowers IT organizations to exceed their service level objectives while radically lowering the cost and complexity of their storage operations.

BMC Helix Discovery provides instant visibility into hardware, software, services, and dependencies across on-premises and multi-cloud environments. Its discovery capabilities are designed to handle the complex management of mainframe, traditional, and hyper-converged infrastructures; software-defined storage and networks; containers; and cloud services.

Customers use BMC Helix Discovery’s software-as-a-service (SaaS)-based, agentless, start anywhere application modeling capabilities to discover assets and create application models from any point in the IT infrastructure within minutes. Combined with a content library that has thousands of asset types, including storage, containers, and cloud infrastructure, BMC Helix Discovery allows teams to detect blind spots, meet compliance and regulatory standards, and manage costs across complex infrastructures.

“I’m thrilled to welcome BMC to our AIOps ecosystem. Through BMC Helix Discovery, our joint customers can easily leverage our best-in-class storage solutions for their applications,” said Erik Kaulberg, Vice President at Infinidat. “In addition, our InfiniBox customers can take advantage of the complete, dynamically updated service view that BMC Helix Discovery provides, which improves service performance, availability, and customer experiences while also lowering costs.”

BMC Helix Discovery provides the following benefits:

• Up-to-date service awareness: Rapid discovery, relationship modeling, and visualization of the hardware and software landscape provide accurate asset, relationship, and service model views from any point in the complex IT infrastructure.
• Reduced costs: Access to updated infrastructure configuration information enables IT teams to continually evaluate the use of assets so businesses can right-size their infrastructure.
• Lower risk: Complete visibility into the IT infrastructure helps teams identify misconfigured and vulnerable software, which results in quicker remediation, reduced downtime, and improved security and compliance.
• Increased productivity: On-demand discovery helps IT teams become more efficient and productive for service and data center management and software auditing.

Maintain visibility across the IT landscape

In today’s continually changing cloud and container-based infrastructures, IT teams need a dynamically updated view of their environment across the IT operations and service management (ITOM-ITSM) environment.

BMC Helix Discovery solves this problem by generating detailed datasets and topologies using Dynamic Service Models, which provide an up-to-date, integrated data store. Dynamic Service Models act as the single source of truth across BMC’s IT landscape. This enables artificial intelligence for IT operations (AIOps) and AI service management (AISM) to leverage the latest infrastructure configurations and ensure accuracy and efficiency across the organization.

Dynamic Service Models complete the picture by ingesting data from third-party solutions such as application performance and network monitoring tools through open integrations, which can be used independently or by other BMC Helix Platform services such as BMC Helix Operations Management with AIOps, BMC Helix Continuous Optimization, and BMC Helix ITSM.

Availability

BMC Helix Discovery’s integration with Infinidat’s InfiniBox storage system is available today. Existing BMC Helix Discovery customers can install the latest technology knowledge update (TKU) and begin to discover their InfiniBox systems in any complex infrastructure.

Visit the BMC Helix Discovery web page to learn more.

IT asset management (ITAM) is the process of ensuring the efficient use and management of an organization’s assets throughout their lifecycle. This includes procurement, deployment, maintenance, upgrades, tracking, and disposition.

Today, ITAM extends beyond tagging, distributing, and tracking devices. The adoption of cloud-based infrastructures, subscription-based software, and end-user customization require enterprises to understand how devices are being used in continually changing environments. In addition, effective ITAM acts as the foundation for optimizing the use of IT resource optimization, lifecycle management, and planning for future investments.

Where do you begin to look?

Too often, assets are tracked across multiple locations, by different departments. This silo-based approach makes it difficult for teams to share resources, which negatively impacts spending and makes it impossible for organizations to gain a complete understanding of the infrastructure and how it supports the business.

“A lack of visibility is like driving while wearing a blindfold. Not only does it leave IT asset management professionals unsure of what they have to protect from risk, leaving endpoints potentially vulnerable, but it also means data management and disposition is much harder to achieve compliantly.”*

BMC Helix Discovery’s software-as-a-service (SaaS)-based, agentless discovery and dependency modeling solution helps IT teams discover assets and their relationships across the entire IT infrastructure. Within minutes, asset managers can obtain an up-to-date list of devices and their dependencies across cloud-native or on-premises environments.

With an accurate inventory, IT teams can manage each asset’s lifecycle, which helps organizations optimize resources, manage costs, maintain compliance, and mitigate risk. This single source of truth makes it easy to understand how assets support the business and deliver exceptional customer experiences.

How does it work?

BMC Helix Discovery uses a lightweight outpost that runs within the customer’s data center or public cloud. Using IP ranges and credentials, it performs an initial scan to securely identify all assets across the infrastructure. In addition to identifying assets, BMC Helix Discovery also discovers attributes that identify the business service that each asset supports.

Through scheduled and on-demand discovery runs, event-driven discovery, and the implementation of Dynamic Service Models, BMC Helix Discovery ensures that the inventory of assets will always be up to date. As configuration items change or dependencies on business services shift, asset managers are equipped to make decisions based on an accurate, dynamically updated service view.

BMC Helix Discovery automatically captures end-of-life (EOL), end-of-support (EOS), and end-of-extended-support (EOES) information for operating systems, software products, network devices, storage devices, and hosts. This provides asset managers with critical information which enables them to plan for future investments, ensuring predictable, cost-effective asset management.

BMC Helix Discovery’s out-of-the-box reporting capabilities enable asset managers to quickly review their assets across the enterprise. In addition to viewing the data directly in BMC Helix Discovery, IT team members can query the data via BMC Helix Discovery’s REST API for external reporting or synchronizing to a CMDB, which makes asset data available to other asset management processes.

Positively impact your business

By identifying and managing a complete list of assets across the enterprise, IT organizations can:

• Minimize risk
• Maintain compliance
• Reduce costs
• Achieve higher levels of performance and availability
• Optimize use of existing assets
• Decommission unused infrastructure
• Increase productivity
• Optimize procurement processes
• Enhance vendor relationships

BMC Helix Discovery’s SaaS-based, agentless asset discovery and dependency modeling solution helps IT organizations easily track and manage assets across the entire infrastructure. This puts organizations in an ideal position to proactively procure, deploy, maintain, upgrade, track, and dispose of assets in a manner that benefits employees, customers, and the business.

Visit the BMC Helix Discovery webpage to learn more.

*“IT asset management risks in 2021 and beyond…,” TES, Accessed August 30, 2021, https://www.tes-amm.com/news/it-asset-risk-management-in-and-beyond.

Today’s enterprise companies need full visibility across their IT service management (ITSM) and IT operations (ITOps) environments to ensure continuous operations of mission-critical business services. By implementing advanced tools that can quickly discover and manage assets across clouds, data centers, hardware, software, and services, they’re better able to prevent disruptions and reduce security and compliance risks, service bottlenecks, asset overspending, and more. Application modeling is a key component of every asset discovery and dependency strategy.

Why do you need application modeling?

Modern IT infrastructures are a complex mix of platforms, hardware, and software, spanning legacy on-premises infrastructure and software and public and private cloud configurations that host containers and micro-services. While it’s common for the data center team to have an inventory of hardware and software assets, that inventory is only a limited-use resource because it doesn’t reveal how the assets connect to one another and support an application.

Application modeling provides instant visibility across the complete mix of environments, empowering IT to assess the impact of potential changes and check service continuity configurations and other functions to ensure optimal business support. That said, the current dynamic—and mixed—environment has made it impossible to continue the manual process of modeling assets and dependencies through spreadsheets and other static forms of record keeping. Businesses that still rely on those outdated processes are falling behind and working inefficiently with an inaccurate model, which also hinders the ability to provide business context for security vulnerabilities.

Auto-discovery and application modeling

Today’s advanced analytics tools ingest data from application modeling through automation, which enables emerging technologies such as AIOps and machine learning. This is integral to helping businesses evolve toward becoming an Autonomous Digital Enterprise—a future-state business framework that integrates automation across every facet of the business.

In dynamic environments, auto-discovery tools collect data on network infrastructure, servers, software, and cloud services and their relationships to build a robust, tiered application model that can be easily updated to reflect changes and ensure timeliness and accuracy. Tools that automatically discover and model dependencies between applications and the hardware and services they utilize are also better prepared to help drive the overall digital transformation of the business.

Auto-discovery is not enough

However, auto-discovery tools, used by themselves, do not solve all the problems application owners face when trying to generate comprehensive, accurate models. The modeling process’s starting point can make a big difference in its accuracy. Most auto-discovery tools use a “top-down” approach. That means the person creating the model has to specify the “top” entry-point for the application—often a URL that leads to a load-balanced service or a web server—and the choice of what to scan is also driven top down. At each stage, the tool decides what to scan based upon the dependencies it detected at the previous stage.

Application owners must also consider where applications store data, which is akin to starting at the bottom. For off-the-shelf applications like Microsoft Exchange, the natural place to start is with that software, rather than the entry points used by clients or the databases storing the data. Exchange servers are in the “middle,” with entry point servers and load balancers above and databases below. If modeling is limited to one area versus evaluating the entire infrastructure, databases used by additional application servers can be missed.

Start-anywhere application modeling

To get a complete picture of the entire environment, start-anywhere application modeling is an ideal solution. It’s exactly what it sounds like—a way of modeling that discovers assets from the top down, bottom up, or middle out from any starting point. It’s the only effective way to accurately model diverse and complex applications across physical and virtual infrastructures and deliver a better user experience to application owners by allowing them to start with what they know, rather than forcing them to work out what constitutes the “top.”

BMC Helix Discovery uses start-anywhere application modeling and always looks everywhere, viewing systems and their dependencies from all directions. Start-anywhere modeling can start from multiple points simultaneously, which is the most efficient way to close the gap on incomplete modeling and ensure that all available information will be modeled—especially if portions of relationships are missing. A rigid top-down approach is limited by only detecting issues that are visible from the top, and as soon as the tool meets something it can’t discover, it stops. The start-anywhere approach pinpoints and fills in the gaps much faster and is always up-to-date, which mitigates many of the challenges of standard tools. Other benefits include:

• Accurate asset and relationship views from any point at any time
• Reduced downtime and outages
• Higher employee productivity
• Better cost optimization

How does it work?

Users employ a modeling editor to create the model, which they can annotate and trim for easier readability. For example, a user might turn off the feature that shows software components associated with software instances. BMC Helix Discovery does this for even the most complex hybrid environments, and if the modeled environment changes, the model changes automatically.

Start-anywhere application modeling is just one of the ways that BMC Helix Discovery creates a holistic view of your application dependencies. The software as a service (SaaS)-based, cloud-native discovery and dependency modeling system provides instant visibility into hardware, software, and service dependencies across multi-cloud environments, including mainframe, traditional, and hybrid infrastructures, container management, and cloud services. With rapid discovery, relationship modeling, correlation, and visualization of the entire hardware and software landscape, the solution improves ITSM operations to better support business goals, such as the evolution to an Autonomous Digital Enterprise.