How to make auto-discovery work; a

dynamic data-driven alternative to the

periodic trawl of Discovery and
Dependency Mapping (DDM)
Look what people are saying, source Linkedin IT Service Management Forum: Weve recently delivered a Configuration
Management System (CMS) platform based on the Interlink Software Service Configuration Manager (SCM) to baseline
configuration items (CIs) populated by automated feeds from a number of data sources. We maintain service dependency
models based on an imported catalogue and have successfully automated reporting and comparisons when configuration
changes are detected. We now manage our corporate IT estate CI records via the CMS, these used to be hosted in a
standalone Access database. I wanted to validate the approach and mention whats possible

Copyright Interlink Software Services Ltd 2013

Page 1 of 10

Introduction
Population of our corporate-wide Configuration Management System (CMS) has been
proven in numerous large scale environments and is validated by ITIL v3
Auto-discovery tools, Service Desk products and their bundled Configuration Management
Databases (CMDBs) present IT organisations with two major
challenges: getting accurate data into the CMDB and getting
meaningful information out. The Interlink Software Service
Configuration Manager (SCM) has enabled many
We really liked Interlinks dataorganisations to successfully address both challenges,
driven approach over competitors.
facilitating the creation of repositories of clean, verified data
Their ability to populate service
relating to configuration items (CIs) and their intermodels on a data subscription
relationships. Building on this solid foundation the Interlink
basis. Mark Blackman, British
Software solution makes it simple to analyse and present that
Airways
data in ways that make sense to both IT operations staff and
business process owners.

How to make auto-discovery work; a dynamic data-driven alternative to the periodic

trawl of Discovery and Dependency Mapping (DDM)
Many of our customers have deployed leading DDM tools in an attempt to create and update a
single-source-of-truth a.k.a. the CMS or CMDB in their large scale environments with varying
degrees of success. Unfortunately, most have found this to be an expensive and difficult task.
Key issues that they have encountered include the problem whereby a "trawl" of the network,
devices, applications, etc. took a considerable amount of time and that the discovery process often
needed to be run in a staggered way by targeting a subnet, domain or location one at a time, once or
twice a day. Other customers reported scans taking several days to complete by which time some of
the data collected was out of date and therefore many changes to the environment (especially those
in virtual and cloud environments) were completely missed by the auto-discovery. SCM does things
differently to DDM, using a dynamic data-driven approach. SCM connects to data sources for each
domain (application, network, etc.) and creates a baseline of the configuration. It then monitors the
environment for updates in near real-time (or as regularly as is practical). SCM can even integrate
with change management tools to verify that any changes detected comply with your change policy,
saving valuable time and money and eliminating the risk associated with poorly managed change.
Most organisations are adverse to auto-discovery scans taking place during business hours,
especially for critical services and consequently scans are usually scheduled overnight when there is
little or no load on the applications scanned. This often leads to the single-source-of-truth being up
to 24 hours out of date. The SCM approach is not nearly as intrusive or risky as it leverages existing
data sources and doesn't require intensive network and application scans. In addition SCM takes
advantage of any knowledge or configuration data held within applications and systems management
tools to enable dependency mapping to occur rather than trying to automatically "learn" from
watching data packets on the network or sockets opening and closing. SCM sees how the
application is actually configured and what critical components are really being monitored without the
challenges of firewalls, encryption, logging onto the application as an automated user, etc.

Our 3 Simple Steps to discovering and mapping IT configuration and dependencies:

1.
2.
3.

Integration and Collection from existing data sources (Real-time, On-demand or Scheduled).
Data Analysis (Cleanse, Normalise, Merge, Enrich, Baseline and Detect Changes)
Visualisation and Exception Reporting

Copyright Interlink Software Services Ltd 2013

Page 2 of 10

Introducing Service Configuration Manager (SCM)

Service Configuration Manager (SCM) delivers a service aware, real-time, change managed
Configuration Management System (CMS). Supporting integration with 3rd party products via a
combination of real-time integrations and data source federation, SCM is designed to protect our
customers existing investment in IT products (e.g. leveraging 3rd
party change, inventory, asset, and systems management tools).
SCM is shipped with inbuilt service modelling, dependency
mapping and risk-of-change analysis tools to help avoid outages to
With regards to audit and
business services and reduce the cost of the introduction of new
compliance, the Interlink
business services and more of the same changes. SCM is the
Software solution maps to
CMS platform of choice for some of the largest organisations in the
your organisations dynamic
world as an enabler for:
network operations or data
centre discovering
Compliance: automated audit trail of IT infrastructure changes
configuration changes
automatically and
Compliance: verify disaster recovery systems are in-line with
cross references them with
production
your change policy highlighting
compliance and security
Visualise infrastructure-to-business dependencies
issues.

Leverage existing data sources via import and federation

(linking) capabilities

Model the impact of IT changes on their business services

BEFORE the changes are made

Identify and re-schedule conflicting changes

Deliver a forward schedule of change by business service or

technology

Identify unauthorised changes to their IT infrastructure

Automate the management of the lifecycle of IT assets

Centralise operational documentation with context sensitive

launching

Perform configuration comparisons across CIs, Data Centres and Business Services

Track infrastructure and business services via an automated Service Catalogue

Detect drift and minimise outages related to the provision of virtual or cloud based services

Pre-packaged integrations for 3rd party products such as ServiceNow, BMC Atrium, VMware
vCenter, etc are available

Copyright Interlink Software Services Ltd 2013

Colin Griffiths, Co-founder,

Interlink Software

Page 3 of 10

Pragmatic, Scalable Deployment Model; Top Down, Service-at-a-Time

Interlink Software developed the Service Configuration Manager (SCM) product from the ground up
to address the need to maintain up-to-date service dependency mapping linking logical and physical
IT elements commonly known as Configuration Items (CIs) to the business functions and overall
business services that they support. SCM addresses this requirement by offering a flexible
top-down, service-at-a-time deployment methodology in contrast to the boil-the-ocean
approach to configuration management that often requires the entire IT estate to be trawled by
discovery tools and defined in a monolithic Configuration Management Database (CMDB) before
moving on to the next steps in the service management value chain such as Service Level
Agreement (SLA) tracking and Business Service Management (BSM).
SCM integrates configuration and dependency data from the entire IT stack; hardware, operating
systems, virtualization layer, cloud services, messaging layer, middleware, databases, applications,
storage, web servers, domain specific auto-discovery tools, systems management tools and agents.
Once SCM has been deployed and a configuration baseline has been established it automatically
catalogues IT and business services keeping these dependency maps to date by automatically
detecting and validating ongoing changes to the environment.
SCM's Service Configuration Data Hub component offers data cleansing, merging and reconciliation
functionality. Reconciliation presidency rules can be applied to determine which source of data (from
the entire IT stack) is the most trusted in each case.

Figure 1. Screenshot of dependency mapping and simulation tool.

Copyright Interlink Software Services Ltd 2013

Page 4 of 10

Figure 2. SCM showing virtual images to physical hardware mapping.

Figure 3. SCM showing numerous different versions of a service configuration accumulated over time.

Copyright Interlink Software Services Ltd 2013

Page 5 of 10

How SCM Builds and Maintains Dependency Maps

Relationships between CIs can be fixed or based upon subscription rules. Subscription rules allow
CIs to be automatically grouped or linked together. A simple example could be that a particular
business service is impacted by all Red Hat Enterprise Linux Servers running a specific process
across any of the production data centres. By using a subscription rule that selects all eligible Red
Hat Enterprise Linux Servers running the specific process across any of the production data centres
we avoid hard coding specific CIs in SCM and just instantiate the list automatically keeping it up-todate in near real-time. Subscription rules can be supplemented with impact calculation rules that
work on the same principal and automatically apply dependency impact weightings.

Figure 4. Pre-packaged integrations for a variety of data sources and 3rd party products such as ServiceNow
and VMware vCenter are available.

Copyright Interlink Software Services Ltd 2013

Page 6 of 10

How SCM Automatically Detects and Validates Changes

The history or delta between versions of service configurations maintained by the SCM product is
created automatically. Every change to the underlying configuration data detected by SCM causes
an increment to the version of the service configuration. Detected changes can be compared
against pre-defined policies or look-ups against a 3rd party change management system can
be performed automatically reconciling detected changes with corresponding change records. This
approach ensures that only authorised configuration changes are propagated to the business service
dependency maps, business service management dashboards and SLA reports. Unauthorised
changes can be escalated via visual cues in the Interlink Software dashboards, automated incident
creation or notification (SMS, paging, email, etc).

Figure 5. The SCM highlight changes facility changed CI attributes are shown in yellow, missing values in red.

Copyright Interlink Software Services Ltd 2013

Page 7 of 10

SCM creates date and time stamped audit logs for changes to both data and system configuration.
A sample automatically created CI change audit log follows:
30/04/2013 14:30:13 :

1.000003

Initial or first recorded version

---------------------------------------30/04/2013 14:41:31 :

1.000004

Merged-Discovery-Hosts > Merged_Discovery > CT_Hosts

Property SERIALNO changed from 'NA' to '1526GFH34533'
Property LOCATION changed from 'London' to Sheffield: Hall 1: Rack 2
Property OS changed from 'MS Windows' to 'Microsoft Windows 2008 Server SP 2'
Property PROCESSOR changed from 'NA' to 'Intel Pentium III 1600 MHz'
Property MEMORY changed from '512' to '1024'
Property CPUS changed from '1' to '2'
Property HOSTTYPE changed from 'Windows Server' to 'Windows Server 2008'
UNAUTHORISED CHANGE
----------------------------------------

Copyright Interlink Software Services Ltd 2013

Page 8 of 10

Automated Audit for Change and Compliance

According to Gartner, more than 40% of all mission-critical IT service outages are due to people and
process errors, with a significant number of those due to a lack of coordination between change,
release and configuration management. SCM is a key enabler of the agile data centre providing an
automated audit of the configuration of business services and their composite IT highlighting
changes that do not have corresponding change records or do not meet change policy. Large
financial services organisations use SCM to avoid the need for costly manual effort gathering data to
meet financial and regulatory audits. SCM has been demonstrated to automate and enable the
visualisation of comparisons between IT configurations across data centres, list software patch levels
across the entire company or for a specific business service, identify recent changes for a specific CI
or business service, and a host of other permutations.

Figure 6. SCM provides the capability to run availability based risk of change simulations, adding or removing
components and simulating failures to see the impact on overall service availability before deploying a change in
production.

Copyright Interlink Software Services Ltd 2013

Page 9 of 10

Summary of Key Features and Benefits

Service Configuration Manager (SCM) is the CMS platform of choice for some of the largest
organisations in the world, as an enabler for:

Compliance: automated audit trail of IT infrastructure changes

Compliance: verify disaster recovery systems are in-line with production
Visualise infrastructure-to-business dependencies
Leverage existing data sources via import and federation (linking) capabilities
Model the impact of IT changes on their business services BEFORE the changes are made
Identify and re-schedule conflicting changes
Deliver a forward schedule of change by business service or technology
Identify unauthorised changes to their IT infrastructure
Automate the management of the lifecycle of IT assets
Centralise operational documentation with context sensitive launching
Perform configuration comparisons across CIs, Data Centres and Business Services
Track infrastructure and business services via an automated Service Catalogue
Detect drift and minimise outages related to the provision of virtual or cloud based services
Pre-packaged integrations for 3rd party products such as ServiceNow, BMC Atrium, VMware
vCenter, etc are available

For further information please see: https://www.interlinksoftware.com/configuration-management/

All names of companies, products and services are trademarks or registered trademarks of their
respective owners.

Copyright Interlink Software Services Ltd 2013

Page 10 of 10