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Executive Summary Higher levels of complexity, coexistence, and constant change in today’s data center make understanding business applications, services, and their underlying infrastructure nearly impossible using traditional discovery and mapping methods. • Take a rigid top-down or bottom-up approach to To manage complex business applications and digital services effectively, IT organizations must have a dependable, accurate data center map of all assets, their dependencies, and information about how they support the business. Without this, they risk being overwhelmed by constant firefighting efforts to avoid IT problems that can lead to revenue loss, reduced profitability, brand damage, and unhappy customers going to the competition. • Leave large areas undiscovered because network, But most discovery solutions fail to meet these needs because they: scanning that typically results in incomplete maps • Do not automatically capture comprehensive configuration data storage, application, and server admins are unable to choose their own entry points for mapping IT can`t have an accurate mapping of applications without having a precise inventory of all assets. BMC Discovery makes it easy to quickly gain complete, real-time visibility into dynamic data center environments. By understanding exactly how applications and their underlying infrastructure deliver critical business services, IT organizations are able to drive growth, efficiency, and agility. A successful discovery solution: Ensures scanning isn’t too rigid or one-directional, avoiding incomplete maps Captures comprehensive configuration data automatically Discovers all assets, regardless of vendor: servers, storage, applications, networks, mainframes, etc. — 1 WHY IT’S CRUCIAL TO GET ASSET AND DEPENDENCY DISCOVERY RIGHT In the digital economy, companies can’t afford to allow IT problems to disrupt or degrade service, so they must be able to proactively identify potential points of failure, address problems quickly when they do arise, and align effort with business impact. Case in point: to optimally prioritize issues, IT needs to know their impact on specific applications and the business services they power. Similarly, before taking a server offline, IT needs to understand which applications will be affected in order to avoid self-inflicted damage. IT must also prevent configuration errors—which is often more easily said than done, since 80 percent of unplanned outages are due to ill-planned changes.¹ “BMC Discovery not only shows you the network you know: servers, network gear, even printers and storage. It also shows you your network’s secret life by mapping out communication patterns and groupings you never knew existed. These relationships can be invaluable in an operational environment for operational impact and configuration management.” Ryan Johnston, Sr. SW Engineering Staff, Lockheed Martin To address these needs, IT needs complete, reliable visibility into the complex dependencies across assets and applications. Effective service mapping is critical to effective incident, change, and availability management and plays an important role in business continuity, data center transformation, planning, and compliance. But the complex and dynamic nature of the modern data center, combined with the norm of asset management across multiple business units, makes it extremely difficult to build and maintain service maps that provide a holistic view. Without a discovery solution that is designed to capture comprehensive configuration data, build complete service maps, and maintain the accuracy of those maps, the likelihood of failed data center projects, security breaches, configuration errors, service outages, and performance degradation increases significantly. 80% of unplanned outages are due to ill-planned changes1 80% START-ANYWHERE APPLICATION MAPPING—THE KEY TO COMPLETE DATA CENTER VISIBILITY Most discovery solutions use a rigid and simplistic top-down or bottom-up approach, where mapping stops as soon as the tool meets something it does not recognize. This means that users must know and specify the “top” entry point for their application or service—often a URL that leads to either a load-balanced service or to a web server. The choice of what to scan is also driven top-down, and at each stage the tool decides what to scan based upon the dependencies it detected at the previous stage. This rigid approach poses numerous problems, for example: • The application or service entry point may not be obvious—in fact, there may be more than one. Application owners often start with the location where data is stored, which is closer to the bottom than the top. • A dependency between two assets can often only be seen from one end can IT afford to miss dependencies that are only visible from the bottom end? A common example of twisted dependencies is a database that is also being used by a second application server. IT can`t rely on a great dependency mapping tool when the discovery is incomplete. • If parts of an application cannot be scanned due to lack of credentials, recognition or for other reasons, the scan will just stop there and remain incomplete, leaving out valuable information. 1 2015 Cost of Data Breach Study: Global Analysis, Ponemon Institute, May 2015. — 2

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