Project Description

Industry: Hospitality
Size: Large
Task: Service Mapping for Data Center Migration
Duration of the project: 5 months

Project Overview

  • Client had a populated CMDB using ServiceNow discovery but the relationships had no Business Context
  • Client was preparing a move to cloud hosted services and migrate out of their physical primary data center. To reduce the risk of the migration and ensure each of their services performed as they should, they wanted to move all components of the service together. Prior to the project, the customer didn’t have the data required to implement that task
  •  Our task was to work with the customer to classify the business services the organization supported, identify the underlying infrastructure, and map out the services accurately in their ServiceNow instance
  • We were able to map out and validate 30 Business Services that included load balancers, load balancer services, applications, servers and databases
  • Built out simple to consume dependency reports that allowed them to plan out their migration strategy effectively

ConfigureTek’s Approach

We didn’t want to reinvent the wheel so we attempted to utilize much of the good work that had already been accomplished with the customers discovery efforts. We were able to save implementation costs by extending the capabilities of their MID servers to be used for Service Mapping and leveraging the approved credentials for Service Mapping discovery.

  • Present the fundamentals of Service Mapping and establish a frame work for a Business Service
  • Work with customer to build out their Business Services portfolio
  • Complete a robust questionnaire for each service to understand its underlying dependencies
  • Review their existing CMDB and identify discrepancies and gaps. This could be due to missing IP ranges, conflicting firewall rules or lack of privileged credentials to end devices
  • Complete Service Map based on entry points and connections defined in the Business Service questionnaire
  • Validate each Service Map with the SME’s to ensure every dependency was captured accurately
  • Operationalize the Service Maps to allow them to be used throughout the ServiceNow platform
  • Create and share reports depicting the identified dependencies

Why the software was chosen

ServiceNow Service Mapping and Discovery was the software of choice due to the value produced that goes beyond the goals of the project. While we were able to identify dependencies between Business Services and infrastructure that was vital for data center migration planning, the results of the service maps can be used to enhance event, incident, change and problem processes. Bringing business context to their existing CMDB elevates the core foundation offering that can be utilized in many areas of the ServiceNow platform

Results

  • Customer has visibility into what Business Services each of the servers in their production data center is supporting
  • Identified servers and assets that had no dependencies to business or technology services that could be decommissioned to save costs
  • Ability to correlate monitoring events to business impact
  • Affected Business Services can now be taken into account during their Change approval processes