Built-to-Order Service Engineering for Enterprise IT Discovery

Enterprise IT environments are complex: business applications rely on distributed middleware running on diverse hardware with components depending on each other in many unexpected ways. Discovery of applications\´ dependency on IT is a critical step in managing application and IT infrastructure together. Many tools and practices have emerged to discover and report IT assets and applications\´ dependency on the IT assets. However, our experience in the field shows that there are significant challenges in effectively deploying the tools. There is a critical need to research and develop flexible processes, methods, and practices, and architecture-level support for them in the tools to enable successful discovery using a "built-to-order" approach. In this paper we discuss our experiences with an advanced application-data relationship discovery tools in large scale enterprise environments and based on these experiences we identify three main challenges of effective discovery. They are: deployment process and related security issues; unavailability of software and administration-related information; and tool integration. To address these challenges, here we demonstrate a holistic approach that includes flexible processes, methods, and practices in the tools for achieving the necessary built-to order capability.