The definition of ITIL Service Asset and Configuration Management is to maintain information about the Configuration Items (CIs) required to deliver an IT service, including their relationships.
IT discovery is the foundation to IT asset management. You need reliable, accurate discovery if you want to collect asset information.
According to a survey by ComputerWeekly, 66% of IT managers admit to not having a completely accurate record of their IT Assets.
Many organisations have deployed software tools to discover their IT assets, including BMC Software’s BMC Discovery. Tekwurx has architected and deployed BMC Discovery for hundreds of customers, discovering just a few hundred devices through to organisations that have in excess of 150,000 devices.
In our experience, customers ask the same questions about discovery:
- How can we discover 100% of our assets?
- How can we discover assets we don’t know about?
- How do we keep BMC Discovery up to date with new IP ranges & addresses?
- How do we identify and fix discovery issues?
There are many reasons why organisations don’t reach 100% discovery coverage, but the common ones we see include:
- There are multiple discovery tools deployed, usually point solutions for specific teams
- CI data is held in multiple locations, such as spreadsheets and databases that is difficult to access from a central point
In the following example, we have discovered 10,000 assets using BMC Discovery but there are 15,000 assets in other sources, of which 12,000 are thought to be unique.
The challenge for asset managers is to work through the disparate data sources to cross-reference the CIs held in multiple locations and attempt to identify the gaps, duplicates in the discovered estate.
Tekwurx uControl
Tekwurx developed uControl to use data from multiple sources to enhance and simplify the management of BMC Discovery and to reduce the time taken to model business applications and services for use in Service Asset and Configuration Management.
BMC Discovery has a wealth of in-built reports and the ability to create generic reports. This enables you to list out applications and their components, to run history based reports to compare an entity at 2 points in time – but is this feasible if you have created 100’s or 1000’s of application maps?
Tekwurx has recently released uControl version 7 that builds on the original design brief and adds the ability to take imports and feeds from many other data sources to drive discovery. The new module, uAsset, takes the CIs discovered by BMC Discovery and compares them with the assets in other data sources, such as spreadsheets, CSV files, network provisioning tools, CMDBs and any other tool with an API.
uControl uAsset uses this data to drive actions within BMC Discovery around discovery, data checks and application modelling.
- We now understand all of the unique assets in the environment
- We know how many of these assets are being discovered
- We know how many assets are NOT being discovered
With the addition of uControl uAsset, we are able to understand in detail the discovery coverage of the total asset estate.
About Tekwurx
TekWurx was founded in 2013 by Steven Hicks and Nik Dimmock.
After spending over 8 years working with customers and partners on BMC Discovery projects (formerly know as BMC ADDM) and seeing the same challenges and same “consultancy” solutions used on each account we realized that there was an opportunity for a significant change to delivery – an approach where the customer could start “delivering” themselves. uMap™, the first module released by Tekwurx as part of the uControl™ suite for BMC Discovery is just that. uMap™ provides the ability for an end user, with no exposure or experience with BMC Discovery, to be able to produce Business Application service models without any complex coding.
For further information please contact info@tekwurx.com
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