Blog

by tekwurx tekwurx No Comments

TekWurx uControl Release – 8.3.2

TekWurx uControl 8.3.2 is now generally available and includes the following highlights:

  • Implementation of an “ALL” rule on the schema list when defining TAG rules in uMap
  • Ability to define TAG type rules against virtual “custom attributes”
  • Cloud CI linking performance improvements
  • uMap Unlinking performance improvements

convert CI asset to UMap Application screenshot

This product release was heavily influenced by customer feedback, so we’re excited to get this in the hands of our users. As always, a full breakdown of all items in this release is available in our Support Centre.

Customers and partners may download TekWurx uControl here.

For further information, please contact info@tekwurx.com

by tekwurx tekwurx No Comments

Beyond Application Maps: Eight Ways Tekwurx uControl v8.3 Adds Value

Today’s organisations face many challenges as they drive digital transformation, manage evolving working practices, and modernise their infrastructures.

IT continues to grow more complex; from a hybrid, distributed workforce and continuous security challenges to increasing market pressure, today’s environment increases the demands on service and operations teams. Also, IT must understand every aspect of the environment and its use. However, this understanding cannot be gained using labour-intensive manual processes that struggle to capture the entire picture. The resulting lack of visibility into applications and dependencies affects migration planning, licence management, capacity optimisation, security, service availability, and integrations with IT service management.

A lack of visibility is like driving with a blindfold. Not only does it leave IT asset management professionals unsure of what they must protect from risk, leaving endpoints potentially vulnerable, but it also means data management and disposition is much harder to achieve compliantly. TES, “IT asset management risks in 2021 and beyond…”

At Tekwurx, we understand the role of automated asset discovery in resolving these issues and how it is the starting point of many organisations’ asset management strategies.

BMC Helix Discovery provides real-time visibility into hardware, software, and service dependencies across multiple environments. Helix Discovery handles the complexity of managing a broad spectrum of configurations, including mainframe, traditional infrastructures, and container management in multi-cloud and on-premises environments. It discovers physical and logical components, including virtual machines, servers, storage, databases, and applications. Helix Discovery also includes the ability to model business applications, which many customers use to assist with IT service management processes.

We originally developed Tekwurx uControl to help customers reduce the time and cost of building and maintaining business application models. Since the first release, customers benefited from the automated workflows in uControl to model their applications efficiently and manage changes to the model over time.

With the release of version 8, uControl answers many more of the commonly asked questions around asset discovery, such as:

  • Do we understand the current asset landscape and whether we have discovered everything?
  • How do we keep our automated discovery tool up-to-date with IP ranges/addresses and simplify our administrative tasks?
  • How do we identify discovery blind spots and discover what our discovery tool doesn’t know about?
  • How do we proactively identify issues with discovery and ensure that these are being remediated?
  • Can we automate getting the discovery issues to the correct teams and track this within our service desk?

These and other use cases are described below.

Use case #1: advanced discovered data analytics.

We introduced an advanced data analytics engine in Tekwurx uControl v8 that provides the platform to rapidly develop the additional functionality to meet the complex use cases that our customers requested. Once we have the data in uControl, the analytics engine can “slice and dice” it to answer many asset-related questions, including:

  • Compare data sets to understand the differences, enabling remediation to close gaps in auto-discovery.
  • View trends in the application modelling process, asset discovery or decommissioning.
  • Identify and report on discovery issues by business unit, owner, or support group.
  • Streamline data inventory to identify blind spots and unscanned systems.
  • Enable rapid vulnerability assessment.

 

Tekwurx uControl Gap Analysis Dashboard

Tekwurx uControl Gap Analysis Dashboard

Use case #2: understand complex asset relationships.

Understanding the relationships between assets is central to managing ever-changing and increasingly complex IT infrastructure. Tekwurx uControl ingests asset data from any source, which is reconciled and normalised to ensure the upstream systems receive accurate and complete data.

CIs may be enriched by adding custom categories that contain business context data, such as the business unit, hosting environment, location tags or lifecycle details.

Tekwurx uControl synchronises discovered and non-discovered CI data with commonly used CMDB, reducing manual effort and potential errors.

Use case #3: improve discovered data quality.

As well as understanding what assets you are managing, you need to be able to trust the data.

We’ve heard customers tell us often that they have a CMDB but that no one uses it because the data is inaccurate or incomplete.

The advanced analytics engine in Tekwurx uControl compares data sets to identify and report on gaps and missing attribute data. Analysis of server attributes highlights those that need to be completed.

Use case #4: advanced reporting.

Tekwurx uControl includes a set of out-of-the-box reports that cover most discovery scenarios. uControl’s Report Studio allows users to create custom reports and dashboards from all data in the uControl database.

Tekwurx uControl reports can run from inside BMC Discovery and may be assigned to specific users or teams to control access.

Reports can be exported in various formats, emailed, and integrated with Microsoft Teams and SharePoint to share across an organisation.

 

Tekwurx uControl uReport showing Report Studio

Tekwurx uControl uReport showing Report Studio

Use case #5: asset blind spot detection.

One of our customers uses BMC Discovery to scan their IT estate. The SecOps team use Rapid7 to discover security risks across the server endpoints.

The customer needed help understanding where they had gaps in Rapid7 monitoring, a potential security risk.

We deployed Tekwurx uControl to import and compare the discovered assets held in BMC Discovery with those in Rapid7. The advanced analytics engine in Tekwurx uControl compared:

  • The servers monitored by Rapid7 are not in BMC Discovery.
  • The servers in BMC Discovery that Rapid7 does not scan.
  • The current discovery status for servers that Rapid7 watches.

We provided a dashboard to the SecOps team, clearly showing the gaps in the Rapid7 deployment and providing remediation targets. The customer also used this analysis to highlight discovery failures in BMC Discovery.

Before the integration, they had a massive list of failures and could not differentiate between REAL failures and what was just “noise.”

Use case #6: integration.

Tekwurx uControl is designed to be the central processor of CI asset data. We can ingest data from many sources via JDBC and REST APIs, including CMDBs, auto-discovery tools, and flat files. We can also pull data directly from vSphere and vCenter, LeanIX, and import subnet information from IPAM systems.

This approach allows customers to bring all their assets (discovered and non-discovered) into one place and can analyse, normalise, and send accurate CI data to downstream systems, including CMDBs, service desks, Microsoft Teams, and SharePoint.

Use case #7: event alerting & notification.

Tekwurx uControl keeps users notified and raises events throughout the asset lifecycle. Events are sent directly to the service desk or via email to the correct teams for remediation. Users are advised of asset discovery issues throughout the application modelling, CMDB synchronisation or discovery system management. Example use cases include:

  • Notify users of the following activities during the business application modelling workflow.
  • Raise events against application model drift, i.e., as new connections & dependencies or deletions are identified.
  • Set up regular service reviews to ensure application models are up to date.
  • Notifies new owners or teams of models that are assigned to them.
  • Receive alerts for import failures.
  • Notifies if there are CMDB synchronisation errors.

 

Screenshot showing Tekwurx uControl Asset BaseLine Dashboard

Tekwurx uControl Asset BaseLine Dashboard

Use case 8: advanced CMDB integration.

An out-of-the-box integration between TekWurx uControl, BMC Atrium and ServiceNow CMDBs enables near-real-time updates, all configurable through a point-and-click interface.

Integrating with CMDBs enables uControl to build application models and services using discovered and non-discovered assets.

Users can modify attributes and class mappings through a “no-code” approach.

  • Tekwurx uControl supports application component synchronisation to support service modelling.
  • Import ServiceNow Discovery data to support service modelling, gap analysis and blind spot reporting.
  • Single click to publish application models to one of many classes depending on requirements.
  • Multi-level filtering ensures that only the required data from the CMDB is imported and used in uControl.

Tekwurx uControl v8: More visibility. Greater Agility. Less Risk


    Your Name:

    I would like to talk about:

    Your Email: Optional

    Your Phone Number:

    by tekwurx tekwurx No Comments

    Tekwurx Joins the Barracuda Partner Program

    Tekwurx is pleased to announce our partnership with Barracuda Networks.

    Tekwurx has joined the Barracuda Partner Program to deliver its security and data protection tools to our customers. This new partnership will allow us to extend our conversations around security-affecting gaps with automated asset discovery into data protection, email protection, network security and app & cloud security.

    About Barracuda

    More than 200,000 global customers trust Barracuda to safeguard their employees, data, and applications from various threats. Barracuda provides accessible, comprehensive and affordable solutions for email protection, application and cloud security, network security and data protection.
    barracuda authorised partner logo
    Find out what’s hiding in your inbox.
    95% of Office 365 mailboxes harbour email threats. Try the Barracuda Email Threat Scanner

    Email Protection

    Barracuda Email Protection is a comprehensive, easy-to-use solution that delivers gateway defence, API-based impersonation and phishing protection, incident response, data protection, compliance and user awareness training.

    App and Cloud Security

    The Barracuda Web Application Firewall is an application-level firewall that blocks today’s most sophisticated, complex threats with advanced inspection capabilities that do not impact throughput. It improves overall app performance with built-in application delivery features, including SSL offloading, load balancing, and content caching. In addition, strong granular controls allow you to easily restrict access to sensitive applications or data to unauthorised users.

    Network Security

    Barracuda CloudGen Firewall is designed to optimise distributed networks’ performance and management and scale effortlessly across any number of locations and applications. In this way, they can provide full protection for your entire network perimeter and maintain the same level of protection while your operation grows.

    Data Protection

    Barracuda Backup is the first line of defence against data loss during catastrophic system failure. By seamlessly integrating all your data, whether physical, virtual, or in the cloud, Barracuda Backup is the optimal solution for data protection in the modern age.
    Barracuda CloudGen Firewall delivers advanced security by integrating a comprehensive set of next-generation firewall technologies. With protection for the entire network perimeter, Barracuda CloudGen Firewall stops cyber criminals before they can reach your data.

    Keith Pound, Tekwurx’s Director of Business Development, said,

    “We are delighted to join the Barracuda Partner Program and add their innovative suite of security-focussed products to our portfolio. Partnering with Barracuda means that we can offer our customers agile, cost-effective security and data protection solutions that are quick to implement and deliver value….fast!”

    Please don’t hesitate to get in touch with info@tekwurx.com for additional information.

    by tekwurx tekwurx No Comments

    Tekwurx Awarded G-Cloud 13 Framework Agreement

    We are pleased to announce that Tekwurx software and services are available under the G-Cloud 13 Framework Agreement.

    The following products and services may be purchased via the framework:

    Cloud Software

    Cloud Support

    Access G-Cloud 13 Portal

    by tekwurx tekwurx No Comments

    Control-M is a Value Leader in this year’s WLA Radar Report

    As application and data workflows and file transfers play an increasingly critical role in digital business, Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) has completed its evaluation of leading workload automation solutions. As in each of the last five reports, the firm scored Control-M at the top of the field, calling it:

    “An outstanding choice for organizations that intend to give WLA its rightful place as a data centre and development discipline with significant business impact.”

    READ NOW

    Read the report to learn how Control-M and BMC Helix Control-M can help you:

    • Define, schedule, manage and monitor workflows more easily to improve reliability and SLAs
    • Integrate, automate, and orchestrate workflows across on-premises, public, and private clouds
    • Enable collaboration between developers and DevOps engineers using a Jobs-as-Code approach

    See how Control-M outranks the market in functionality, deployment and administration, architecture and integration, and vendor strength.

    The Tekwurx WLA team will be pleased to discuss your requirements with you.

    by tekwurx tekwurx No Comments

    Tekwurx Sponsors BMC Exchange 2021

    Once again, Tekwurx is sponsoring BMC Exchange, which this year is all about data. You will learn how to exploit customer data, IT performance data, and industrial IoT data to become a more agile, customer-centric Autonomous Digital Enterprise.

    Read more

    Top