Device42 adds cloud dependency mapping to IT discovery product

Device42 this week delivered hybrid cloud discovery capabilities for its IT inventory and asset management product, enabling IT managers to gain near real-time visibility into how cloud assets are communicating with other components and how they support business services across on-premises and cloud infrastructure.

“[Customers] will have near real-time visibility across their entire hybrid IT footprint, regardless of the nature or the location of any IT asset, whether on-prem or in the cloud. This is big news for our industry that continues to rely on outdated spreadsheets to track things,” says Raj Jalan, CEO, Device42. “With cloud services and containers, the complexity and the growth are so massive that there isn’t clarity on the dependencies across the cloud, data centers, and on-premises.”

New features announced this week include hybrid cloud business service mapping, which shows the interdependencies of services on workloads in the cloud and hardware and software on-premises. The product can show details such as device-to-device connectivity as well as business service mapping in the same view.

Device42’s cloudCMDB will enable IT managers to gain more insights into how various components comprising business services use cloud resources and communicate with other assets in the environment. The cloud discovery capabilities will provide a more complete picture of all the elements of a business service and enable IT managers to automatically update their configuration management databases (CMDB) with near real-time, accurate data about application dependencies.

CMDBs have long been touted as a best practice for IT managers who need to maintain an accurate inventory of their enterprise environments. Defined in the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL), CMDBs include data on the hardware, software, and infrastructure used by the applications and services provided by an IT organization. Such an all-inclusive source of data is difficult to keep current with manual efforts, but with agentless discovery and automated updates, Device42 says customers can keep its cloudCMDB accurate in near real-time.

“IT needs a single source of truth. It needs a repository that gives it visibility that it can access programmatically from other platforms, and it is our vision to provide a comprehensive view of all elements across the environment,” Jalan says. “The two biggest problems with the CMDB are in the past, you had to hire an army of consultants to go configure it and to keep it up to date. And then new technology comes along, and you would have to do it all over again.”

The asset and dependency data stored in a CMDB can help IT managers better understand how a business service would be impacted by a problem or failure with any one of the components identified as part of that service. Device42 also provides reports on which assets are most utilized, which might not be in use anymore (an important detail for cloud resources), and which are approaching end of live. The asset data is also useful for compliance and audit purposes.

“Customers want to see a view of what assets are growing the most, especially in the cloud, so they can track the rate of change across specific asset types,” Jalan explains.

Device42’s product is delivered as a virtual appliance, and once installed, it uses agentless discovery to identify the network, application, and infrastructure components across on-premises and cloud environments. With the additional cloud capabilities, it shows IT managers all cloud asset communication, which provides an accurate picture of the interconnectivity of a hybrid environment. IT managers can generate reports from the Device42 dashboard.

Device42 integrates with other applications used in managing IT Infrastructures such as ITSM and orchestration. In addition to an extensive API library, Device42 provides connectors that make integrations easy.