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IT Management Research, Industry Analysis, and Consulting

ASG Service Dependency MappingMaking the Link between IT and the Business

An ENTERPRISE MANAGEMENT ASSOCIATES® (EMA™) White Paper Prepared for Allen Systems Group (ASG)

July 2008

ASG Service Dependency Mapping:Making the Link between IT and the Business

©2008 Enterprise Management Associates, Inc. All Rights Reserved. IT Management Research, Industry Analysis, and Consulting

Table of Contents

Executive introduction ............................................................................................................................................... 1

Crossing the Chasm from Technology to Business Services .............................................................................. 2

ITIL, Configuration Management, and a Service-Driven Approach ................................................................ 4

Service Dependency Mapping .................................................................................................................................. 5

ASG and Its Place in this Market ............................................................................................................................ 7

EMA Perspective ......................................................................................................................................................... 9

About ASG | www.asg.com ....................................................................................................................................10


�©2008 Enterprise Management Associates, Inc. All Rights Reserved. IT Management Research, Industry Analysis, and Consulting

Executive introductionCost, complexity and change are defining characteristics of today’s Information Technology (IT) deployments. The industry-wide transformation from centralized business applications to modular, distributed business services has been accompanied by ever-higher business criticality. Today’s business applications are driving enormous amounts of revenue and are becoming increasingly central to the way entire industries do business.

This combination of criticality and complexity has serious implications to IT budgets. While the average IT budget remains relatively flat, with an estimated 3% growth rate for 2008, the cost of administer-ing and supporting these business applications continues to escalate. Companies relying on IT as a strategic asset are growing budgets at a slightly higher rate – 4% instead of 3% – however this added invest-ment is largely earmarked for the development of strategic services, not for support. Today’s businesses expect to see tangible value from their IT investments, and it is difficult to convince a cost-conscious CEO that pumping additional money into administration and support is a good use of limited resources. With support costs already hover-ing between 60 and 80 percent of budget, IT is being called upon to support ever higher levels of scale, complexity, and business criticality – with few or no additional resources.

One of the primary reasons for rising support costs is because IT and the business see business applications from very different perspectives. IT sees the trees – the servers, routers, and data bases underlying busi-ness applications. The business sees the forest – the technology-based business services delivered to users and customers. While there is in-

creasing awareness of the need for IT to evolve to a more service-focused view of the enterprise, this is easier said than done. Both support processes and management prod-ucts have traditionally focused on technology silos. Evolving to a more business focused and automated approach requires evolution of both processes and tooling.

In the absence of such an evolution, IT is left to solve service-related problems with the one course of action that has worked in the past – added head count. However, today’s business services are so mission-critical, complex, and dynamic that, in many cases, even this doesn’t solve the problem. The business continues to demand higher levels of ser-vice and new applications, and as soon as IT specialists are added, new applications are added as well.

Solving these challenges requires a new approach, one that enables IT to cross the chasm between supporting technology and managing business services. Managing business services in context to the infrastructure that supports them is today’s “holy grail”. Best practice disciplines such as the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) and Control Objectives for Information Technology (COBIT) set the stage for this transition, however executing on it requires automation investments as well.

While there is increasing awareness of the need for IT to evolve to a more service-focused view of

the enterprise, this is easier said than done. Both support processes

and management products have traditionally focused on

technology silos. Evolving to a more business focused and automated approach requires evolution of

both processes and tooling.



Growing adoption of configuration management products and growing interest in ap-plication management solutions that leverage configuration information demonstrate the key role of Configuration Management Data Base (CMDB) initiatives in making this transition. In an EMA survey just completed (2008), the number of respondents that did NOT plan to invest in a CMDB had decreased to less than 5%, as opposed to 25% in 2006. When companies that had implemented a CMDB were asked about its primary

benefits, the number one benefit cited was “improved service levels, reduced downtime, and fewer outages” (36%).

Aligning IT and business perspectives requires the ability to create links between configuration information in the CMDB and the business ser-vice as experienced by the user. Service Discovery and Dependency Mapping (SDM) products automate the process of creating and main-taining these links. Relatively few vendors provide these leading- edge products as yet, however demand for them is growing, as is evidenced by EMA research. Approximately 83% of IT professionals in one survey indicated that products that “map services and applications to underlying infrastructure” are either high or somewhat high priority

objectives. In a separate study on CMDB adoption, 65% of the respondents cited au-tomated dependency mapping as key to their organization’s core CMDB strategy. And while monitoring remains the primary goal for 2008, EMA anticipates growing interest in automated application detection and dependency mapping over the next few years.

This paper examines how IT organizations can transition to a more service-focused approach to managing business applications, and how these leading-edge management solutions support this transition. This new approach is business service-driven instead of infrastructure-driven and enables IT organizations to manage the service in context to technology. In doing so, it brings IT into much closer overall alignment with the business.

Allen Systems Group (ASG: www.asg.com) is an industry leader in the management of distributed business services. ASG’s differentiators in the areas of configuration man-agement, service discovery and dependency mapping, cross-technology integration, and other key areas have positioned ASG in a challenger position against the major Business Service Management (BSM) vendors. This paper details ASG’s offerings and explains how and why ASG products help companies transition towards a more service-focused IT management paradigm.

Crossing the Chasm from Technology to Business ServicesToday’s business applications are numerous and diverse. Many IT organizations are still running legacy mainframe applications that have been re-purposed to interact with web, web 2.0, and distributed applications. Business services execute over distributed hard-ware and software, run on virtual servers, and include composite applications that share software components. Integration products and other middleware add to this complexity. While this cross-breeding and interoperability among technologies and applications can

Multiple research studies indicate that, although companies are investing substantial resources in managing the IT enterprise,

they are only marginally successful in doing so.

http://www.asg.com



deliver substantial business value, IT organizations are finding that services built in this way are also very difficult to support.

Multiple research studies indicate that, although companies are investing substantial re-sources in managing the IT enterprise, they are only marginally successful in doing so. IT professionals are vocal in describing their top concerns, three of which include:

High cost of IT support

Lack of business –IT alignment

Inadequate application management capabilities. This is despite the fact that the average IT organization has five tools in house, and some have as many as 100.

Additional EMA research uncovers the business impact of these problems:

45% of companies surveyed report that performance problems with web-based business services seriously impact service levels more than once a week.

61% of IT personnel report that that they use expert opinion instead of tools as their primary application problem diagnostic tool

Despite significant investments in tools, 43% of application related problems are still reported by users

25-80% of production problems are related to change. For those companies with structured and well-controlled change processes, change drives between 25 and 30 percent of production problems. For those with a less disciplined approach, change drives between 75 and 80%.

One common thread among all of these findings is significant. Every one of them points to an inability to support business services ef-ficiently and effectively. One primary reason for this is that most IT or-ganizations, and many enterprise management vendors, are still focused on managing technology, not business services. While the business has changed, processes and tools have not evolved to accommodate this change.

With the advent of the Internet, IT has turned the corner from being a supporting player to becoming, in many cases, the star of the show. IT's responsibility has moved beyond simple support of back office func-tions such as accounting to developing and maintaining customer-fac-ing business services. In many cases, the business is so dependent upon IT that the business itself is essentially a set of IT services. Managing them efficiently becomes fundamental to the health of the business.

This transition changes the game and requires a shift in focus from managing infrastructure to managing business services. While infrastructure manage-ment is certainly important, it is only one element of a broad requirement to monitor and manage business services in the context of supporting technology. The research cited above underscores the difficulty of making this transition.

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For those companies with structured and well-controlled change processes, change drives

between 25 and 30 percent of production problems. For those with a less disciplined

approach, change drives between 75 and 80%.



ITIL, Configuration Management, and a Service-Driven ApproachITIL evolved in the 1970s and 1980s when IT systems were far simpler than they are today. However, ITIL’s creators apparently envisioned the complexity we are facing, and developed a set of best practices as a way to bring efficiency to the task of managing IT services. While ITIL concepts were not widely adopted in the U.S. until the mid to late 1990’s, ITIL adoption within the U.S. is still gaining momentum, and has tripled in the last two years. This increase can be attributed to the fact that IT shops now understand the importance of consistent, standardized, and automated processes.

ITIL v2 ITSM

ITIL v3

ITIL IT Service Management (ITSM)Service Support

Incident Management

Service Desk

Problem Management

Configuration Management

Change Management

Service Delivery

Service Level Management

Availability Management

Service Continuity Management

Capacity Management

Financial Management

Service Strategy

Continual Service Improvement

Service Design

Service Transition

Service Operation

Financial Management Service Portfolio Management

Service Level Management

Service Management

Service ReportingService Level Management

Service Management

Service Reporting

Incident Management

Problem Management

Request Management

Incident Management

Problem Management

Request Management

Change Mgmt

Configuration Mgmt

Release Mgmt

Service Knowledge

Mgmt

Availability Mgmt

Capacity Mgmt

Continuity Mgmt

Security Mgmt

Figure 1: ITIL v2 and v3

Figure 1 is a high level graphic showing the best practice disciplines within ITIL v2 and v3. The IT Service Management (ITSM) processes from v2 are core to both versions, with ITIL v3 assuming that these core disciplines are in place.

Within ITSM, two areas particularly relevant to making the transition to a service-focused support scenario are the Service Catalog and the Configuration Management Data Base. The Service Catalog defines the IT services available to the business. It is a foundational concept for Service Level Management, Service Portfolio Management, and Service Measurement, among other ITIL disciplines. It is also fundamental to managing business services, since it isn’t possible to deliver, monitor, or measure these services without clar-ity to the IT services available in the service portfolio.

The other key concept is the CMDB, which is the foundation of ITIL configuration management. While the Service Catalog offers a service-focused perspective, the CMDB provides detail into the infrastructure components and relationships that, together, make up the service. From a management perspective, this provides two of the three key pieces of information necessary to make the transition to a service-focused management ap-proach. The missing link is the ability to associate the business service with its dependen-cies. Once this link is made, an organization has the capability to make the connections between the CMDB and the Services represented in the service catalog. This, in turn, makes it possible to manage to the business service, not simply to infrastructure.



This connection builds the bridge connecting IT to the business and enables the process of crossing the chasm. Technology and the busi-ness become much more closely aligned, connected by clear perspec-tive to business services, their IT dependencies, and their relation-ships. Once this connection is made, support requirements can be dramatically reduced because troubleshooting isn’t relegated to teams of technologists collaborating for hours or days to pinpoint and solve application-related problems. The impact of change is mitigated, be-cause visibility to interrelationships among business service elements enables the change management process to become more predictive. This link also provides the visibility necessary to streamline application troubleshooting; freeing up skilled resources to work on project back-logs – another primary concern expressed by both business executives and IT technologists.

Service Dependency MappingBuilding these links requires visibility to business services, applications, and infrastructure, and the capability to link this information in a way that fully describes the service in context to its component elements.

Obviously, though this is today’s state of the art, there are multiple hurdles associated with developing this capability. The challenges are in two key areas: one is in collecting required information, and the second lies in tying it together into a service-focused view. Few of today’s management solutions provide comprehensive visibility to all of these elements, and those that do typically require significant manual modeling.

Service Discovery and Dependency Mapping solutions automate this process. Via mul-tiple vantage points, they discover, document, and maintain these links, storing logical maps of multi-dimensional dependencies in a federated MetaCMDB. Figure 2 depicts the four-pronged approach necessary to achieve this goal

A ssetC onfigura tionM anagem ent

A sse tC onfigura tionM anagem ent

T ransactionO bserva tionand A na lys is


P ackagedA pp lica tion

D iscovery andM app ing



C ustom A pp lica tion D iscove ry and

M app ing


M app ing










M app ing


M app ing

Service Dependency Mapping

Figure 2: Service Dependency Mapping (SDM)

The missing link is the ability to associate the business service

with its dependencies. Once this link is made, an organization has the capability to make the

connections between the CMDB and the Services represented in the service catalog. This, in turn, makes it possible to

manage to the business service, not simply to infrastructure.



SDM utilizes multiple technologies to “learn” about business services and their depen-dencies. Asset Configuration Management products discover servers and other infrastruc-ture, along with their software resources. Such products describe configurations within data center infrastructure. They contribute information about which operating systems, versions, and configuration files are running and, in “stand alone” mode, are useful for license and change tracking, technical configuration management, and similar activities.

Packaged Application Discovery and Mapping products analyze production systems. Their role is to identify packaged applications, such as SAP and Oracle, by their well known “signatures” or “fingerprints”. There are a variety of such products on the mar-ket, and they are in high demand by enterprise IT support organizations. Since packaged application support is typically delivered as part of the product bundle, products in this category provide significant functionality “out of the box”.

Custom applications are another story, and are a challenge because they lack well known signatures. As a result, many discovery/mapping solutions currently on the market require significant manual modeling. Products that solve this problem are starting to emerge, but are few and far between.

A small contingent of vendors is addressing this problem with innovative code analytics. ASG’s BSP-Service Dependency Mapping, for example, analyzes application code pre-deployment, generates custom “signatures” based on that analysis, and uses these signa-tures during the discovery process to map dependencies. This eliminates a great deal of the manual work typically involved in mapping custom applications, which make up as much as 80% of the applications in many enterprises.

Generating the final piece of the puzzle requires a top-down approach, in which the services themselves are tracked and analyzed as they execute. This process, Transaction Observation and Analysis, completes the “big picture” by linking production services with their underlying dependencies. This capability completes the loop and is the final piece in the puzzle of managing IT services in a business context.

Service Dependency Mapping solutions pull all of this information together to provide a holistic picture of the services being delivered to the business. In today’s sophisticated IT deployments, business services deployed using Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) can utilize application components from both custom and packaged applications, as well as “stand alone” components created expressly for SOA’s composite transactions. SDM is capable of “watching” transactions as they execute and, in doing so, combines intel-ligence gathered from these observations with the information provided by configuration and mapping tools to create a service-focused view of assets, configurations, applications and business services. SDM capabilities rely on federated metadata management as dis-cussed in the following section on ASG products.

Products capable of discovering and mapping business services are on the “most want-ed” list of IT organizations, with approximately 83% of IT professionals indicating that products that “map services and applications to underlying infrastructure” are either high or somewhat high priority objectives. A major consideration in selecting such products is that today’s IT environments are dynamic, not static. This means that there is also the problem of discovering and maintaining changed dependencies over time. Getting better



control over changes by understanding their potential and actual impact to production systems can obviously generate significant ROI. According to EMA research, this is a major reason why IT organizations invest in CMDB projects and is one of the first areas where they expect to see a payoff from their investment.

Linking accurate configuration information to the actual IT services provided to the business builds a tangible link between IT and the business that is not achievable without such a link. SDM generates such links. From the EMA perspective, the key to translating service catalogs and CMDB information into actionable business value lies in leveraging

automation designed to accommodate data federation, differences in update requirements, and constantly changing business services. This is where ASG shines over much of the competition.

ASG and Its Place in this Market The ASG solution set automates the process of discovering and main-taining links between services and configurations via discovery and de-pendency mapping. ASG’s product line features leading-edge capabili-ties including rich, federated configuration data and metadata, support for a wide variety of hardware and software platforms, and discovery and mapping for both custom and packaged business services. These solutions are enterprise-grade, scale to very large enterprises, and have a breadth of coverage with few equals in the industry.

ASG’s integrated portfolio relies on ASG’s BSP-Service Dependency Mapping as its discovery and mapping engine. It discovers service and application dependencies by examining software structure, discovering deployed artifacts, and detecting real-time interactions between com-ponents. By leveraging this multi-faceted approach, ASG’s solution provides the automation and depth of knowledge and understanding necessary to gather and analyze information about the diverse applica-tions running within today’s enterprises. These approaches include:

Pre-deployment structural analysis of custom applications: Capability to analyze source code to understand the characteristics and dependencies of custom applications

Predefined application fingerprints: Inherent product intelligence includes capability to distinguish among a wide range of packaged applications. During discovery and mapping, these fingerprints identify where known applications and dependencies are deployed, enabling them to be mapped in an automated fashion.

Real-time transaction observation: Monitors and records communications between applications and dependencies in production environments, providing additional insight into dependencies of both packaged and custom applications.

With this multi-dimensional application visibility, ASG’s BSP-Service Dependency Mapping supports best practice and compliance activities such as release management, change and configuration management, incident and problem management, compliance and audit. It also supports business initiatives such as cost control, charge back, disaster recovery, dynamic provisioning, Service Level Management (SLM), data warehouse man-agement and Application Lifecycle Management (ALM).

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The ASG solution set automates the process of discovering and

maintaining links between services and configurations via discovery and dependency mapping. ASG’s

product line features leading-edge capabilities including rich, federated configuration data and

metadata, support for a wide variety of hardware and software

platforms, and discovery and mapping for both custom and

packaged business services.



A significant differentiator is the range of coverage for mainframe, web services, and distributed technologies. These are critical capabilities for an enterprise-grade product to, for example, model relationships between a mainframe backbone and connected, distrib-uted services. They are also capabilities that competing vendors are struggling to dupli-cate. This, combined with the rich discovery and mapping capabilities described above, generates an essentially complete view of business services and their dependencies.

Another significant differentiator is ASG’s federation capabilities for business process management tools such as IDS Scheer ARIS and CA BPWin. This offers a way for defined business processes to become additional sources of application insight for the Service Dependency Mapping / MetaCMDB solution. This perspective into business service definitions and processes adds a distinctive dimension to discovery and depen-dency mapping activities by incorporating modeled business processes without the need to duplicate them across solution sets.

Application dependencies can be dynamically discovered and stored within ASG’s con-figuration management system or maintained via interfaces with outside configuration management systems. This solution also tracks changes and lineage, supporting both change tracking and regulatory/governance initiatives.

While ASG’s BSP-Service Dependency Mapping repository contains detailed knowl-edge about applications and their dependencies, its federation to the ASG-MetaCMDB adds dimension and depth, creating multiple levels of application visibility. ASG’s MetaCMDB, powered by ASG-Rochade (See Figure 3) is the centerpiece of ASG’s service mapping and management strategy. As a leading metadata repository, Rochade powers 10 of the 20 largest financial institutions in the world, and is the core and heart of ASG’s MetaCMDB system. ASG’s MetaCMDB can be leveraged as a stand-alone CMDB or as a master CMDB federating distributed and/or cross-vendor CMDBs and diverse data sources. As a master CMDB, ASG’s MetaCMDB is a federation point ca-pable of logically combining and synchronizing performance and availability data from multiple sources to provide scalable, real time enterprise performance reporting.

Federated configuration data and metadata provide a foundation for multiple BSM func-tions such as application lifecycle management, asset management, capacity management, and financial management. This extends the value proposition of the ASG portfolio, making it a good bet for organizations seeking ways to strengthen the alignment between IT and the business.



Figure 3: ASG’s MetaCMDB™

ASG’s BSP-Service Dependency Mapping gathers run-time information on servers and workstations on diverse platforms including UNIX, z/OS and NT, Windows, Linux, and others. It automatically discovers and audits all mainframe and distributed hardware and software on the network and maintains an inventory of device-specific configuration data. This provides a basis for license management, asset tracking, and detection of unau-thorized configurations as well as for monitoring and notification. It also inventories the applications on these devices and creates topology diagrams of hardware and software relationships. This information is then available for federation into the MetaCMDB. The product’s bus architecture intelligently combines data from multiple vantage points into a meaningful whole. This simplifies management as well as the development of new product functionality, as new capabilities can be developed and deployed in a flexible and modular fashion.

EMA PerspectiveAlthough ASG is not as well known as some of its competitors, its customer list reads like a Fortune 1000 “who’s who” and includes some of the biggest companies in the world. ASG has developed a set of solutions designed to satisfy this demanding market, and is just beginning to penetrate the consciousness of the broader marketplace.

Other EMA analysts have described this vendor as a challenger to the major BSM vendors, and this is an accurate assessment. The breadth of technology coverage, the connection bus that positions ASG to easily manage technology evolution, and robust configuration management capabilities set ASG apart from the pack. These are leading edge capabilities


�0©2008 Enterprise Management Associates, Inc. All Rights Reserved. IT Management Research, Industry Analysis, and Consulting

that competing vendors are still in the process of retrofitting, and many have still not addressed the challenges of SOA and Web Services.

One of ASG’s challenges is that its primary competitors in the enterprise market are very large and well-known companies such as IBM and CA. Another is that, although ASG’s products certainly measure up, brand recognition is still lacking. Customer references and expanded media cov-erage can help address these issues.

ASG offers some compelling strengths. Anticipating infrastructure sprawl, widely distributed applications, and the need for federated management of dissimilar data sources, ASG has made all the right moves, product-wise. The focus on service-driven management is a timely message, and the customer list is impressive. ASG’s products hold up under comparison with best of breed products across the industry. As distributed applica-tions become the rule rather than the exception, ASG has all the bases covered and is well-positioned as a contender in the enterprise application management space.

About ASG | www.asg.comASG provides software solutions to over 85 percent of the world’s largest companies. Through its comprehensive Business Service Management (BSM) solution, Business Service Platform™, ASG is an established BSM provider with a strong heritage in Content, Metadata, Applications, Operations, Performance, Infrastructure, and Identity Management technologies. ASG enables clients to reduce costs, enhance customer service, meet business objectives, and truly go beyond BSM. Founded in 1986, ASG is a privately held company based in Naples, Florida, USA, with more than 90 offices around the world.

ASG’s products hold up under comparison with best of breed products across the industry. As distributed applications

become the rule rather than the exception, ASG has all the bases covered and is well-positioned as a contender in the enterprise application management space.

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