How efficient is your discovery process? Can you maintain an up-to-date picture when the pace of change is so rapid, and can you get a single view when you’ve got assets in multiple locations?

That level of efficiency is essential when you’re planning or carrying out a migration or managing a major incident. It can reduce your costs when you can easily identify redundant assets or don’t have to waste staff time trying to discover complex dependencies.

With a complete, up-to-date picture, you can make better decisions about infrastructure, respond rapidly to business demands and help create a more agile organization. And, you can be confident that all of your assets meet compliance requirements and service level agreements.

The benefits are clear, but there’s a problem. Discovery can be complex and time-consuming if you use traditional manual methods. Automation is essential.

Tracking Multiple Environments

With some assets in a data center, others in a public cloud, and maybe more in a private cloud, it can be difficult to get a single view of the entire infrastructure. With analysts forecasting that businesses will increasingly utilize multiple clouds, the problem will only increase.

IT teams will have to track assets across multiple suppliers with different standards of security and compliance. It can also be difficult to identify and monitor dependencies across multiple environments.

A lack of accurate information can lead to asset sprawl, variable performance and problems identifying causes in the event of an incident. It can also be difficult to manage assets efficiently and optimize their performance and usage.

By using an automated system like VTG’s ZENfra^TM, you can reduce the time spent on tracking assets across all environments and create a single view.

Managing Change

Keeping your asset inventory up to date can also be a problem, particularly when business units or cloud vendors make changes or add new services and applications.

Automated assessment and discovery tools like ZENfra^TM keep multiple data-points for comparison based on date and time. They provide detailed reports, which help identify new or changed infrastructure assets, as well as assets that may be underperforming, reaching service milestones or proving unreliable.

Responding to Incidents

IT problems can have a serious impact on customer and user experience, so it’s essential to have complete, up-to-date information on the assets and dependencies that support critical applications and services.

A comprehensive picture helps you quickly resolve issues before they have a business impact, or plan proactive maintenance on assets that may be prone to failure. By using the information, you can maximize uptime and ensure you meet SLAs.

Reducing Migration Time and Costs

Discovery and planning represent a significant proportion of total migration time and costs. However, accurate, up-to-date inventory is essential to successful migration, so it pays to avoid shortcuts.

Automation tools eliminate the many small, time-consuming tasks of discovery, reporting and monitoring change during migration. Tools like ZENfra^TM, for example, are capable of reducing migration times by 30 to 40 percent and cutting costs by around 25 percent, compared to traditional in-house methods.

Find out more

If you would like to know more about ZENfra^TM or our discovery services, please check out the articles and infographics on our website.