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NETWORK VISUALISATION
When you look at management frameworks such as ITIL and ISO27001 , you ’ ll also see terms defined such as ‘ information assets ’ and ‘ service assets ’ to help focus control and governance on components and data critical to the organisation . In data centres the physical infrastructure such as power strips , patch panels and cabling are important in managing space and connectivity , so we may use the term ‘ inventory ’ to cover all components used in the delivery of IT services . In the interests of completeness , I ’ ll assume asset management could be any component you want to identify , manage and control for any management purpose often held in a mix of spreadsheets and databases .
diagrams refreshed from the same spreadsheet . Simple , quick , plus fewer errors than manually cutting and pasting data into diagrams .
Look at the various Visio extensions or
Step 2 utilities that are available online ( mostly free ) to speed up specific types of diagramming .
Invest in training for at least one person in
Step 3 each IT team to be a visualisation subject matter expert . They can then guide and advise on diagramming formats , symbols , methods , templates and standards so that it ’ s simple for everyone to use . Otherwise there is no consistency and time is wasted unnecessarily re-inventing formats and conventions .
Look at consolidating asset and inventory
Step 4 data into as few repositories as possible to make maintenance and data reuse simpler . It does often results in mixing asset data with non-asset components such as cabling , power , internal developed software , etc . to support capacity and consolidation planning . The database repository could be home grown , though the better solution would be a commercial system such as a CMDB which already has in-built reporting and audit trails , possibly even with some visualisation capability .
Dependencies between assets is a bit more complicated as there are commercial , physical , logical and business dependencies to consider when deciding on the data to be managed along with the ‘ asset ’. A server can be connected to multiple logical networks ( LAN / SAN / Virtual / remote management ) so it always requires multiple diagrams to show how assets are connected . Simple questions such as , how secure is our user data ? Or , how resilient are our systems to a power outage ? Will require a lot of understanding of dependencies before an accurate risk assessment can be undertaken . Knowledge of assets alone is not enough for typical change impact and risk information needs as you can ’ t map dependencies between assets without an asset list to start with .
First steps to visualisation As you leave the baggage of unwanted spreadsheets with orphaned data behind , you then face the need to reduce the effort of creating and maintaining asset visualisations . Where possible , we want to automate both the data updating and the visualisation . It isn ’ t a simple task so here are a few words of advice on how to progress :
Buy a book or look online to learn how to
Step 1 use MS Visio to leverage the data linking features in the professional version . In just a few minutes you can refresh a diagram from data in a spreadsheet or database . In a few more minutes , you can have multiple
Investigate the use of specialist toolsets for
Step 5 database driven visualisation . If you have
more than 1000 assets , multiple sites , or distributed IT design and support , then automated visualisation is needed to cope with the scale of medium or large enterprises . If manually drawing 100 racks worth of assets can be reduced from 15 to 25 days down to a 15-minute overnight batch process , the workload reduction and improvement in accuracy is easy to understand . If you have 1000 racks , 200 network diagrams and 600 host / application service maps it becomes even more beneficial to adopt automated techniques .
The first three steps to improving asset visualisation are really about improving skills and methods , while steps four and five then implement the methods on common data sources . When both methods and data come together , the result is improved control and governance across technology platforms and teams . How much confidence in a supplier of IT services would you have if they didn ’ t maintain their own systems documentation ? Would you believe the bills , the reasons for outages or the delays in responding to simple governance questions asked by your own management ?
I find it worrying that planned changes still result in the majority of service disruption experienced by users . The ITIL framework has been around for 20 years , and there are still many organisations that haven ’ t managed to map which servers are involved in delivering which business processes . No wonder many users and incident managers get the Monday morning blues after weekend updates . More recently we see that cyber attacks continue to reveal the internal challenges of managing change , risk and communication about the IT systems vulnerabilities . Getting the basics right , such as knowing what you have , where it is and what it does is reliant on managing knowledge of assets and understanding their dependencies . One day it may become common sense to understand your own systems . •
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