Custom Service Mapping pattern for installed software
A large ERP hosting provider struggled to automatically map out the shared services they had running for their customers. The first major challenge was in the discovery of all the F5 load balancer pools, since they were split over several partitions on the load balancer server. By default, the discovery patterns are not able to access anything outside the root partition.
After I resolved this, I was required to make minor adjustments to the IIS pattern to make sure the correct website for the correct customer was selected to connect to. After this, the application service seemed complete: it contained all hosts that supported the service.
However, event management was done on particular applications that ran on the webserver. The events were logged on an application of the client whenever there was an issue, so the requirement was to include those applications on the service maps as well. Not all of them of course, because for the shared webservers, multiple applications were running for multiple customers.
There was no IP connection between the website and the application, since they were on the same host. I couldn’t embed the software on the host, because this was already done for the IIS application. With an ingenious setup, including a custom CI class for the applications and a custom pattern for them, I was able to include the applications for the correct customers on the correct service maps.
Are you running into similar challenges? Do not hesitate to contact me!
