Application Stack Review and Refinement Overview

Important:The product name for this user guide has changed from Foundation and Cloudscape to Business Service Discovery and Migration Planning. Previous UI pages known as Foundation have changed to Business Service Discovery. Previous UI pages known as CloudScape have changed to Migration Planning.

First, it is important to understand what your starting or initial reference point will be. For most organizations, this will be the set of Application Stacks that are automatically generated by the platform using the Build App Stack function (found in Add Intelligence >> All Applications).

Some organizations may prefer to use internally documented Application-to-Server mappings as the baseline to begin this process (e.g. CMDB). In this case the Application Stacks must be manually created and workloads are assigned to them as documented.

The Business Service Discovery and Migration Planning platform has several UI features that enable bulk manipulation of server workloads and their assignment to specific application stacks. This includes the ability to filter server lists based on naming convention, shift select, and right click to assign to an existing or new Application Stack.

No matter which methodology you use as your initial reference point, you will likely use a combination of connectivity data, internal documentation (CMDB), and “tribal knowledge” during the Application Review and Refinement process.

Tip:Use the Graph in Add Intelligence >> All Applications to switch the view from Application Stacks to servers. You can sort and filter on any column in order to facilitate bulk movement of workloads to Application Stacks. Since Application Stack is one of the available columns this can also help to locate systems in the platform.

There are two techniques that can be used to review and refine automatically generated Application Stacks: 95th Resolution and Visualization with Movement. We recommend having the application owners participate in either approach as they can more rapidly iterate over known hosts based on their knowledge of the environment.

Tip:The easy way to determine which approach would work best for you is to first Build App Stacks without the 95th group. This will, generally, generate several application stack groups (AutoApp-xxx). Review these groups by selecting them and viewing the number of hosts in a group. If a group appears to have over 50 hosts, then visualize the group. This will visualize connectivity for that group, if the visualization is unworkable from either a portal performance perspective or visually because there are too many connections then you should proceed with the 95th Resolution approach, otherwise the initial auto-grouping was sufficient and you can continue with the Visualization with Movement approach.

Tip:There is a filter by number of connections slider within the left slide out on the visualization that can be used to determine highly connected servers easily within large visualizations

Tip:Before you begin creating your own application stacks it is important to come up with a good prefix and suffix structure to “tag” application. This will be very useful when looking at subsequent reports and visualizations. (e.g. ITM-XXXX-PRD would be an IT management app in my production environment vs. BUS-XXXX-DEV would be a business application in my development environment.