Driving Agility: Discovery, Documenting & Diagramming
BY IT GLUE | July 07, 2020
As an IT professional, you’re playing the part of both a detective and a doctor on a daily basis. Whether you’re developing an IT environment from the ground up, or walking into one set up by your predecessor, there’s a discovery process involved. In the case of the latter, the challenge might be figuring out what backwards logic resulted in the convoluted web of workstations and servers. The only way you’ll be able to troubleshoot issues, or optimize an IT environment, is by having a complete and accurate understanding of its individual components and how everything fits together. Having the agility to remedy issues quickly, or reconfigure things to meet changing business needs relies on this understanding.
Automated Network Discover, Documenting & Diagramming
Manually doing this is a heavy lift, to say the least. You’re either looking at previously made diagrams and documentation that may or may not be accurate, or making a site visit any relying on your eyes and word-of-mouth. In both cases, there’s a high margin of error, and it’s just plain inefficient. So what’s the alternative? Network Glue.
Network Glue is a product that automatically discovers all devices on a network and all users from on-premises and hybrid environments. It then documents all this information within IT Glue, and illustrates the entire system in a neat and easy to interpret diagram. You get a complete picture of an entire IT ecosystem, and best of all, it’s updated routinely so you can be sure that the information you’re looking at is always the most recent.
Let’s take a look at some case studies.
Scenario 1: Natural Disaster
A sudden earthquake damaged a remote office location. While most of the essential components of the office’s IT are up and running, operations are still significantly handicapped and need to be back online ASAP to support core business functions. You can’t make a site visit but need to assess what systems are down, fix whatever you can remotely, and then walk through someone onsite to do the rest.
The first step is assessing the situation. You log into Network Glue and sync information to see what parts of IT environments are working fine and where the problems lie. Network Glue’s diagrams help you understand right away where the problems lie, what near-term “bandaid” solutions can be applied. You see that some servers and devices are offline and need to determine whether the issues concern the hardware, operating system or a third-party service problem. Knowing where to look lets you narrow your assessment, and direct onsite personnel to ensure hardware is intact, and if not, how to replace components that may have been damaged.
Scenario 2: Economic Downturn
A number of IT service providers are closing shop, leaving clients hanging and looking for someone new to step in and take care of their IT infrastructure. Great for you, but you’re working with a bare bones crew of employees, and question whether you have the capacity. The need for additional revenue, however, doesn’t give you much choice.
Luckily, onboarding new clients has been streamlined. Manually documenting networks and AD users is a thing of a past, since Network Glue does much of the heavy lifting. The added benefit is that the network diagram acts as a springboard for troubleshooting any issues an end user might submit a service ticket for, thereby expediting the process and making it so techs and helpdesk team members can service more tickets in less time.
Want a deeper look at how Network Glue makes organizations more agile through its ability to automatically discover, document and diagram networks? Request a demo!
