Announcing the general availability of Service Map solution

Modern applications are complex, multi-tier, business-service systems that might span multiple datacenters and cloud hosting environments. To manage these applications and ensure they meet their SLA, you need an end-to-end view that ties together the different application components and infrastructure services.

I am excited to announce the general availability of Service Map, which enables you to automatically discover and build a common reference map of dependencies across servers, processes, and third-party services in real-time. Using Service Map, you can isolate problems and accelerate root-cause analysis by visualizing process and server dependencies. You can manage incidents and improve SLAs by viewing cascading alerts, failed connections, load-balancing issues, and rogue clients. You can also make sure that nothing is left behind during migrations with the help of detailed process and server dependency inventory.

One customer, Inframon, uses Service Map to help meet stringent compliance requirements and view their entire network, end-to-end.  “The standard view in OMS is great, but Service Map is the first view we go to. It’s like the instant, let’s see what the breadth of the problem is, and then work through it,” says Gordon McKenna, CEO and Microsoft MVP.  “We can also see patch and alert information. It just gives us that fuller picture of the services we’re offering, how we’re actually managing them, and how well we’re looking after these hosts.”

Comprehensive view of app components and infrastructure services

When performance issues and outages occur, a top challenge is isolating the source of the problem. Without visibility to how systems and application components are interconnected, team members join a bridge call, each with their own tools and data, and often the finger-pointing begins.

By providing automatic discovery of dependencies across any workload with zero pre-definition required, Service Map removes the guesswork that’s required to isolate the problem domain. With a common reference point, teams can quickly focus on the problem area, reduce mean time to resolution (MTTR), and involve fewer resources.

Comprehensive view of app components and infrastructure services

Improved SLA with proactive incident management

A consistent challenge for teams monitoring and supporting critical business applications is sifting through the noise of existing alerts and performance metrics to focus on the ones that matter. Without the ability to quickly identify where to focus, it is impossible for operations teams to become more proactive in identifying and resolving issues before they affect customers.

Service Map provides visibility to alerts and security issues that affect dependencies across interconnected systems. With this visibility, you can quickly identify changes that may affect application performance, issues with connectivity such as misconfigured firewall rules, or performance spikes that may ripple through to affect end-users – all before your SLAs are impacted.

Better together with OMS Solutions

Through Service Map’s automatic dependency discovery and mapping, users can visualize the data from multiple OMS solutions such as Log Analytics, Change Tracking, Update Management, and Security, all in context. Rather than looking at individual types of data, you can now see all data that’s related to the systems you care about most, as well as data on their dependencies.

Service Map’s automatic dependency discovery and mapping

Azure migration assurance

In addition to enhancing your troubleshooting and root-cause analysis, Service Map helps to expedite your app and workload migrations, accelerating your transition to the cloud. Service Map helps you eliminate the guesswork of problem isolation, identify surprise connections and broken links in your environment, and perform Azure migrations knowing that critical systems and endpoints won’t be left behind. Service Map provides a REST API that makes it easy to pull data on dependencies into your existing tools and processes.

This solution is available as part of Insight & Analytics in Microsoft Operations Management Suite (OMS). Try today by activating your free account.

To learn more visit the documentation page and Insight & Analytics webpage.

Nick Burling
Principal Program Manager
Enterprise Cloud Management Team