Introduction
OpsRamp offers two constructs to track relationships between your managed resources and reason about the impact the resources have on each other:
- Topology Maps: Represent connections between resources at the network and application levels.
- Service Maps: Represent logical relationships between resources that participate in the same IT service.
Topology maps
OpsRamp automatically builds a topology map from relationships that it gathers during discovery. Each node in a topology map represents a managed resource and an edge between nodes represents the type of connection between those resources. For example, a topology map may have an edge between a server and switch, representing the layer 2 network connectivity between them.
You can use a topology map to visualize and explore connectivity structures in your environment. You can also use maps to model the impact of planned changes. For example, to determine which servers will lose connectivity if you take down a switch for maintenance.
Topology Map
Service maps
Your organization may be responsible for managing different types of IT services:
- applications (for example, an order management application)
- infrastructure services (for example, Wi-Fi for the office).
IT resources (for example, servers, switches, and routers) deployed in your environment participate (directly or indirectly) in some IT service that serves end users. Therefore, it is important to have line of sight between IT resources and their impact on users.
To manage these service-supporting resources effectively, you must be able to answer questions such as the following:
- Are all the resources supporting my IT service up and running?
- Which users are affected if I reboot these servers for maintenance?
- Did users of this service experience any downtime in the last month?
OpsRamp’s service maps offer a way to organize your IT resources into a hierarchical structure, so that you can easily tie the health of your resources to end user impact.
The following figure shows the service map for a web application. The web application consisting of an application server, a database server, and a load balancer. The node “users of my app” represents users of the application. If your application server, database server or load balancer becomes unavailable, then your users are impacted. The service maps allows you to automatically determine when end users are impacted and alert you to these conditions.
