Cloud Resource Tag Discovery and CMDB Correlation
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Solution Overview
Problem
Public cloud users face challenges in correlating and managing tagged resources across both public cloud and managed network environments, as existing tagging systems are not effective in discovering and organizing configuration items spread across multiple providers.
Innovation Solution
A remote network management platform queries public cloud provider APIs to obtain tags associated with resources, stores them in a database, and associates these tags with configuration items, enabling consistent identification and management of resources across multiple cloud providers.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Ease of operation
If public cloud users employ a remote network management platform for overall administration, then network and cloud resources can be centrally managed, but tags are unable to correlate discovered configuration items and services spread across the public cloud and the managed network
Solution Approach 1:
The patent introduces a configuration management database (CMDB) as an intermediary system that receives tags from the public cloud provider and correlates them with configuration items in the managed network. The CMDB acts as a mediator between the public cloud tagging system and the network management platform, enabling information correlation that would otherwise be lost. This resolves the contradiction by maintaining centralized management capability while restoring tag correlation through the intermediary CMDB system.
2Reliability
If tags are stored in a database and associated with configuration items, then consistent identification of resources across multiple cloud providers is enabled, but system complexity increases
Solution Approach 1:
The patent implements a universal tagging approach where the same CMDB infrastructure handles tags from multiple different cloud providers (AWS, Azure, Google Cloud) using a unified database schema and correlation mechanism. This multi-functional system provides consistent resource identification across diverse cloud environments without requiring separate tagging systems for each provider, thereby improving reliability while managing complexity through standardization.
3Productivity
If configuration items are discovered and tagged in the cloud-based service, then resource organization and search capability improve, but the process of discovering and storing tags increases operational steps
Solution Approach 1:
The patent performs tag discovery as a preliminary action during the configuration item discovery process. When configuration items are first discovered in the cloud-based service, the system simultaneously queries for associated tags and stores them in the CMDB before the configuration items are fully processed. This preliminary tag collection eliminates the need for subsequent separate tag discovery operations, improving search efficiency while reducing overall processing time through action consolidation.
Data Source
AI summary
A system may contain a computational instance including persistent storage that maintains a discovery pattern and credentials for a cloud-based service, where the cloud-based service provides a remote computing infrastructure. The system may also contain one or more processors configured to: remotely access, using the credentials, the cloud-based service; execute the discovery pattern to obtain copies of tags configured in the cloud-based service, where the tags each include key fields, value fields, and resource identifier fields, and where the resource identifier fields uniquely specify respective computational resources of the cloud-based service; associate the tags that were discovered to configuration item representations of the respective computational resources; and store, in the persistent storage, the tags and their associations to the configuration item representations.