IT Asset Mapping System for Relationship Visibility
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Solution Overview
Problem
Current products lack a centralized asset management and mapping tool for global infrastructure operations, making it difficult to track asset health, relationships, issues, and configuration changes, and to determine the impact of configuration item problems.
Innovation Solution
An automated framework that sends instructions to assets in a networked IT infrastructure to generate answer files, copies data from these files to a mapping system, tracks and logs events, validates data, and determines standardized reporting data to map relationships between hardware and software assets.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Loss of information
If a centralized asset management and mapping tool is implemented, then asset tracking and relationship mapping capability is improved, but system complexity and implementation cost increase
Solution Approach 1:
The system segments asset management into distinct functional modules: data collection from assets, relationship mapping engine, impact analysis calculator, and reporting interface. Each module handles specific aspects of asset management independently, reducing overall system complexity while maintaining comprehensive functionality.
Solution Approach 2:
The patent introduces an intermediary mapping system that sits between the diverse asset infrastructure and the management interface. This intermediary layer standardizes data collection from different asset types and translates it into unified relationship mappings, simplifying the complexity of directly managing heterogeneous assets.
2Loss of information
If comprehensive asset data collection and mapping is performed, then asset relationship visibility is improved, but data processing time and computational resources increase
Solution Approach 1:
The system performs preliminary actions by continuously collecting and storing asset data in standardized formats before impact analysis is needed. Relationship mappings are pre-computed and maintained in the database, so when an impact analysis is requested, the system can quickly retrieve pre-established relationships rather than computing them in real-time.
Solution Approach 2:
The patent creates simplified copies of asset relationships in the mapping system database. Instead of querying the actual complex infrastructure each time, the system maintains replicated relationship data structures that can be quickly queried for impact analysis, reducing processing time while preserving relationship accuracy.
Data Source
AI summary
A method comprising performing, by at least one processor, operations including: sending instructions to an asset among various hardware and software assets in a networked information technology infrastructure to cause the asset to generate an answer file; copying data from the generated answer file to memory of a mapping system; tracking and logging events associated with the copying of the data; validating the copied data based on the logged events; determining standardized reporting data from the validated data in the memory of the mapping system; saving the standardized reporting data in a data structure formatted for the various hardware and software assets; applying an algorithm to the saved data structure to determine a relationship between the various hardware and software assets; and linking the determined relationship between the various hardware and software assets to the saved data structure.