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Application Discovery

Purpose

Application Discovery is a Clarity Transform dashboard in three tabs that slices the application estate by scope, criticality, environment, owner, vendor, technology stack and architecture type. It answers the question: what are we migrating and who owns it? The on-screen subtitle reads: "Comprehensive view of your application portfolio including ownership, technology landscape, and business context."

It is read-only: nothing on it changes data. Its figures come from the Application records in the CMDB, so they are only as good as the fields filled in on those records.

Where to find it

Discover → Data Analysis → Application Discovery. The page header is Application Discovery Dashboard.

What you see

Tabs

  • Executive Summary: the cards Total Applications, In Scope, Out of Scope and Unscoped, and the charts In-Scope vs Out-of-Scope (Applications), Apps by Criticality, Apps by Environment and Apps by Type.
  • Portfolio Breakdown: the cards Unique Owners, Unique Vendors, Business Units and Avg Apps per Owner, and the charts Apps by Owner (Top 10), Apps by Business Unit and Apps by Vendor (Top 10).
  • Technology Landscape: the cards Platforms, Tech Stacks, Architecture Types and Install Types, and the charts Apps by Platform, Architecture Types, Technology Stack, Data Classification and Install Type Distribution.

The In Scope, Out of Scope and Unscoped cards also show their share of Total Applications as a whole-number percentage.

Each tab loads its figures the first time you open it, and keeps them until you reload the page. Reload the page to see changes made to the Application records since it opened. If a tab's figures cannot be loaded, the page shows no error message: the cards do not update and the charts stay blank or keep their loading spinner. Reload the page, and if that does not help, report it.

Charts

Hover over a chart for its values. On the doughnut charts the tooltip gives the count and the percentage. The Top 10 charts list the largest value at the top.

Each chart has icons at its top right: Restore, which resets the chart's view (it does not reload the data), and Save as Image, which downloads the chart as a picture. Bar charts also have Zoom and Zoom Reset icons.

A chart with nothing to show displays a message instead, for example "No criticality data available", "No environment data available", "No application type data available" or "No data available". This means no application has a value in that field yet.

Values

The charts group applications by the values of their fields on the Application record. The values configured for those fields under Settings → Field Management → Dropdown Lists are:

  • Criticality: High, Medium, Low
  • Environment: Production, Pre-Production, UAT, Test, Development, DR
  • Application Type: COTS, Home Grown, SaaS, End User Computing (EUC)
  • Platform: Windows, Unix, Linux, AWS, Azure, Google Cloud Platform, AS400, Mainframe
  • Architecture Type: Client Server, N-tier, Web based, Other
  • Technology Stack: .net, Java, Ruby on Rails, Python, Serverless, LAMP
  • Data Classification: Top Secret, Secret, Official
  • Install Type: On Premises, Cloud, Hybrid, Third party hosted

How to

Baseline the application estate

  1. Go to Discover → Data Analysis → Application Discovery. The Executive Summary tab opens.
  2. Read Total Applications against In Scope, Out of Scope and Unscoped.
  3. Select Portfolio Breakdown to see the owners, business units and vendors to engage.
  4. Select Technology Landscape to see the platforms, technology stacks and install types.

To change an application's fields, edit its record on the Application grid, then reload the dashboard.

Find gaps in the application records

  1. On the Executive Summary tab, read Unscoped. Each unscoped application still needs a scope decision on Rationalise.
  2. Look for charts that show a "No ... data available" message. No application has a value in the field behind that chart.
  3. Use Application Data Quality to find the individual records with missing fields.