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Problem Statement

Problems

A handful of problems related to asset catalog are shared here to highlight how operations efficiency has been impacted in general.

Owner Identification is hard

In a modern api/data architecture, there is a proliferation of assets across teams. Identifying Asset Owners is a challenging task. Often times we have a problem with an application, a system or an appliance and it takes a long time to get to the owner and to discuss the issue and seek help.

Obscure and Inaccessible

Ease of use is a priority and complexity is not a necessity. Most CMDB were written before microservices and cloud native applications became popular. Not only are new attributes missing, existing ones are hard to get access, retrieve and integrate with.

No support for self-service and Innovation

Self-service platforms are being built by various platform and feature teams alike. Modern application workflows demand new attributes which are accessible to streamline tooling.

Lack of an open approach

No single consistent approach exists for system data collection for App Team, Infra Team and Ops Team. Operational configuration often resides as tribal knowledge among developers, making it invisible to operations. It is hard to give a consistently good experience to your internal and external customers when data is managed in silos.

Lack of context

Enterprise-wide initiatives are great ideas and are meant to solve specific problems. However, they do not integrate with team specific data and processes and the data available in them stays high level. Making decisions using the outdated data or context can be inefficient and this also hides the inherent risk to the business.

Self Assessment

You can try to answer the following questions and see where you sit on this.

  • How do you find all the database schemas, message queues and assets a team has?

  • Are resources like repository, schema, topics provisioned through ticketing by special admins?

  • Do you calculate impact prior to software release and exercise different levels of testing with various integration points?

  • Do you know what configuration a given microservice is running, who the owner is and how quickly the owner is contacted when problems occur?

If you did not confidently answer the above questions' answers to yourself, there may be a good chance Ops Catalog could help with your DevOps workflows.