I was asked to provide a health check with insights into the clients Discovery operations. I created a custom application called Pithos – a python-based application which collected data from CMDB and Discovery. This data was then imported into Power BI and we were able to present the following back to the client:

• High disk utilisation
• Presence of core dumps
• Segregated architecture, but no network segregation
• Sensitive data such as plaintext usernames and passwords stored in unstructured data fields
• Scan schedules impacting performance

This was followed up with a roadmap of improvements for the client with the option of being delivered by my company.

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I was responsible for the improving the managed service architecture of a multi-year service contract already in-flight. There had been significant issues raised over the quality of the service up until my engagemement.

The main complaints were:

• Support resource not seen to be solving any reported issues
• Missing roadmap meetings
• Not feeling the value

An action plan and strategy was put in place, for me to conduct quarterly service reviews where I would present the latest features of the products and recommend strategy for upgrade and utilisation of these features, including any enhancements we could provide to the service.

The support resource issue was identified as being a follow on outcome of the customer not willing to log tickets and instead engaging the named resource directly. In this way the resource was being treated as a contractor and being asked to work on various unspecified tasks and issues. In discussing the issue with the client, I suggested they could either continue with no SLAs and agree to the support resource under 1-day per week effort, or that in order for us to track performance and ensure requests were deailt with, they would need to engage with the service and log tickets.

However, as many of the requests would have been out of the scope of the service and meant engagement with professional services, they did not want to implement this change. They prefered to carry on under the existing arrangement, without further complaint.

During this time I was also able to implement health checks for them and identify a number of security vulnerabilites which were esclated to their CISO. One was the identification of plaintext username/password strings in running processes, and the other was production level software running under a non-service account credential.

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I was approached by the account management team for a US coffee brand to implement SSL Certificate Discovery for their network, as they were having issues with expiring certificates causing application failures.

During deployment one challenge was the need to expand the tool to query the Windows stores and resolve an issue where Azure agents would automatically issue and manage short-term 24 hour expiries – which significantly skewed the analytics. These certificates were identified and excluded from reporting.

The solution was deployed quickly and there was time to develop additional analytics and dashboards to allow the account team to quickly export a list of all certificate expiry dates.

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A major UK retailer was looking to perform a datacenter assessment to understand the infrastructure currently deployed within the DC and the relationships between the infrastructure. This was in preparation for a cloud migration.

The chose ITAM solution for discovering their infrastructure was BMC Discovery. The requirements included deployment, data gathering, knowledge transfer, and application architecture modelling. This was delivered over a 6-week period.

The end result was that the retailer were able to identify their application dependencies in order to plan the move and identify assets such as servers which were in decommissioned status but still live. As a value add I also provided them detailed reporting into single-point-of-failure devices (servers configured with only one switch) and valuable software lifecycle data.

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Over the years I built a relationship with this global fashion brand in facilitating their ongoing digital transformation. The first engagement was in architecting and implementing a number of critical integrations with their CMDB from various data sources, allowing them to gain full central visiblity of their enterprise infrastructure. Later, I was again called upon to re-architect and extend the earlier integrations in preparation for a move of CMDB cloud platforms.

As a Principle Solutions Architect I also oversaw the technical delivery of their managed services – consulting on roadmaps and strategy with the client. I built a trusting working relationship and also proposed and worked on implementing a new feature of exception reporting, which helped them to identify, understand and narrow down the discrepencies between source data and CMDB data. The result was clear visibility and improved data quality of their CMDB.

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I developed this with a mixture of Bash and Python, exporting the results to JSON and then converting to CSV. All code was handed to the client.

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