Discovery - Overview

Value Stream Management (VSM) relies on automation. No developer wants to document things manually, especially not in a continuous delivery world. We support customers in two ways:

• With out-of-the-box integrations, allowing you to get started extracting your data within minutes. It could be a plugin (e.g. for Jenkins), it could be a scheduled job hosted by us
• With powerful APIs that enable you to build your own integrations, and leverage our platform capabilities to monitor them & keep them up-to-date.

Get the right information from the right place

VSM combines information from typical phases of your software development lifecycle. The goal is to support your development team with intuitive, up-to-date documentation - so work with them to get a good understanding of what to extract how.

• Development time - Some information like team ownership or used programming language can be pulled directly from source code repositories
• Deployment time - CI/CD adapters give an easy insight into what's deployed and when. Typically they are the easiest starting point for your documentation but need to be augmented with more information to capture all aspect
• Runtime - in addition to deployment time information, runtime information (e.g. from Kubernetes) helps you to validate what should be live (deployment) against what is really live - helping to identify & address so-called Architecture Drift
• Finally, information from supporting systems (like API management, vulnerability scanners, ...) could augment development, deployment & runtime information to obtain the full picture.

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Best Practice

Always get information from where they logically belong, e.g. deployment time information shouldn't come from a runtime environment like Kubernetes

Out-of-the box integrations

Setup

See VSM for Admins to learn about the Integration UI & setup.

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Your favorite DevOps integration is missing, or you cannot find the right details?

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Deployment Time

Discover your microservices and document their deployments using the CI/CD Integration. Through a simple manifest file in the source code repository, you can document all your microservices at build time. Understand how frequently your services are deployed and what software libraries are being used.

To simplify the implementation of the CI/CD integration we provide you with native plugins for:

• Jenkins
• GitHub Actions
• Azure Pipelines

Development Time

Often, it's easier to get information statically from the repositories instead of waiting for deployments (e.g. team responsibilities might not change based on deployments, you might want to track whether a certain repository is public or now). We offer a GitHub Repository which makes it easy to get this information directly from GitHub's public APIs.

Runtime

Augment your microservice metadata with an always up-to-date runtime view. Deploy our K8s integration to your clusters and regularly scan the environments to detect, which services are running in your cluster and how they have been deployed. Or use the Public Cloud integration to discover software running on AWS, Azure or GCP.

Another popular framework is CloudFoundry, where a straightforward API call can provide similar answers.

Supporting systems

SonarQube is a well-established tool to increase code quality & security. VSM integrates with SonarQube, helping engineering managers to understand violations in context.

VSM also helps companies to establish an API Catalog, connecting the demands from business & low-code developers with the technical API ownership of engineering teams. An out-of-the-box integration to MuleSoft Anypoint Exchange is available, while an example how to create an integration with Swagger can be found here.

The LeanIX EAM integration provides business context to understand what products are being supported by your services. The EA-Suite in turn gets more detailed technical information regarding the underlying technology of their Applications. Information about technical risk and API management can be shared.

Create your own integration

To get an appreciation how easily you can create your own integration, take a look at the Tutorials