Introduction

Accelerate cloud transformations, reduce migration risk, and govern with confidence. CloudSphere’s automated software discovers and maps even the most complex applications across hybrid environments without having to install agents. A key step in any cloud transformation plan is a current state analysis of the entire IT estate that shows your infrastructure, applications, and how those workloads are connected.  

This article will introduce you to the key areas of the tool to enable you to get up and running quickly.

Top Navigation Menu

The main navigation menu is available at the top header and is divided into five primary sections:

• Discovery - Configure scanning and data gathering
• Explorer - View inventory and the discovered assets
• Reports - View basic reports
• Insight Consoles - View interactive dashboards and reports
• Settings - Configure system settings

Discovery

Discovery is where you will configure your discovery scan jobs to gather inventory data. In addition to having at least one scanning appliance deployed, scan jobs require two key pieces of information from you:

• Appliances - Listing of all virtual appliances deployed and registered to the tenant
• Scan Jobs - Listing of all configured jobs within the tenant
• Scopes - Where to perform the scan(s). Usually described as a list of Subnets, IP Ranges, Individual IPs, or hostnames.
• Keychains - Stores credentials for access as part of environment scanning

Credentials are stored in secure keychains that can either be stored in the CloudSphere cloud or directly on your appliance.

Explorer

Explorer is where you will view the details of what has been discovered in your environment. It includes the following key categories:

• Services - Logical groupings of servers and applications based on the discovered dependencies and communication information.
• Servers - physical, virtual, and cloud servers.
• Applications - Instances of software that have been discovered on the servers.

By clicking any of the categories or subcategories, you will see a list of assets of that type.

Double-clicking an item in the list will show you additional details and views of the asset in question.

This section is often for internal use, but can allow for the creation of Process Search and Found Group Inventory reports

This is the central hub for most tabular reporting and all of the interactive dashboard reporting available in the platform.  

Clicking this link will open a new tab with the reporting engine and the main reporting consoles include:

• Insight Console 
• Migration Console
• Optimization Console
• Modernization Console
• Executive Summary

The reports are covered in further detail in another article, so please refer to that article for additional information on each console

Settings

These are mostly administrative and will be addressed in further detail in another article.