Archi, jArchi and Heat Maps/RAG Status Maps

General Geekery

Update… and that’s why you don’t publish until your brain stops working…

I’ve updated the script to support a colour picker, and any number of colours (up to the number of values in the selected property)


I recently had a request to highlight all applications which store Personally Identifiable Information (PII) as well as “Sensitive PII” in use within an organisation. I already had the data available as “Properties” stored against each element within a Landscape view. There are a number of artefacts that could be produced from this, firstly I could export the view as a CSV, import this into a spreadsheet, and display the data as a table, however, I also wanted to provide a “heat map” view of the landscape, red being “Sensitive PII”, amber being “PII” and green being “none”.

Rather than spend the time in Archi reviewing each property and manually applying the colour…

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By Alberto D Mendoza

Will McKinsey be the first ‘big consultancy’ that gets (enterprise) architecture right?

R&A IT Strategy & Architecture

I’ve experienced and seen quite a bit of what the ‘big consultancies’ tell organisations about (enterprise) architecture and over the years I’ve seen quite a bit that in my observation does more harm than good, sometimes even serious harm, hundreds of millions of dollars wasted kind of harm. The approaches promoted by ‘big consultancy’ are generally based on assumptions that will not withstand a bit of scrutiny, let alone the confrontation with the actual reality of complex Business-IT landscapes in larger organisations. There is an overabundance of simplistic and logically sounding advise which often has little impact on the problems at hand.

Advise that sells better than harsh realism, though.

The situation in academia is not much better. Here we sometimes even see even more impractical approaches, which look really ‘sciency’, formulas and all, which are about as useful as applying Einstein’s relativity theory to the problem of, say, technical…

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By Alberto D Mendoza

Archimate, the gateway into Enterprise Architecture

This blog of mine has been kicking around, sitting unused since 2014 when I finished the MBA. After a year of learning about what Enterprise Architecture is, and sharing a few other Enterprise Architecture (EA for short) posts, I finally have a purpose for this blog, and it is to tell (and keep track) of my journey into this not-so-new but interesting practice. The area itself is not relevant to what I do on my day-to-day IT Analyst job, but it has been a huge influence in getting better at it.

There’s a lot more to EA than Archimate, and I hope to explore and share a lot of it via this blog. The notation language gave me a lot of insight into thinking in terms of Architecture, and in terms of Enterprise. There’s also been a lot of thinking on opportunities for capturing current state and how to deal with unstructured data. I hope to finally use this blog to explore my adventure into the world of Enterprise Architecture, Architecture Artifacts, frameworks, ontologies, knowledge graphs, etc.


Back in October of 2017, I was growing a bit frustrated with the way we were doing architecture diagrams within our wiki site. Although I had some successes in representing system architecture with the build-in graphic tool, it was frustrating not be able to reuse/recycle the elements in these diagrams, the lack of depth in them (no metadata or click thru), and the biggest challenge of all, which is the same with all knowledge-base efforts, maintain them current.

By then I was working with a hand full of application admins on about a dozen applications, with a few more coming down to my plate. With so many apps, and the diversity of their environments, we had a huge need for documenting their architecture as much as possible.  With the advent of the Windows 2008r2 EOL, this provided a good opportunity to revisit each application’s architecture in detail.

With architecture diagrams, depending on the perspective and needs, I would normally draw a few diagrams per app: infrastructure (network and servers), applications components and integrations, data structures and ETL processes (if any). I say basic diagrams as each had no more than a dozen or so objects in them. If I’m to revisit twelve Applications, I was going to end up easily drawing (and maintain) thousands of graphical objects.  No way I’m doing that manually. No way I’ll be able to maintain them up-to-date. I need a better way of doing diagrams.

I don’t feel particularly happy about setting up a proprietary stack to maintain documentation, much less one built on Microsoft (which is my background). I once set up a Sharepoint and a SCCM server while I was studying for the MCSE. There’s potential in the idea, but Visio would be a solution with a lot of technical compromises.

Either way, the diagramming tool is only half the question, the other half is the visual language.  Tweaking visual objects so they could convey more context to the reader is daunting. If you want to represent a device, a network, a process, or an individual, diagramming was becoming purely an exercise in creativity, rather than a communication tool.  There’s an iconography with Cisco and once you learn their meaning, these diagrams become natural part of the learning process. To this day they even have official stencils for Visio.

Now there’s plenty of iconography already available on the internet to represent every aspect of IT architecture, but that was part of the problem, I would have to write a legend in each diagram or a guide on how to read boxes, circles, and lines. There’s just so much and basically having to start all over again when there was a need for a new diagram or point of view, its all just too much. It was then that chatting with my next door office mate he pointed me to look into this app called Archi and ‘Archimate’.

At first I didn’t understand what Archimate was all about, it looks like a boiled down UML, something I once tried but got lost in, also instead of being an universal notation, is specific to architecture, Enterprise Architecture(?). I was intrigued.

For the next few months I tried to understand Archimate, and the whole concept behind what EA is all about. In my years in IT experience I did not know this practice was actually formalized and adopted by the ISO. I had been so focused on service management frameworks like ITIL and Microsoft Operating Framework, that I completely missed the boat on EA. I had heard of Zachmann’s architecture framework, but I thought it was no more than an academic exercise. Boy was I so wrong!

After a couple of months setting up a test environment, I customized some reports from my asset management system to conform with the CSV import. The file is exported and I’m able to tweak it. I see on the XML file that elements get created and assigned a Universal Unique Identifier (UUID), so a couple of tweaks to the inventory database, a few tweaks on the reports logic, and now I have a central repository for my Archimate elements. One server in my Asset Management ==> One Archimate Node… or should it be an Archimate Device? Well, either way… this works. By March 2018 I had my first ‘Archimate Model’ and had published a new Wiki article with an embedded image of my diagrams. Time to submit a request for a real server and get an Archimate book.

 

By Alberto D Mendoza

Business Motivation Model (BMM) mapping to ArchiMate

Business Motivation Model (BMM) is a specification by the Object Management Group (OMG), current version is 1.3 (2015). BMM can be used to model motivational aspects of the business. BMM concepts can be mapped to ArchiMate (3) concepts. BMM overview is shown in the figure below. BMM overview mapping to ArchiMate concepts is shown in the diagram below.

Source: Business Motivation Model (BMM) mapping to ArchiMate

By Alberto D Mendoza

Presenting Decentralized Cloud Architecture with Archimate

I am a firm believer in using #ArchiMate not only as a modelling language but also as a communication vehicle on software architecture. This article presents examples of ArchiMate being used to illustrate an #AWS cloud architecture, and my thoughts on the effects of cloud transformation. Plus, it should be fun to read!

www.linkedin.com/pulse/presenting-decentralized-cloud-architecture-archimate-tero-karttunen

ArchiMate Patterns – Technology Layer

General Geekery

The technology represents the low level hardware, software and connectivity.

Much like last weeks Application Layer post, I’ll split this out for the basic pattern, and then a number of different examples which will hopefully make some sense.

Pattern

Node

A node represents a computational or physical resource that hosts, manipulates, or interacts with other computational or physical resources.

ArchiMate 3

The “Node” is the most generic representation of a server. I tend to think of the node as the container for operating system, system software, artefacts and the physical hardware.

Device

A device is a physical IT resource upon which system software and artifacts may be stored or deployed for execution.

ArchiMate 3

The usage of ArchiMate and Archi models should be derived from the questions that you want to answer. When I first began modelling, I wanted to separate the logical server (node) from the physical or virtual…

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By Alberto D Mendoza

Use jArchi to draw Archi relations from Azure service map

ICT things I find interesting enough to share

This blogpost is about a script…

Azure Service map

Azure service map is a really cool thing.  It basically shows you all network connections your servers make when running.  You can view this information in a table or in a visual form.

Picture taken from: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-monitor/insights/service-map Out of the box service map functionality.  The script we discuss here will create something similar directly in Archi..

Now, does this look interesting?  Sure it does, I see the sever, the connections it makes to other servers, I see the processes that start the connections…  all of that in an easy to use interface.  When migrating to cloud this is really valuable information.  When doing firewall projects or management also.  It helps you decide if you should open that port or not.  There are more cases where this information is a huge time saver.

I am not going to write on how to setup this, the microsoft…

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By Alberto D Mendoza

“Enterprise Architecture As A Service” – Why?

The Open Group Blog

By Terry Blevins, Fellow of The Open Group, Enterprise Architect at Enterprise Wise LLC

The previous TOGAF® User Group meeting was held by The Open Group in London on April 18, 2018. In that meeting, a number of very interesting questions were asked by the attendees. One topic in question was “Enterprise Architecture (EA) As A Service”.  Was “EA As A Service” considered possible, and/or useful? And if so, why? Great questions!

My immediate reaction to these questions was – yes Enterprise Architecture could, and in my opinion should, be offered through a set of services, and yes it would be very useful. An unasked question was what would it be like – but that’s another blog!

First, I guess I should describe what I mean by “EA As A Service” and the best way to do this is in comparison to something – but I am having…

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By Alberto D Mendoza