The hidden value of an application dependency discovery manager

It's common knowledge that implementing or migrating to a cloud-based solution could provide your company with definitive business benefits.

These benefits might include increased agility, acceleration of your application development life cycle; reduced application downtime; increased security, and most importantly reduction in operational costs - with less staff time maintaining infrastructure, which result in reduced IT infrastructure costs, components and resources.

Whilst the potential benefits are extremely enticing, migrating applications to the cloud can be a complex undertaking.

Even the simplest projects can be very complex. However what is not so obvious from this view is where there are indirect dependencies that we need to know about. For example we may know that a CRM system is used by customer services and the sales team but are there other systems that take a feed? TADDM has the ability to build a topology view by taking a single instance (in this case a database) and building a complete topology view of dependencies based on this single core CI. 

Enter a dependency discovery tool. Discovery is a multilevel process that collects configuration information about the entire application infrastructure, identifying deployed software components, physical servers, network devices, virtual systems, and host data that is used in the runtime environment.

Typically a configuration management tool that helps IT operations personnel ensure and improve application availability in application environments. It provides operational staff with a top-down view of applications so that they can quickly understand the structure, status, configuration, and change history of their business-critical applications. When performance and availability problems occur, this view helps the staff to immediately isolate issues and to more effectively plan for application change without disruption.

Configurations and interdependencies are discovered across the following entities:

• Application components, such as Web servers, application servers, and databases
• System components, such as hosts, operating systems, load balancers, and database servers
• Network components, such as routers, switches, and firewalls
• Infrastructure services, such as DNS and LDAP services

The information provided provides IT Leaders with the visibility and ability to understand what they have to support the identification of workloads/workload components suitable for migration to a cloud environment.

Enterprises with some of the largest IT deployments worldwide rely on application dependency discovery tools to discover and reconcile up to 10s of millions of infrastructure components.

Typically an effective discovery tool can also provide the following benefits, to these areas of your business.

The Application Owner - ability to visualise Business Applications: to support line of business consumers enabling them to see what they have within their environment, enabling the consumers to react to incidents based on facts.

IT Operations Manager - able to triage and enhances trouble-shooting operation problems: see infrastructure dependencies of resources under events enabling accurate movement of applications, servers, or full data centres

Application Developer - can understand impact of new implementations or changes: helping identify how and where to deploy new application or troubleshoot existing applications

Service Manager - will be able to populate CMDB or other systems of record with discovered data to feed ITIL processes. It’s used by some of the biggest companies in the World to do their discoveries and populate their CMDB’s. For example Prudential in the states do a complete discovery of their 17,000 systems every night.

Overview of the IBM Tooling

IBM® Tivoli Application Dependency Discovery Manager (TADDM) is a management tool that discovers configuration items (CIs) and relationships between them. 

TADDM is highly scalable – you can run it on your laptop or it can grow to accommodate and discover a magnitude of CI’s over night. You can add discovery servers to data centres or large parts of your network or Storage servers to increase the throughput to the database.

Additionally IBM have now enhanced the tool to leverage the BigFix deployment mechanism, using the BigFix architecture to automatically deploy, execute and capture TADDM Asynchronous Scripted Discoveries saving set up time to discover the same targets using the standard TADDM method.

Why Orb Data

Orb Data is a niche Enterprise Systems Management (ESM) Company that specialises in ensuring that our customers get the most out of the tools that they use. We have unrivalled experience, helping us to achieve an enviable reputation for excellence in project delivery. Because we are independent, we identify actual issues and help organisations resolve them –from requirements to deployment, and beyond –providing the right solution in terms of best of breed technology and support. 

Orb Data was winner of the 2014 IBM Cloud and Smarter Infrastructure Award for Endpoint Management and Mobility Innovation. In 2018 we were awarded by IBM globally for the Most Outstanding Hybrid Cloud Solution at Think in Las Vegas for our OpsAlerts ITSM event management solution

Orb Data is an IBM Gold Business Partner specialising in Hybrid Cloud, Security and Storage.