With ADM’s ability to discover tiered applications you can gain confidence in your ability to see all layers of a distributed application, continuously monitor them for configuration compliance with best practices, and ensure a smooth restart after a migration or site fail-over. Application Discovery Manager discovers many different types of dependencies – including dependencies between applications residing on the same or different ESX Servers. It can even discover dependencies between VMs that are managed by different vCenter Servers.

In this example, you can see the dependencies between all three tiers of an application and make sure that you put a protection plan in place for all three tiers. Without the visibility provided by Application Discovery Manager, there is a chance that you would miss one of these tiers.

Get a birds-eye view of the activities and states of your environment as it relates to the applications in this dashboard view:

• Discovered OS
• Discovered Services
• Summary of what types of objects have been discovered
• Change window showing what changes have been flagged (configurable)

The Detailed Discovery Dashboard shows all the general information regarding your detailed discovery environment.

• The chart at top left shows how many hosts you have successfully, partially, and failed to run a policy against.
• To its right, the bar chart outlines some specifics, especially in regards to the failed attempts.
• In the middle panes are your list of Collectors and their state as well as uptime.
• To the right is a list of the policies that are active, and at what rate they are performing discovery.
• The bottom pane shows your individual policies and gives you a detailed breakdown regarding their success and failures.

The Inventory screen allows you to see much more detailed information about what hosts have been discovered. It also lets you filter your view based on Groups (in the Navigation column on the left).

Additionally, you can select individual hosts, and perform many actions, such as finding all the dependencies of a particular host, or show a group of hosts in the map. Click on a host to bring that host more into focus as shown in the Detailed Properties on the next slide.

Here you get a focused view of a single host. In this case, this host is a container for a number of other virtual hosts, as is noted not only in the name ("Virtual Container"), but also because there is a tab labeled "Virtual Machines."

This tab, if selected, will show all the Virtual Machines hosted here and you can drill down into them for more detailed information.

Similarly, you can expand the nodes here and view information regarding the host environment and its related elements.

Because Application Discovery Manager creates relationships, not only between hosts, but between the services running on those hosts, one of its most powerful features is the ability to show upstream and downstream dependencies.

In the example shown, "Uses" relationships are those that are upstream from your host or service, and "Used By" are those that are downstream, and most likely to be impacted if a change is performed.

This becomes critical for change management (especially when loading this data into a CMDB), and allows you to understand who and what will be impacted up and down stream when making changes.

Application Discovery Manager also lets you easily compare the configuration of two entities, such as an Oracle server and a staging server, each with the same application running on them. For planning and migrating to VMware environments this can be used to ensure that after the transition is made, the application will continue to run as expected and service levels will be maintained, simply by comparing the configuration differences of the two hosts.

This discovery dependency map view is an intuitive visual display that conveys a lot of information in a single glance and offers a natural means to navigate the data to better understand the application environment.

In the map, you see:

• Nodes - Each node/IP, or configuration item, represented by an icon
• Apps - Each icon when expanded shows the application components detected by the automated discovery. Servers will appear as nodes and the multiple resident applications will appear when the nodes are expanded.
• Dependencies - You also see the lines linking the nodes. These represent the application conversations between nodes. The arrows and line thicknesses indicate behavioral information about the direction and intensity or usage of the conversations. Thick lines indicate heavy demand and thin line, of course, show light demand.
• Usage - Here you can see the time analysis navigation slide bar. Because ADM uniquely captures demand, you can slide this bar back and forth over time to see not just how the structure changes, but how demand changes. This is critical when determining appropriate maintenance windows or during forensic analysis to determine who or what was connected to an application prior to an outage.

ADM can also discover VMs and ESX servers and show the relationships between them. Individual application components, DB instances, and installed software on each VM are all available for display. Connections and dependencies between application components running on VMs (even on VMs within the same ESX or physical host!) are also represented. This uniquely complements the mapping provided in VirtualCenter by creating a single point of visibility ACROSS the physical and VMware environments.