The product joins a growing list of vendor-specific discovery tools that are designed to help automate some of tasks involved in the creation and maintenance of the configuration management database, a hub and asset repository of all information gained by all other systems management processes.
Topology Discovery is the third component of the company’s discovery and detection solution for change and configuration management. It is designed to map the physical and logical dependencies that exist between hardware and application assets to validate the contents of the configuration management database in 3D.
It will map network hardware such as PCs, servers and printers, and also chart the topology of various enterprises applications based on SAP, J2EE Weblogic, or J2EE Websphere to identify dependencies that exist between them.
BMC has already delivered an agent-free product named Discovery Express that will automatically compile lists of IT assets and which works in association with the Configuration Discovery toolbox acquired with Marimba by BMC in July 2004 to detail how those assets are configured. That technology also provides a means of offering policy-based configuration automation software with options for patch management, software distribution, and server management.
Discover Express reveals what assets there are, Configuration Discovery shows how they are configured, and Topology Discovery dispays how each of those assets are related.
The three BMC Discovery workbench tools are supported by the Remedy Action Request derived configuration management database, which is used for automated repository refresh, and also maintains accuracy of data held in the configuration management database.
The aim is to provide service management tools that feed systems information in real time with a range of service quality measures to help flesh out which IT resources are key to supporting which business service so that they can be better monitored, maintained and brought back to a healthy state should they look to be in danger of failing.
As well as revealing application dependency information, Topology Discovery connects to BMC’s Service Impact Model for change impact analysis. BMC has said it will release additional Application Expert Module components for applications such as Microsoft Exchange or Peoplesoft on a regular basis, and has promised an application integration toolkit that can be used to add more application expert modules for custom applications.
