N-Tier Is the New Frontier of IT Operations Management (Continued)

Remapping Application Management Product Categories
"Application management" software products have long existed, but the concept of a product category has been fuzzy. Analysts seldom track, as a distinct group, the loose collection of application management software products. Most enterprise IT management products have been considered systems management products, as appropriate in the element-by-element era. Add to those a collection of "support" products—such as IT service management (including help desk), "release management," and "change management" packages that provide general-purpose utility for applications—as well as operating systems and other types of software, including client software. Later, a broad group of application performance management products became ubiquitous, but these started out with mostly hardware-oriented metrics.

Now that there's a clear need for application-centric management, as well as the ability to create more advanced management software, a comprehensive enterprise application management category is coming into focus. Underlying this are important trends toward increasing levels of abstraction and resulting automation (see Figure 2).

IT Moves Toward Fly-by-Wire
Abstraction and automation are really part of the same tsunami. With software's ability to abstract the nature of complex infrastructures and applications comes the reward of automated management. This is the concept of virtualization, a term embraced by some, abused by others, and even hated by a few. Love or despise the term, the concept has moved well along in the area of storage, and it will do so in applications, whether it goes by the name of utility computing, grid computing, on-demand computing, service-oriented architecture, Web services, or whatever.

The vital first step in any effort to move toward abstraction and virtualization is automating configuration management. In fact, it can be argued that the new breed of configuration management software is the foundation for many efforts to automate IT's application management. Why? Because the ability to automatically generate accurate, up-to-date data about configurations is crucial to the overall automation process. If IT operations is just trying to nurse the day-to-day health of n-tier distributed applications, which by now have been split into many pieces adjusted on the fly, then reliable information about configurations is crucial. No one can keep that amount of information on a spreadsheet any more.

And in an escalating troubleshooting situation, looking into the change management database or at available logs for configuration data is becoming impractical. That familiar data might not reflect the reality of actual planned or unplanned configurations. In the near future, the repository of choice will be the configuration management database (CMDB)—assuming that a CMDB can be automatically generated and updated.

The emerging category of configuration management software promises to do exactly that type of dynamic database construction and more. Automated discovery functionality contained in configuration management software will comb through the datacenter, as well as the underlying infrastructure, for configuration information. What's more, some of these configuration management solutions also demonstrate the ability to track configurations of software elements through application-specific plug-ins and customizable templates.

At the top of the heap of configuration management solutions are packages that also create topologies of entire applications, complete with cross-dependencies to other applications and infrastructure. This type of mapping capability has been pioneered by Relicore's Clarity and Troux Technologies' Troux 4, which refer to their own functionality as "blueprinting." These products and others come with their own basic topology models, but invite IT customers to do plenty of customization to make their "blueprints" as accurate as possible.

At least a couple newcomers are pushing the envelope with more robust built-in topology models, seemingly capable of automatically capturing the complexities and dependencies of n-tier applications software. Collation's Confignia product automatically discovers—without the use of any agents—all the components of complex applications and their underlying infrastructures. Confignia dynamically maps all application interdependencies in their runtime environments, creating an end-to-end view of an entire application. It allows drill-downs on topological views to look at configurations and changes, and offers a set of analytical tools for troubleshooting. Additionally, it provides a way to answer what-if questions about how a hypothetical change will affect an application, given its known dependencies.

Another young company, Appilog, promises capabilities similar to Collation's, although it uses a somewhat different technical approach. Appilog's PathFinder provides dynamic discovery, service definition modeling, and visual topology mapping designed to show the interdependencies between critical applications and the servers, systems, databases, and network devices they rely on.

As configuration management software becomes established, other applications will likely begin tapping the configuration management database for information. That "machine-readable" data could solve numerous issues associated with management of virtualized applications in service-oriented environments.