The model includes five broad product families, all of which are supported by, and contribute to, a federated configuration management system. These product categories include:
? Data Center Analytics: Traditional infrastructure monitoring and management products that discover, identify, monitor, and manage infrastructure and foundational technology elements.
? Application Discovery and Dependency Mapping: Products that discover, identify, and map applications, their dependencies and their relationships. Typically use application “signatures” or “fingerprints” to detect and identify applications.
? Application Code Analytics: Products that analyze application code and apply that analysis to discover, identify, map, and manage custom applications.
? Networked Application Management: Products that track transactions (including SOA) in an automated fashion by observing network flow, “real” or “synthetic” transactions.
? Application Integration Analytics: Products that track transactions through integration layers, technology touch points, middleware and across variable transaction paths.
? Federated CMDB: While not an application per se, the federated configuration management database (CMDB) ties together the information collected from multiple sources into a “big picture” with context to applications, the transactions that constitute them, infrastructure, cross-functional relationships, and organizational metadata.
Products currently available to address these dimensions are at varying levels of maturity. For example, products within the Data Center Analytics category are widely available, while relatively few management products can track a transaction through middleware and across dynamic execution paths. Likewise, some of the middleware management capabilities that are critical to managing SOA and web services applications are still scarce, and many management solutions do not address application dependency mapping at all.
EMA believes this is very much an evolving domain, and that remaining gaps will be filled over time. Meanwhile, working towards a vision of managing an application fabric, not simply point technology, helps bridge the gap between “as is” and “to be”. Further information on EMA’s research regarding the End-to-End Application Management model, and on the May Webinar detailing this new approach, is available at www.emausa.com.
Julie Craig is a senior analyst with Boulder, Colo.-based Enterprise Management Associates (www.ema-usa.com), an industry research firm focused on IT management. Julie can reached at [email protected].