APPLICATION MANAGEMENT
ENABLING CONFIGURATION MANAGEMENT
WITH MERCURY APPLICATION MAPPING
Whether providing services on the Internet or to internal customers,
using custom or packaged applications such as ERP or CRM, today’s IT
organizations are under increasing pressure to align themselves with
their company’s business processes. These processes are often
deployed across multiple global locations, traversing packaged, custom,
and legacy applications. With increasing business pressure to meet high
availability and performance requirements, and the increasing complexity
of the underlying systems that support these business processes, IT
organizations must be able to quickly isolate and resolve any problems
that may arise. In order to do so, they must maintain an accurate map of
the configuration of their environment. For most IT organizations this is a
difficult and time-consuming task. Mercury Application Mapping™ delivers
accurate, complete, automatically, and continuously updated application
maps that organizations can use for a broad range of configuration
management activities, including change management processes, data
center moves, geographic replication and disaster recovery, server
consolidation, business impact analysis, dependency impact analysis,
asset management, and policy compliance.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Managing Rapid Growth and Constant Change …………………………………3
Customers Manage Change with Mercury Application Mapping Today ………9
The Nature of Today’s Business Applications ……………………………………4
Configuration and Change Management Processes ………………………9
Drawbacks of Manual Topology Maps ………………………………………5
Data Center Moves ……………………………………………………………10
Accurate, Automated, Up-To-Date Topology Maps …………………………5
Geographic Replication and Disaster Recovery……………………………10
Introducing Mercury Application Mapping ………………………………………6
Server Consolidation …………………………………………………………11
Automated Infrastructure Discovery …………………………………………6
Business Impact Analysis ……………………………………………………11
Mapping Infrastructure Elements to Applications ……………………………6
Dependency Impact Analysis …………………………………………………12
How it Works ……………………………………………………………………7
Asset Management ……………………………………………………………12
A Solid Foundation for Implementing Configuration Management
Best Practices ………………………………………………………………………9
Policy Compliance ……………………………………………………………13
Using Mercury Application Mapping in Your IT Organization …………………14
APPLICATION MANAGEMENT
Managing Rapid Growth and Constant Change
Managing today’s IT organizations is an exercise in managing rapid growth and constant change — and
the inevitable increase in complexity that both growth and change bring. Rapidly expanding IT
infrastructure brings a constant stream of new systems into high-end data center environments, at
rates up to 40-50 percent. Combine this with the churn generated by a three- to four-year technology
replacement cycle, and the overall number of new systems an IT environment in a given year easily tops
70 percent.
Now consider that business processes require the support of multiple applications, each of which use
multiple server, storage, software, and network resources that are sometimes distributed over multiple
geographic locations. Day-to-day operations require bringing new applications online, scaling and
upgrading existing ones, consolidating and relocating servers, and implementing disaster recovery plans
— all just to keep up with the increasing demand to achieve the best performance and throughput as
possible within budget constraints. It quickly becomes clear that IT organizations need help managing
the sheer volume of change in their environment.
IT organizations are also feeling the pinch of having to provide more and better services for less. Lineof-business (LOB) managers demand service-level agreements (SLAs) that provide greater performance
and availability levels. IT organizations have difficulty committing to and managing towards their SLAs
because of a lack of insight into the critical path between the applications they deliver and the
underlying infrastructure elements, or Configuration Items (CIs), such as servers, storage, and networks,
which support them.
Managing information technology silos separately leads to a lack of accountability as to what teams are
responsible for which components throughout the application lifecycle. Managing applications using
manually created application maps — if ever completed — is a complex, time-consuming, and errorprone process because maps are outdated sometimes moments after they are created. These methods
have long been known to be costly, ineffective, and inflexible — yet methods to manage new network
architectures are still evolving.
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APPLICATION MANAGEMENT
The Nature of Today’s Business Applications
Today’s complex business processes are often supported by multiple applications, and each application
tends to have a set of infrastructure elements — some unique, and some shared — supporting it (Figure
1). As the complexity and dynamic nature of IT infrastructure grows, management techniques must
increasingly be automated.
To help them cope with rapid growth, constant change, and the demand to deliver more for less, many
IT organizations are adopting IT service management frameworks, or best-practices methodologies, like
ITIL, that include configuration management as a key operational process. As the basis for these
methodologies, IT organizations must understand what applications and infrastructure elements support
which business processes, and the nature of their complex interdependencies. Anything less than
complete knowledge can result in lower performance and availability levels. This is because without
accurate application maps, IT organizations cannot easily work down from a business process problem
to the infrastructure element causing it. Likewise, an IT organization noticing a failed component cannot
easily work upward to determine which business processes are at risk.
Figure 1: Today’s business services are supported by multiple applications, each of which relies on a dynamic set of configuration items.
It is difficult to maintain up-to-date application maps in today’s data centers given that change — both
planned and unplanned — is the norm. Every day, administrators change network components, add or
remove servers from load-balanced service groups, consolidate multiple functions onto larger servers,
upgrade operating systems, patch applications, and add or remove disk devices from storage systems.
Then there are the unplanned changes. The server that was taken offline because of a memory failure.
The database table that ran out of space and an extra disk drive allocated to alleviate the crunch. The
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APPLICATION MANAGEMENT
spare server used to smooth a sudden spike in Web traffic. The 24-port network switch replaced with a
48-port switch when its power supply failed. All of these changes, planned and unplanned, affect
application maps every hour of every day.
Drawbacks of Manual Topology Maps
Configuration management methodologies require accurate, up-to-date topology maps, but many
organizations are left to create them manually, resulting in a cascading set of problems:
• Manual configuration maps are difficult to keep up-to-date.
• Out-of-date configuration maps lead to false assumptions.
• False assumptions regarding what infrastructure supports what application contribute to lower
application availability and increased Mean Time To Repair (MTTR) because IT staff is limited in its
ability to isolate problems.
• With incorrect configuration data, changes in the data center, including moves, configuration
changes, server upgrades, replacement, and consolidation, have unforeseen consequences that put
the company’s business at risk.
• With out-of-date application maps, implementing service management best practices can be difficult
or impossible. A simple process such as approving a change, making a change, and validating that
the change has been performed correctly is hard to implement when the very configuration map
used for validation is out-of-date.
Accurate, Automated, Up-To-Date Topology Maps
Application maps are a requirement for IT service management processes, but creating and maintaining
them remains a difficult task. Mercury Application Mapping, a powerful new configuration management
solution from Mercury, automatically provides complete and accurate insight into the dependencies
between infrastructure elements and the applications they support, helping to increase business
process performance and availability. Mercury Application Mapping allows IT personnel to determine the
impact that a change might have on their business processes by automatically analyzing “what-if”
scenarios. In addition, Mercury Application Mapping can tie a service interruption to a planned or
unplanned change by maintaining a change audit log and reporting on all changes taking place in a
given time. Mercury Application Mapping can help manage change in fast-paced data center
environments by dynamically auditing and updating application maps on a continuous basis. Used as a
standalone configuration management solution, IT organizations use Mercury Application Mapping to
support change management processes and for a host of configuration management functions
including business impact analysis, data center moves, geographic replication, disaster recover, server
consolidation, dependency impact analysis, asset management, and standards compliance.
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APPLICATION MANAGEMENT
Introducing Mercury Application Mapping
Mercury Application Mapping provides the foundation for a new generation of configuration
management solutions. Unlike manual techniques and agent-based tools, Mercury Application Mapping
continuously and automatically discovers and maps IT services to the underlying infrastructure
elements that support them. Mercury Application Mapping provides IT organizations with complete and
accurate topology maps that include elements that might not have been recognized as having a role in
a particular application, with the power to do so either with or without the use of agents. Indeed,
unexpected infrastructure elements are often the ones causing problems because they can be
overlooked as configurations are changed, and their failure isn’t otherwise linked to the applications
they support. Mercury Application Mapping eliminates this problem because all infrastructure elements
are automatically discovered and included in topology maps.
With up-to-date application maps, companies using Mercury Application Mapping can more closely
align their information technology with their business objectives by providing IT organizations with the
tools they need to manage rapid growth, constant change, and increasing complexity within a business
context. Mercury Application Mapping allows IT personnel to instantly drill down from a high-level
application problem to isolate the change responsible for causing a problem. The application maps that
it produces can support a wide range of configuration management processes, including creating
blueprints for disaster recovery, data center moves and consolidation, automatic verification of changes,
and day-to-day activities including infrastructure upgrades, changes, and server consolidation.
Automated Infrastructure Discovery
Unlike other network-oriented discovery tools, Mercury Application Mapping continuously explores
every configuration item from Layers 2-7 of the OSI model within a running production environment,
mapping the relationships between resources and the applications that they support. Mercury
Application Mapping accomplishes this either with or without the use of agents, depending on the
specific environment or mode of use. It locates resources, including:
• Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition (J2EE) components and interdependencies,
• Database components such as tablespaces, users, and jobs,
• Software assets such as installed products, patches,
• System resources such as servers, CPUs, memory, network interfaces, and storage devices, and
• Network devices such as routers, switches, and load balancers, switch ports, VLANs, and firewalls.
Mapping Infrastructure Elements to Applications
Once Mercury Application Mapping discovers infrastructure elements, it maps relationships and
dependencies between them, including network connectivity between servers and switches, logical
connectivity between network-based services, and internal relationships such as message queues and
inter-process communication mechanisms. The result is a highly accurate, comprehensive topology map
of applications and business services.
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APPLICATION MANAGEMENT
The key technology behind Mercury Application Mapping is its
Topology Query Language (TQL), an intuitive, drag-and-drop
mechanism for creating application or service definitions that
describe resources and applications that have been discovered.
Providing out-of-the-box intelligence, Mercury Application
Mapping includes predefined TQL templates for anything from
complete J2EE applications, Siebel, SAP, or Microsoft Exchange
environments, all the way down to single Oracle databases, and
IBM WebLogic or BEA servers. If a needed predefined template is
not available out-of-the-box, TQL’s drag-and-drop interface can
be used to create customized models that describe entire
applications. A custom description of a bond trading application
is illustrated in Figure 2.
Customers can use TQL application descriptions directly or
modify them to suit their own environments. Once constructed,
TQL definitions provide an automated mechanism for mapping
discovered resources to dynamic application models. The result
Figure 2: TQL allows application descriptions
to be built using fundamental components
provided with Mercury Application Mapping.
is an efficient, directed exploration of data center environments
even as they evolve and change.
How it Works
In a nutshell, Mercury Application Mapping uses a set of fundamental object models and TQL
descriptions of the environment to be explored. It discovers infrastructure elements according to the
object models, matches elements to TQL application descriptions, and provides discovered application
maps for use by higher-level tools (Figure 3):
CONFIGURATION
MANAGEMENT
DATA CENTER
CONSOLIDATION
SERVICE
LEVEL
BUSINESS
AVAILABILITY
POLICY
COMPLIANCE
IMPACT
ANALYSIS
END USER
MANAGEMENT
SYSTEM
AVAILABILITY
J2EE APPS
3-TIER APPS
EXCHANGE
SIEBEL
WEBLOGIC
NT
DB
TOPOLOGY QUERY LANGUAGE
CMDB
OPEN MODEL
DISCOVERY
APPLICATIONS
DESKTOPS
SWITCHES/ROUTERS
FILES
DATABASES
SERVERS
Figure 3: Mercury Application Mapping uses TQL models to drive the discovery process, storing results in a configuration database for
use by applications like Mercury Business Availability Center.
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APPLICATION MANAGEMENT
• At the lowest level, many common infrastructure elements are discovered using out-of-the-box
discovery patterns. Mercury Application Mapping uses more than 130 discovery patterns that span
levels 2-7 of the OSI model.
• Application templates are created using the drag-and-drop TQL interface using the basic object
models provided with the product. Additional application packages support the mapping of custom
and additional application classes.
• The discovery process efficiently explores the IT environment, locating all infrastructure elements (or
configuration items) described by the object models. The discovery process maps basic
infrastructure elements first, and successively spirals into each element to further discover its
attributes and interdependencies.
• Once the discovery process is complete, the infrastructure elements and their interdependencies are
pattern-matched against the TQL application descriptions to provide a complete and accurate map
of the application environment. An example of how the TQL description of the bond trading
application might yield multiple instances of the application is illustrated in Figure 4.
• The discovered topology is stored in a repository designed to support high-speed and high-volume
queries of object types, their attributes, and interrelationships. This repository is available to
applications that then integrate the application maps with external data to provide specific insights
into the IT environment. For example, application maps from two different times can be compared
and their differences highlighted.
Figure 4: Discovery using the bond application description yields a production, staging, and test instance of the application.
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APPLICATION MANAGEMENT
A Solid Foundation for Implementing Configuration Management Best Practices
Mercury Application Mapping provides a solid foundation for implementing best practices for
configuration and change management, data center moves, asset management, business impact
analysis, disaster recovery, and policy compliance. Because Mercury Application Mapping creates a
permanent record of all infrastructure elements and their relationships to the applications they support,
customers can use the historic record to automatically detect and manage change and its impact.
Mercury Application Mapping can support many best practices with its out-of-the-box capabilities.
Customers can also access the configuration management database directly, using it as the foundation
for their own tools that support their business practices. Mercury’s CMDB has an open architecture that
includes an Application Programming Interface (API), that allows customers to integrate its findings into
other applications both in batch mode and programmatically.
Customers Manage Change with Mercury Application Mapping Today
Mercury customers are using Mercury Application Mapping today to manage change in a number of
ways, including supporting configuration and change management processes, data center moves,
geographic replication and disaster recovery, server consolidation, business impact analysis,
dependency impact analysis, asset management, and policy compliance.
Configuration and Change Management Processes
Rapid rates of change and increasing architectural complexity has a direct impact on a company’s
ability to do business. Indeed, many IT organizations estimate that more than 90 percent of their
outages occur as the result of planned or unplanned changes. Planned changes can cause outages
because administrators don’t always know what business processes depend on their applications
before they make a change that they believe to be benign. Likewise, unplanned changes, such as a
failure to properly implement a planned change, can cause outages from the loss of a critical
application component.
Many IT organizations work to manage change with a change control board that meets on a periodic
basis to assess, approve, and communicate to staff regarding changes to applications. Without
complete visibility into the IT infrastructure, however, the board must make decisions based on
incomplete information, sometimes discovering after the fact that an approved change causes an
unexpected incompatibility.
With Mercury Application Mapping facilitating configuration and change management processes,
change control boards work with full knowledge of their IT infrastructure and its interdependencies.
With full, up-to-date knowledge, they can make more reasoned decisions on the impact of proposed
changes. They can better assess the impact of changes by using Mercury Application Mapping to help
answer “what if” questions. Change control boards can implement best practices of authorizing
changes, implementing them, and then compare configuration snapshots to verify that only the
authorized changes were made, and that they were made correctly. Mercury Application Mapping can
automatically detect and report changes as they are made, and it can produce a change log for later
audit and verification.
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APPLICATION MANAGEMENT
Application maps can improve communication within IT organizations. Database management teams
supporting a large number of databases can now easily see how each of their databases support
business-critical applications. Application teams can refer to application maps to see how their
applications support high-level business processes, and how they are interconnected into the whole IT
infrastructure. Better knowledge and better communication, helps to reduce the risk of change.
Data Center Moves
Data center moves are a fact of life for IT organizations, and the methodologies in use today have
advanced from moving a rack of equipment at a time to moving one application at a time. Manually
creating application maps is a time-consuming, error-prone process. It inevitably misses some key
assets, and even when created accurately, maps are out-of-date as soon is they have been created.
Complete knowledge of what infrastructure supports which applications can help IT organizations
better plan data center moves, reducing the risk and uncertainty of simply moving servers, storage, and
network components and hoping to plug them all back together in exactly the same way. Once
application maps are created, independent applications can be identified, and then moved one at a
time, reducing the risk inherent with rack-at-once or all-at-once move, as well as validating correctness
and compliance once the move has been completed.
Mercury Application Mapping’s discovery process reduces the resources and time required to identify
all infrastructure elements used by an application. Its ability to locate all resources in heterogeneous
environments results in a reliable, single repository of both assets and their relationships. This
information is useful before, during, and after the actual move.
Geographic Replication and Disaster Recovery
As companies realize the degree to which their business operations depend on their IT infrastructure, a
growing number are operating multiple, geographically distributed replicas of their applications. Using
one of many geographic load balancing or fail-over mechanisms, these companies help to ensure
continuous operation despite the failure of an entire data center or network connectivity. Likewise for
organizations stopping short of supporting multiple, continuously-operating sites, they know that they
must be prepared to reconstruct their entire infrastructure in the event of a long-term or permanent
loss of a data center. IT managers know that they need offsite backups of all software, switch, router,
and load balancer configurations, and customer data itself.
Whether a site is replicated for continuous operation or as insurance against a failure in the main data
center, manually created application maps are quickly out-of-date, often incomplete, and timeconsuming to produce in the first place. Once a data center is replicated, manual application maps
provide no automatic way to verify that the replication was completed accurately. Indeed, ongoing
manual audits of business continuance plans are costly and cumbersome, leaving many organizations
simply hoping that disaster never strikes.
Application maps created by Mercury Application Mapping can create accurate maps of existing
application infrastructure. These maps are first used during the replication process and later used once
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APPLICATION MANAGEMENT
the data center is replicated in order to verify correctness. Given that change is a constant in today’s
data centers, application maps can be continuously updated so that IT organizations can continuously
maintain the secondary data center as a faithful replica of the primary one.
Mercury Application Mapping’s automated discovery process locates not only all physical resources,
but also software resources including application and operating system versioning, patch levels, and
logical connectivity to other components, whether within the same server or across the network.
Server Consolidation
Consolidating multiple applications onto a single server, or consolidating multiple servers on a server
farm into one, is one technique that IT organizations use to fight the battle against cost and complexity.
Using a smaller number of more powerful servers results in fewer devices to manage, helping to
increase economies of scale and reduce administration costs. Consolidation onto larger, vertically
scaled servers helps to increase total availability while reducing total cost of ownership. With today’s
servers capable of hosting a large number of applications simultaneously, IT organizations need to ask
how their consolidation choices might affect other characteristics like overall application availability,
security, and performance. If, for example, server consolidation eliminates redundancy that is needed
for application availability, the cost savings of consolidation must be weighed against the reduction in
availability. Using complete, accurate application maps provided by Mercury Application Mapping, IT
organizations can more clearly assess the impact of changes before they make them.
Business Impact Analysis
IT organizations are typically tasked to deliver business services to their client organizations subject to
specific SLAs, yet with few tools to help them manage at the business level. In order to identify the
impact that a planned change might have, as well as detect the impact of a change that has already
been made, IT organizations need some way to understand the relationships between the configuration
items and the business processes they support. Unfortunately, most IT organizations attempt to manage
their applications and higher-level business processes by managing the network elements that support
them. If a server runs out of memory, a database management system delivers poor performance, or a
network switch begins to fail, network management systems begin to show alerts that often propagate
across many different infrastructure elements, creating a storm of red alerts that obscure the source of
the problem. The difficulty of problem isolation is compounded by the fact that without understanding
the business impact of a problem, network engineers typically attend to each problem with the same
priority. Indeed, in such an environment it’s easy to lose sight of which problems are affecting a lowpriority backup or development system, and which ones are affecting the company’s ability to do
business.
Some network management systems provide dashboard views that relate systems to applications, but
they do so based on maps that require many months to create and constant updates to stay current. In
contrast, Mercury Application Mapping can automatically integrate the status of infrastructure elements
to dynamic application maps, giving instant insight into how a problem affects higher-level functions. It
can help to eliminate alert floods and help focus IT staff on isolating the problem rather than being
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distracted by extraneous alerts. Instead of giving each problem the same priority, operators can focus
on the failures affecting business operations first. This approach helps to increase utilization of valuable
IT staff members while reducing the cost of down time by placing the focus on the right problems.
Dependency Impact Analysis
Just as business impact analysis displays real-time information on how business processes are affected
by infrastructure elements, dependency impact analysis enables organizations to explore the business
impact of hypothetical failures. With the power to ask “what if” questions and instantly see the impact of
a failure, IT organizations can better assess whether their current infrastructure adequately supports
their SLAs. LOB managers can assess the impact of resource failures and how they affect applications,
business processes, and end-user experience.
Mercury Application Mapping’s dependency impact analysis feature can provide insight in a number of
dimensions, including availability, performance, and change. For a database, for example, it can analyze
the impact of an unavailable table (availability dimension), long queue lengths (performance
dimension), and of an infrastructure element upgrade (change dimension). Dependency impact analysis
uses TQL element descriptions to percolate the impact of such status changes up through the
application descriptions.
Asset Management
Physical asset tags and manual inventory techniques don’t even begin to address the asset
management requirements of today’s IT organizations. It’s a given that IT organizations must have up-todate lists so that their finance departments can accurately account for their capital assets. But with
today’s data centers supporting multiple business units, each one structured as its own profit center, IT
organizations need to keep track of what assets support which applications. Of course with the rapid
growth, high churn rate, and constant change in today’s data centers, it’s easy to miss assets and
allocate them to the wrong applications when manual processes are used.
Mercury Application Mapping, with its automatic discovery and mapping of all assets, helps to reduce
time and costs, and delivers current, up-to-date maps. With accurate application maps, it’s easy to get
a complete picture of inventory from an application perspective, including critical data like the number
of servers supporting each application.
Mercury’s Configuration Management Database provides a single, central source that can be used to
support asset management in two ways. As a foundation for configuration and change management
processes, asset information can be extracted from the CMDB as part of Mercury Application
Mapping’s many viewing modes. When used to track and analyze IT expenditures, IT organizations can
export data from the CMDB for import into its asset-tracking system, or they can utilize the CMDB’s API
to programmatically extract the required data for use by the company’s finance organization.
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Policy Compliance
In the United States and other countries, an increasing number of regulations require specific actions to
be taken to conform with securities exchange laws and with other laws that safeguard the privacy of
customers, as well as to enforce internal IT security policies. In the United States, Sarbanes-Oxley has
stimulated a wide range of changes in the way that companies do business, from accounting to
information technology. IT organizations need a mechanism to provide the required visibility as well as
to ensure and report upon their compliance with Sarbanes-Oxley. The COBIT model includes more than
100 processes and more than 200 control objectives including access control, IT operations, and
disaster recovery. For example, some of COBIT’s control objectives require mapping configuration,
security, and management activities.
Attempting to accomplish this broad range of objectives manually brings up several problems. When
configuration changes are performed on per-application basis by a team supporting each specific
application, compliance is difficult to achieve because each team must objectively follow exactly the
same procedures. System security and access control is often not auditable. When monitoring changes
with manual processes, errors result causing violations of control processes. Once established, ongoing
compliance requires significant investment simply due to the enormous rate of change in IT
organizations.
Mercury Application Mapping automatically discovers and maps all IT infrastructure, reducing the
number of IT staff and time needed to identify all infrastructure elements. It can help ensure system
security by automatically discovering changes so that they can be attributed to a specific change
authorization or corrected as an unauthorized change. Mercury’s single CMDB provides a central
repository that supports audit traces and validating IT services against stated operational objectives.
Mercury Application Mapping specifically automates the following control objectives:
• Ensuring continuous service (DS4) by mapping applications and disaster recover sites.
• Ensuring system security (DS5) by automating the discovery of applications, infrastructure elements,
and their relationships to insecure sites and systems.
• Managing configuration (DS9) with automated discovery and a single repository for securities access
control processes.
• Managing operations (DS13) when using Mercury Application Mapping with Mercury Business
Availability Center™ to map and monitor the infrastructure that matters for regulatory compliance.
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Using Mercury Application Mapping in Your IT Organization
Mercury Application Mapping delivers fundamental technology to support a broad range of
configuration management best practices that an increasing number of IT organizations are
implementing today. It can support change management processes, data center moves, geographic
replication, disaster recovery, server consolidation, business impact analysis, dependency impact
analysis, asset management and standards compliance. Mercury Application Mapping continuously,
automatically discovers all IT infrastructure, including software components, from Layer 2 to Layer 7 of
the ISO model, either with or without the use of agents. With all infrastructure elements inventoried and
their interrelationships stored in a central configuration management database, IT organizations can
refer to and compare historical configurations to detect changes and compare configurations against
their own gold standards. Mercury Application Mapping can also be configured to automatically notify
administrators of changes that it detects, and custom views can be created based on the TQL
descriptions of applications.
Continuous, automated discovery and mapping of applications and infrastructure elements reduces
time, expense, and dramatically increases accuracy of configuration management processes. With the
chance of human error reduced so significantly, many IT organizations are eager to begin using Mercury
Application Mapping. Fortunately, there are three ways that this technology can be put to use in your
organization:
• Standalone Use: Mercury Application Management can be used as a standalone solution to support
the configuration management processes described in this paper.
• Operations Package: Mercury offers an integrated bundle of Mercury Application Mapping with
Mercury System Availability Management™. This enables customers to integrate infrastructure element
monitoring strategies with their configuration management processes and the discovered application
topology, saving time and expense by using the same intuitive interfaces for both critical activities.
• Mercury Business Availability Center: For organizations wanting to have the most comprehensive
configuration management, system monitoring, and business process management capabilities
available, Mercury Business Availability Center includes Mercury Application Mapping as the key
technology linking business processes with infrastructure elements. Customers using Mercury
Business Availability Center have access to configuration management features as well as the ability
to apply monitoring and management policies based on their application models. Mercury Business
Availability Center integrates application maps with information from infrastructure element
monitoring, business process monitoring, and user experience measurements. With this
comprehensive package, IT organizations can manage applications from a business perspective,
linking SLAs to the applications and elements that support them — all while providing a
comprehensive foundation for configuration management processes. The benefits of this solution are
discussed more fully in the Mercury white paper titled Linking Business Applications and IT
Infrastructure with Mercury Application Mapping.
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© 2004 Mercury Interactive Corporation. Patents pending. All rights reserved. Mercury Interactive, the Mercury Interactive logo, the Mercury logo, Mercury Business Availability Center, Mercury Application Mapping, and Mercury System
Availability Management are trademarks of Mercury Interactive Corporation in the United States and/or other foreign countries. All other company, brand, and product names are marks of their respective holders. WP-1262-1004