New Concept for Application Dependency Mapping: A Run-time Model

By Sue and Todd

OPNET announced a fairly dramatic breakthrough this morning: operationally focused application mapping.

After seeing an early demo at OPNETWORK this summer, one of our clients relayed a story to me about why he thought our new approach would be of immediate value to his employer:
"We literally have hundreds of applications and they evolve constantly. We don't have time to sort through the CMDB when there's an emergency. I can't tell you how many times I've had to say, 'With all due respect, Sir, this application behaves nothing like the way it's supposed to.' We figure things out manually and it's ugly."


Other discovery and dependency mapping tools have been around for years. They automatically populate CMDBs and allow specialists to define logical entities, and how to discover them. They contain lots of data based on configurations of every discoverable resource that could ever apply to an application, such as from a database that's called only once every few weeks, or a web server to which traffic is redirected only during peak periods. There is certainly value for IT departments to have this kind of comprehensive information — but support teams need to know what's relevant to the problem at hand with the actual application.

OPNET's new solution is designed to be a game changer for operations teams. AppMapper Xpert builds an accurate run-time model of dependencies based on granular data that is already being collected by the real-time performance management solutions monitoring your application stacks and network. So our approach increases the return on investments in existing monitoring solutions and enables IT to provide significantly better support -- with dependency mapping as a component of the overall performance management function. Demand for this kind of solution is driven by application usage growth and trends including virtualization, SOA, and SaaS, which make visibility into application behavior more challenging.