IBM Tivoli: Keeping Applications Alive and Well

Manage your applications better and achieve higher service levels

Tivoli Beat - A weekly IBM service management perspective. The case for IBM Tivoli Application Dependency Discovery Manager (TADDM) just keeps getting stronger and stronger. In the latest version, 7.2, TADDM offers more value, in more ways, than ever.

This tool has for several years represented a best-in-class solution to a complex problem: How can IT discover and visualize the complex chain of dependencies involved in business applications, isolate problems to root causes and in this way maximize overall application availability and performance?

For composite applications that span multiple systems, data repositories, networks and subnetworks and other IT elements, such a challenge can be difficult to meet. TADDM simplifies this challenge tremendously, thanks to powerful autodiscovery and visualization functions that can identify the actual state of each element in such a chain of dependencies, then reflect the information via an easy-to-read topology map and reports. This process can take place on three levels of increasing detail, from basic discovery to deep-dives into the complete configuration of any given item.

By updating the map on demand, TADDM helps to keep IT teams continually apprised not just of application status but also of any specific infrastructural changes that may have taken place to affect it. The reports, similarly, can reflect configuration changes over time, involving different combinations of technologies or software versions, as well as illustrate compliancy (or lack of it) with internal policies or external government regulations.

Today, TADDM also represents a key element of the larger Tivoli service management portfolio, which collectively empowers organizations to focus on service levels and the business impact of technological changes, as opposed to the details of domain-centric technologies per se.

By addressing application performance in a holistic sense, from end to end, TADDM helps keep the services supported by applications up and running, translating directly into a better experience for end users and more business value for the organization.

TADDM 7.2 has been augmented with many compelling features

IBM Tivoli Application Dependency Discovery Manager 7.2 has been augmented with many compelling features. In version 7.2, TADDM includes many powerful new features that substantially improve five areas sure to be of interest to any IT manager: discovery, the user interface, network capabilities, virtualization and storage.

Discovery

One particularly exciting new aspect of TADDM 7.2 lies in its ability to leverage ITM (the leading solution for infrastructural status and health monitoring) infrastructure to run it's sensors.

As the leading solution, with an extraordinarily broad customer base, ITM represents a great way for many organizations to extend TADDM's power even further. This can happen via two ways: either through data collected by ITM servers or through discovery targets monitored by ITM agents (in versions 6.2.1 and above). Such a design also translates into improved ease of use, since ITM agents reused in this manner spare the IT team from having to deal with credentials for each target in the case of level two discovery sequences. Similarly, crossing firewalls to obtain target information is now simplified—compared to the previous approach of deploying TADDM-specific anchors and gateways—thanks to the fact that ITM can already traverse them and TADDM can benefit from that.

Event-driven discovery is also included. In this way, ITM and other solutions can send change events to TADDM in real time—essentially, a push model rather than a pull model, that doesn't require TADDM to take action in order to obtain change information and keep IT apprised.

User interface

TADDM 7.2 also boasts a substantially optimized Web interface designed to improve both overall visualization and scalability. Clearly, the more complex an infrastructure is, the more complex will be the chain of dependencies for any given application. TADDM 7.2 performance enhancements mean the topology map is rendered significantly faster than before, delivering more timely information about even the most complicated and labyrinthine dependency chain.

Also available in TADDM 7.2 is a new, scope-configurable server affinity report/graph, useful for reflecting the logical relationships between servers at a glance—that is, their service or transactional dependencies—without including detailed consideration of their complete software stacks. Both the source and destination of the dependencies are clearly shown.

Network capabilities

For many organizations, security is an increasingly important mandate requiring new functions from deployed solutions. In the case of government organizations, for instance, special cryptography may be specified to ensure that unauthorized users have the least possible opportunity to access sensitive data.

For this reason, TADDM 7.2 includes a significant step up in crypto security, to the 128-bit Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) capable of complying with new Federation Information Processing Standard (FIPS) guidelines.

Additional network enhancement is evident in the fact that TADDM 7.2 is now fully IPv6-tolerant, meaning it supports configuration items based on this standard (though it doesn't discover anything specific to IPv6 configuration per se). As IPv6-driven offerings become more and more prevalent on networks, this feature will generate more and more business value in proportion.

TADDM also now supports overlapping address spaces, as used by technologies such as NAT (Network Address Translation) to support IP functions given a limited range of actual available addresses (usually associated with IPv4). And added support for Cisco's NetFlow protocol means TADDM works with NetFlow-based devices even when credentials for dependency endpoints are not provided. This delivers an exceptionally comprehensive perspective on the dynamic relationship between application performance and network elements.

Virtualization

Customers who have deployed VMware to create virtualized environments will be pleased to find that TADDM 7.2 now discovers VMware ESX 3.5-based data centers, including the servers they manage, helping to reflect the correlation between those servers and physical hosts. Furthermore, VMware offerings are among those capable of pushing change information, such as migration across hosts via vmotion, directly to TADDM.

Similar support is provided for Microsoft's Hyper-V Server 2008 OS. Additionally, TADDM 7.2 now interoperates with IBM Power Systems to report unallocated virtual resources on those hosts, and map host resources to virtual machines. Collectively, these features deliver improved understanding of the relationship between services, applications and resources inside virtualized environments.

Storage

Rounding out the new features of TADDM 7.2: new ways to understand the hidden dependencies connecting storage and applications, and in this way drive application/service availability to new heights.

Blind spots in the storage infrastructure associated with earlier versions of TADDM have now been eliminated, allowing more complete interoperability with IBM Tivoli Storage Productivity Center, and in future versions, other storage management tools as well. Through periodic deep-discovery (via a level three process), TADDM 7.2 can leverage storage management solution databases for storage configuration