Leveraging technology acquired from nLayers in June of 2006, EMC's Application Discovery Manager (ADM), part of its Smarts line of infrastructure management tools, provides automated application discovery and dependency mapping capabilities, primarily for change management.

The ADM appliances are installed passively off the SPAN or mirror ports of up to three switches, and utilize agentless technology to examine network traffic and automatically determine and map both the applications that exist on the network as well as their dependencies. Passive traffic analysis is augmented with active discovery techniques (where servers are queried to obtain supplementary host information). The discovered applications and dependencies are mapped into an embedded Configuration Management Database (CMDB), which is then continuously updated in real-time. The vendor notes that the platform is able to build the full (and reconciled) interactive map, application model, and embedded CMDB "within just a few hours." The appliance can be deployed as a stand alone platform with support for thousands of servers, or as a distributed platform in which Collector appliances can be deployed to remote data centers (or to scale data collection in large data centers) and Aggregator appliances can gather Collector information for the creation of the centralized application model.

The embedded CMDB information within the ADM can be integrated with 3rd party or custom CMDBs via open, XML-based integration interfaces. Additionally, CMDB Dashboards enable the examination of the CMDB environment via graphs, charts, and tables; and also facilitate change tracking capabilities with alerting features.

Applications are identified and mapped via a combination of the vendor's Application Fingerprint technology, which provides out-of-the-box recognition of common packages and applications, and Application Pattern technology, which recognizes common n-tier application interactions. A user interface is included facilitating the definition of custom Application Patterns, and deep packet inspection can also discover patterns related to such specific identifiers as URLs or DB table names.

New in the latest release of ADM is a "Virtual Listener," with the ability to listen to application traffic across a VMware Virtual Switch and identify and catalog dependencies between virtual machines.

Application Discovery Manager is available now; pricing starts at $50,000. Contact EMC for further information.