Relicore Inc. on Monday will launch the latest release of its Clarity automated configuration management tool for distributed applications.
Clarity, in the market for just over a year, automatically discovers and documents the inter-relationships between all of the software elements on different servers and then maps those dependencies. As configuration changes are made, the system dynamically updates the tools Dependency Map to reflect those changes.
Based on user feedback, Relicore updated the tool, to be able to “interrogate and understand the [Sun Microsystems Inc.] Solaris package database, used to register applications,” described Blair Wheeler, cofounder of the firm in Burlington, Mass. “So now we can discover internally developed applications,” he added.
Clarity Version 3.0 also adds the ability to interrogate and understand the Microsoft Internet Information Server metabase, along with the ability to understand Named Pipe dependencies in Windows 2000 applications, Wheeler added.
Clarity is intended to help speed the isolation and diagnosis of problems in complex, multitiered Web applications infrastructures. It uses agents to gather and update applications dependency data and a centralized repository to analyze the nature and structure of the applications as well as how they communicate with different, distributed components on other machines.
Also new in the latest release, which is available now, is the ability to perform a system-wide history search. “You can take a business service and do a history search on it to see any changes that happened during a specified time period,” described Wheeler.
Version 3.0 adds color-coded Dependency Maps that detail the related applications or servers that were influenced by a system change or the addition of a new business process.
The tool starts at $100,000.