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Two vendors in the growing configuration management arena last week sought to fill in missing pieces of their products capabilities.
The smaller and nimbler Relicore Inc. in Version 4.0 of its Clarity IT service configuration management software added new capabilities that help the tool scale and that fit into a large enterprises overall management infrastructure.
The larger BMC Software Inc., for its part, added new discovery capabilities that allow its software to automatically discover elements that make up an application infrastructure along with their dependencies.
Clarity 4.0 integrates for the first time with IBMs Tivoli Enterprise Console, allowing the tool to be launched from within the IBM console. The tool also automatically sends an event to TEC when it detects changes that occur in the structure of the applications being managed, according to Blair Wheeler, co-founder of Relicore, in Burlington, Mass.
That integration adds value to the Tivoli offering, according to Relicore user Kurt Hansel, senior technical officer at JPMorgan Chase & Co., in Lowell, Mass.
“Itll make Tivoli a better product for us. Well be able to click on a Tivoli alert, itll open Relicore automatically and drill down to whatever has changed—like a configuration file—to troubleshoot problems faster,” said Hansel.
Clarity 4.0, available now, can also automatically discover application infrastructure elements and their dependencies across thousands of servers. Automated discovery and element mapping are gaining new interest as IT governance projects get under way and more organizations adopt IT Infrastructure Library best practices, Wheeler said.
That interest has gained the attention of large players such as BMC, which last week launched a new suite, called Topology Discovery. It provides three types of discovery, including Discovery Express, Marimba Configuration Discovery and Topology Discovery.
The new Topology Discovery component provides a logical mapping of SAP AG, BEA Systems Inc.s WebLogic and IBMs WebSphere J2EE (Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition) applications. Those application environments will be mappable right away, while BMC plans to add Seibel Systems Inc. products next month and then release additional Expert Packs for other products, such as those of PeopleSoft Inc. and Microsoft Corp.s Exchange.
“All that relationship and mapping data is returned as objects to the database and is then used by other BMC tools,” according to a BMC spokesperson in Sunnyvale, Calif.
Discovery Express, already available in the market, is an agentless technology that discovers IT assets such as desktops, servers and network devices. It provides hardware attributes and an inventory of software on those hardware devices.
Marimba Configuration Discovery provides more detail on end devices such as servers and desktops. Such detail includes device settings, hardware and software components, and current states.
The suite is slated to ship Dec. 23.
Configuration management advancements
Relicore
- Clarity integration with Tivoli Enterprise Console
- Automated element discovery
- Automated dependency mapping
BMC - New Topology Discovery suite
- Logical mapping of SAP, WebLogic and WebSphere applications