nLayers Inc. ratcheted up the competition in the application discovery and mapping arena on Monday at the Gartner Data Center Conference with the latest release of its InSight software.
With its new InSight Release 4.5, the San Jose, Calif., company sought to provide one of the broadest as well as most detailed discovery capabilities in the market.
The 4.5 release adds discovery and relationship mapping for network devices as well as storage devices on top of its existing discovery of application component and infrastructure elements that support multi-tiered applications.
“Many players talk about application discovery, while what they discover are servers and software,” said Gili Raanan, CEO in San Jose.
“They dont discover the network and storage devices that business applications rely on. Those players send the customer to get network discovery from OpenView Network Node Manager, or do it yourself,” he said.
nLayers competes with smaller discovery vendors, such as Collation and Cendura, as well as large enterprise management providers in the nascent CMDB (Configuration Management Database) market such as BMC Software Inc. and Mercury Interactive.
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The new Layer 2 and Layer 3 discovery can capture dependency, demand and usage data on network switches and routers.
InSights active discovery capability uses several methods for connecting to networking devices, including Simple Network Management Protocol polling, Secure Shell Server links and new Telnet scanning.
“Using it, we know which servers are connected to which ports, which business applications map into what software services in the data center. We can show a complete map of dependencies and impact analysis,” Raanan said.
Using agentless discovery, operators can scan IP addresses to manually discover any device with an IP address.
That scanning of IP address ranges is based on industry standard Internet Control Message Protocol.
InSight 4.5 also broadens its ability to discover custom or legacy applications by allowing users to create port and service-based fingerprints of those applications using a graphical wizard.
Users can add those custom applications to the “hundreds” of existing application fingerprints in nLayers Fingerprint Knowledge Base.
The new release is available now.
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