“You got application discovery in my end-to-end performance monitor! Oh yeah? You got end-to-end performance monitoring in my application discoverer!”

NetQoS and EMC have developed integration that feeds EMC’s Application Discovery Manager (ADM) server and application data into NetQoS SuperAgent. That makes it a lot easier to set up the applications you want to monitor with SuperAgent initially, and maintain these configurations as applications change and new ones are added. It also helps to ensure that consistent nomenclature is used to describe application components: If SuperAgent finds something that people should know about – let’s say there’s an application performance issue – the related component names will be understood by different IT groups which makes collaboration on problem resolution a lot easier.

ADM constantly tracks changes in hardware, OS, and software applications. Combined with SuperAgent, you can find problems and match them to the change that may have caused it, even if it’s something simple like replacing the RAM or patching the operating system.

The ADM product itself is an interesting one and pretty valuable to those that work in and around the data center. It’s an appliance that plugs into a span or mirror port on a switch and passively watches traffic and maps the application infrastructure relationships in the data center. You could find out in great – maybe shocking – detail about what every single server in a particular application might be – along with the clients that connect to it, the services involved, the dependencies, the hardware. You can do some deep-dive analysis using things like Windows Management Instrumentation, or SNMP or Secure Socket, and actively get into those machines, log on to them, find out the configuration currently and then regularly check for changes.