ManageEngine has introduced runtime application discovery and dependency mapping in Applications Manager, its application performance monitoring solution. Now, enterprises can rapidly visualise and understand application relationships in complex, dynamic environments by drastically trimming down the time and effort required for accurately mapping multi-tier applications to their underlying infrastructure components. The company also announced Applications Manager now offers comprehensive monitoring of Microsoft business applications such as Dynamics CRM, Lync 2013 and BizTalk. The new features provide deep visibility into the health and performance of these applications, enabling IT administrators to trace down issues before they cause problems for end users.
Application maps are often the first step to visualising complex IT environments. However, manually discovering and mapping the relationships between applications is a resource-intensive process that can take hours or even days. Also, the information mapped can quickly become outdated in dynamic environments, making it error prone and requiring additional effort to keep it up to date. Automated application discovery and dependency mapping can accelerate the mapping process by eliminating the manual effort.
"Applications Manager can now offer runtime dependency maps that provide actionable information in a very short span of time," said Sridhar Iyengar, vice president of product management at ManageEngine. "Unlike the maps created by competing products, these maps can be generated very quickly and do not require extensive effort or programming knowledge. These maps are updated dynamically as changes occur, enabling business teams to make better decisions."
Introducing Application Discovery and Dependency Mapping
Applications Manager automatically discovers the applications and servers in IT environments and maps the relationships between the different components. It provides a global view of all the discovered applications and shows the connections to their immediate next level of applications and services. Users can also easily add or delete relationships in these maps. These dependencies can be populated and maintained in a configuration management database (CMDB), which makes it easy to quickly capture an accurate and up-to-date map of the application relationships.
Among their many benefits, the Applications Manager automated dependency maps help IT administrators:
- Gain visibility into the dependencies between application and infrastructure components in complex IT environments.
- Speed up the troubleshooting process by quickly identifying components associated with a particular application.
- Understand which service will be impacted when a particular resource goes down. This will be immensely useful in change impact analysis as part of the change management process.
Expanding the List of Monitored Microsoft Applications
Applications Manager enables comprehensive performance monitoring of Dynamics CRM to minimise downtime and optimise the performance of Dynamics CRM systems. The key performance indicators of Dynamics CRM monitored by Applications Manager include those pertaining to authentication failures, Outlook sync requests, event logs, as well as the availability and health of component services such as Async service, Sandbox service, discovery service, router service and locator service.
The monitoring support for Lync 2013 server enables IT teams to quickly determine if there is a slowdown in any of the core activities of the Lync server such as user authentication, peer connectivity, deploying host applications, and web conferencing. Applications Manager monitors the health and performance of the important components of the Lync server such as the Conferencing server, Mediation server and Edge server. The key performance metrics of Lync 2013 monitored by Applications Manager include authentication errors, details of SIP connections, number of incoming/outgoing requests and processing time.
Applications Manager enables performance monitoring of individual components of the BizTalk server such as message box, orchestrations, ports and adapters. The key performance indicators of BizTalk monitored by Applications Manager include host throttling, memory consumption, thread count, etc.
The support for Dynamics CRM, Lync 2013 and BizTalk is complementary to the existing out-of-the-box support for 80+ applications and infrastructure components, including other Microsoft apps such as Exchange, SharePoint, SQL Server, .NET application server, Hyper-V, Windows Azure, IIS, Active Directory and MSMQ.
