Automating application mapping and replacing Application Descriptor Files with relationships

This paper provides guidance on how you can automate the definition of business application and collections using rule-based definitions. As an added benefit, this paper demonstrates how you can replace existing application descriptor file based solutions for application discovery with the easier-to-manage rule-based business application definitions, and thereby avoid the administrative nightmare associated with maintaining application descriptor files.

The information presented in this paper will help you achieve these goals:

• More accurate application mappings provide better information to the incident, problem, and change management processes, and will help improve Time To Resolution, and quality of change impact analysis, so that unforeseen impacts are minimized.
• Automating and easy cloning of application definitions allow you to keep up with the dynamics of the virtual infrastructure
• As the TADDM administrator, you will become more productive when you do not have to maintain and deploy application descriptor files

For many years, IBM® Tivoli® Application Dependency Discovery Manager (TADDM) has supported the use of application descriptor files to associate certain discovered components and servers with specific business applications. This functions has never become particularly popular because it require that you maintain and deploy application-component specific files to each system in your infrastructure that host resources you want to associate with an application. The application descriptor files must be maintained every time the lifecycle state of a component changes, and require that you discover the components in order for TADDM to recognize their existence. In a dynamic, virtualized environment it is almost impossible to keep up with the speed of the automated change processes. The manual management of the application descriptor files is cumbersome, time consuming, and error-prone, and represent such a huge manual effort, that most organizations decline to use it to automatically map business applications.

In TADDDM 7.2.1 the Grouping Composer function provides an alternate way to associate specific resources with a business application or a collection. With the Grouping Composer, you can define rules that specify the particular components and servers that support certain business applications or use cases. The rules identify the resources based on queries against the TADDM database, so it is centrally managed, does not require deployment of files throughout the infrastructure, support bulkloaded and placeholder components, does not require discovery, and supports maintenance of collections in addition to business applications. As you can see, rule-based definition of business applications provide superior functions compared to the use of application descriptor files.

Be advised, that to benefit from reading this paper, you should be familiar with the Common Data Model, and in particular how it support object inheritance and relationships.

• TADDM_An_Alternative_to_Using_ApplicationDescriptorFiles_V1.0.pdf
• groupManager.bat
• groupManager.py
• relationshipManager.bat
• relationshipManager.py
• taddmJythonApiHelper.py