Automated application discovery and analysis system and method

Abstract

An object oriented design for an automated modeling system for mapping and monitoring the business roles and impact of elements within an IT Infrastructure that make up specific applications or business processes, spanning not only network elements, hosts, servers and programs but also users, company structure and processes. The design including: a series of collector modules for collecting relationship, modeling and status information from both IT and external non IT specific sources used to build a model of the application or process in the database and to gather data about activities occurring on the computer network from a business impact perspective; a series of visualizer modules for reporting monitoring activities conducted by the monitoring system; a modeling database for storing information collected by the collector modules; a series of correlator modules for automatically determining relationships between data objects stored in the database to build application models of individual applications in the context of business process and IT service delivery.

1 . A method associated with a system for automated application discovery, the system including a plurality of Information Technology (IT) elements, the method including the steps of:
 collecting descriptive and relationship data on the IT elements from multiple non-specific sources;   converting the collected data into a common data format;   combining the converted collected data into objects of a common model; and, identifying at least one unique application structure.   
     
     
         2 . A method, as set forth in  claim 1 , wherein a structure of an application consists of all IT devices, components, software and users, plus the relationships therebetween, of which the application is composed. 
     
     
         3 . A method, as set forth in  claim 1 , wherein a structure of an application is created in the model as a function of a set of predefined policies, consisting of at least one unique structure being one of virtual, logical or physical. 
     
     
         4 . A method, as set forth in  claim 1 , where the collected data can consist of any descriptive attribute for an IT element, including but not limited to model, ports, interfaces, IP address, location, owner, memory, software version, model, cards, and descriptive data. 
     
     
         5 . A method, as set forth in  claim 1 , the collected relationships including, but are not limited to, connected via, composed of, virtualized on, owned by, supports application, and neighbor of. 
     
     
         6 . A method, as set forth in  claim 1 , wherein the step of collecting is performed by a piece of generic collector software that can be configured to collect data from any source that is accessible. 
     
     
         7 . A method, as set forth in  claim 2 , wherein the collector software identifies an amount of end user application usage. 
     
     
         8 . A method, as set forth in  claim 2 , wherein the collector software includes a virtualization network discovery collector for mapping all IT elements in the cloud. 
     
     
         9 . A method, as set forth in  claim 2 , wherein the collector software includes a software inventory collector for identifying applications loaded on all connected IT elements. 
     
     
         10 . A method, as set forth in  claim 1 , wherein the objects collected into the model can represent any type of IT infrastructure, physical or virtual. 
     
     
         11 . A method, as set forth in  claim 1 , wherein the collected data may be from multiple sources and may represent both business structure and operational models. 
     
     
         12 . A method, as set forth in  claim 2 , wherein the identifying at least one unique application structure as a function of a set of predefined policies is performed by correlator software modules. 
     
     
         13 . A method, as set forth in  claim 1 , wherein the predefined policies are non-specific descriptions of the type of element, element attribute(s) or element inter-relationships that describe and applications structure. 
     
     
         14 . A method, as set forth in  claim 10 , where the Application structures created by the policies do not require manual identification of specific IT elements to create them. 
     
     
         15 . A method, as set forth in  claim 1 , where the object data in the Common Data Format is combined in an object model to represent specific applications and service structures using non-specific policies to identify the IT elements from which the application is comprised. 
     
     
         16 . A method, as set forth in  claim 1 , where multiple relationships between objects embody application interdependencies representing complex applications and processes.