Understanding Your IT Portfolio with Automated Application Discovery and Monitoring

A number of factors drive the need for a full picture of your IT infrastructure. Visibility can help you address the threat of security breaches, comply with data protection regulations, or enhance organizational performance and agility.

Application discovery isn’t straightforward, especially if you have many servers or Virtual Machines and many apps. Run books might be out of date, install scripts might be missing, some applications are no longer used, and new apps are added over time. How do you discover which applications are running on each server, how they’re distributed and connected across a network, and how and when they’re used?

Start with dynamic discovery

“If you want to plan where you’re going, you’ll need to know where you are.”

Nigel Stokes, CEO VirtaMove Corp

Automated application discovery you immediately reach all systems, servers, and network nodes in a network. Using software to dynamically discover apps will get you an application portfolio in a fraction of the time and cost it would take to do a manual inventory. 

Optimize with application monitoring

Once you have a handle on your application portfolio, monitoring apps gets you to the next stage of your modernization plan. Application monitoring lets you track and understand:

• who is using the applications, and when they’re using them
• which functions or features of an application are used and how they’re used
• dataflows between applications on different servers
• dependencies between applications running on different servers

Application monitoring will tell you about apps that are broken or no longer used, so you can confidently decommission them. It also shows which apps are in high demand and need a server upgrade, as well as which apps might be good candidates to move to the Cloud. 

If you want to move applications to a better place, automated application discovery identifies all the dependencies and stack components that need to move too. Monitoring discovers how much memory, storage, and processing will be needed if you plan to move apps to new VMs or servers. These factors will help you size your requirements, so you avoid overprovisioning in your new destination.

Detailed app discovery and monitoring is the first step in an IT modernization plan. Call VirtaMove if you’d like to learn more about how app discovery can help you move your IT infrastructure to a better future.