2 Components and Concepts

Application Discovery Components

Application Discovery contains these components:

•The Application Discovery agent, which discovers the presence of applications and processes on a managed system, collects information about the managed system and its applications, and communicates that information to the Application Discovery server on the central management server.

—An agent is fully autonomous.

—An agent is the only component that is platform-specific (by operating system type and version).

•The Application Discovery server, which communicates with agents, runs all of the algorithms, tracks events, stores templates, and passes data to the user interface.

•The Application Discovery WBEM provider, which provides transport for commands issued by the Application Discovery server from the central management server (CMS) to the agents.

•The Application Discovery user interface, which displays collected data and provides mechanisms that allow the user to modify and refine aspects of user interface, agent, and server behavior; and data display.

•SSL certificate helper files, which build necessary administrative command files. These files include commands to manage and exchange SSL certificates, allowing the agent and the CMS to authenticate the legitimacy of the transmission.

•The Application Discovery initialization scripts, which initialize the database, install the user interface into HP SIM (including the help system for Application Discovery), and set up the conditions for certificate exchange between agent and server.

•The Application Discovery templates, which define the objects of discovery for identification and data collection.

Agents and WBEM providers are installed and run on the managed systems where applications are to be discovered and monitored. The Application Discovery server and user interface are installed on the CMS. The templates also reside on the CMS.

The data transmitted by Application Discovery agents includes the following:

•Running process information, including command lines and command-line arguments, working directories, users, and environment variables

•Installed software information

•Operating system and architecture versions

Application Discovery uses installed software registries and templates (user-defined and those provided by HP) to match known attributes to discovered data for analysis and presentation in a user interface.

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