HP UX Matrix Operating EnvIronment manual Introduction, Features of Application Discovery

1 Introduction

This document describes how to use Application Discovery to monitor applications in a virtual server environment. This document is for administrators and operators who are responsible for configuring and/or monitoring application health and availability. Some understanding of system administration is assumed.

Application Discovery works from within HP Systems Insight Manager software (HP SIM) to give you the ability to inventory running and installed applications across your system network and to centrally monitor application activity.

Within Insight Dynamics, Application Discovery integrates with HP Insight Virtualization Manager software to give you the power to group running processes into custom applications that can be added to a workload for more comprehensive resource management.

The Application Discovery server and user interface run on the central management server (CMS). Working in tandem with the agent that you install on your managed HP-UX or Linux systems, Application Discovery gives you access to system and process information captured by the deployed agents.

With Application Discovery, you can do the following:

•Discover the location and number of recognized, running and installed applications in your network or data center.

•Monitor the activity and resource usage of running processes and applications.

•Define and adapt application templates to your environment for better discovery of your third-party and custom applications, and to make them available for adding to monitored workloads on HP-UX systems.

•Select the event types for which you want to receive notifications and set their level of importance.

Features of Application Discovery

You can use Application Discovery to do the following:

•Automate discovery of standard applications supplied with HP-UX and Linux operating systems.

•Automate discovery of applications often run on HP-UX and Linux operating systems within data centers. For example, Application Discovery includes templates to discover common applications generated by Oracle and SAP software.

•Find unmatched processes that represent third-party or custom software.

•Edit or create an application discovery template to make it specific to your environment.

•Determine the location of running and installed applications.

•Monitor the activity of running processes and applications.

•Define severity for application-oriented events to trigger notification messages, and control where the messages display (in Application Discovery and/or HP SIM).

•Discover the presence or absence of Application Discovery agents and check their status.

•Monitor the behavior and performance of the Application Discovery server.

Configuring Application Discovery behavior and changing template definitions requires “VSE All Tools” access (which usually corresponds to root or Administrator permissions). See “User authorizations” in Insight Dynamics help for more information about tool boxes in HP SIM and how they affect user access to Application Discovery features.

Visibility of systems and applications depends on the permissions a user has for each managed system and application. Users can see only those systems and applications in Application Discovery tables that they already have permission to access or view.

Features of Application Discovery 9