Looking Under the Hood

Imagine keeping a complete picture of hundreds of business applications, thousands of servers, hundreds of thousands of software components and millions of relationships up-to-date. Daunting (or impossible?) to do manually. But it’s all in a day’s work for Foundation.

Getting the Complete Picture

Our native, agent-free data center indexing engine refreshes Foundation’s picture of the entire global enterprise infrastructure on an intraday basis. It can easily cover tens of thousands of servers, with negligible load on the network. Indexing can be federated to localize traffic across geographical regions and time-zones, or to enhance data center indexing speed. Foundation is the only product that can operate in a truly agent-free manner across Windows, Linux, UNIX and Netware environments. Indexing can also reconcile configuration data from third-party sources such as agent infrastructures and inventory management systems.

Knowledgeable About Your IT Environment

The knowledge library contains patterns that allow Foundation to recognize software products and business applications running in the data center. The knowledge library ships with thousands of pre-populated patterns – meaning Foundation is ready to go out-of-the-box. Tideway’s Knowledge Update Service adds new patterns as vendors release new products and versions to market. But what about your custom software and business applications? Simply create and add your own patterns.

An Eye for Spotting Patterns

The reasoning engine runs the patterns from the knowledge library over the raw configuration data generated by indexing to intelligently recognize hardware, operating systems, software editions and versions, as well as business applications. These are then stored in Foundation’s Configuration Database. This is a graph-based database that uses a pre-defined best practice schema, and is customer extensible, making it easy to index, model and map detailed information about CIs as well as the complex any-to-any relationships required for today’s IT environments.

Foundation constantly monitors your data center, identifying hundreds of business applications, thousands of servers, and millions of dependencies.

“For executives trying to make sense of a rapidly changing business environment, superiority in pattern recognition is perhaps the greatest competitive advantage that can be developed.”
Harvard Business Review, November 2007