Large enterprises are confronted with an increased need to fully understand the IT systems that support their business applications. Unfortunately, conventional communication trace-based approaches to discovering IT infrastructure dependencies are insufficient to gain a comprehensive mapping of business applications to IT infrastructure. This paper describes BizMap, a novel, information-discovery-based approach for deriving accurate business application topologies.
BizMap uses a combination of information management, data analysis, and interactive visualization techniques to rapidly develop accurate topology models based on discovered information and configuration experts’ insight. BizMap’s evaluation is based on a comparison of the topologies created by BizMap’s automated topology discovery with manually derived topologies with respect to performance and accuracy. It also includes a discussion of the user validation of the interactive BizMap steps.