Tideway: the obvious tool for conducting a baseline
by Simon Woodward | 31 Jul 2009 | Permalink |
Software
Every data center baseline has similar goals in mind. Equally, all baselines are problematic in similar ways. In Tideway Foundation 7.3, we’re directly addressing these problem areas. We want to make Tideway the obvious tool to use when you’re conducting a baseline, to make it easy to establish where the business services are in the datacenter, which of their components are reliant on which others and which business services rely on which other services.
The problems that occur in baselines, broadly, are:
- Deploying the automated scanning tool is a lot of work. Too many different teams are involved. Diagnosing why the tool isn’t collecting some bits of data is even harder.
- Using the retrieved data to find dependencies is tedious and error prone: analysing network connections, process lists, installed software and so on.
- Exporting data into a spreadsheet so that is can be annotated and organised causes big management problems. The spreadsheet goes out of date, manually maintaining it is error prone and there are problems when different people need to work on it at the same time.
- Meeting with IT staff and application teams to confirm findings is often inefficient. Conducting a meeting over a stack of spreadsheet printouts wastes a lot of time and good will. Emailing these spreadsheets around makes it hard to convey the details you wish to convey.
Tideway Foundation 7.3 seeks to address these problems, and I’ve put together some demos below to show you how it works.
Analyse the data and start building your dependency map
We’ve introduced some really effective tools for analysing network communications and the associated processes.
Datacenters are complicated! Tideway Foundation enables you to make sense of that complexity
There’s a lot of noise in datacenters. Foundation lets you see past all of the infrastructure chatter to identify the underlying business services.
Discuss, share and collaborate on the data in Tideway Foundation in an effective way
We’ve introduced purpose-built PDF format reports that you can use as a tool to collaborate with your colleagues and other IT staff. The grouping functionality reviewed in the first demo above is also an effective collaboration and sharing tool.
Thank you for reading! If you have any comments or feedback, please post them on the forum in this thread.
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