Business Application Modeling

Tideway Foundation allows you to model your distributed, custom business applications which may consist of hundreds of distributed software and hardware components. Tideway Foundation then locates all instances of the business application in your environment, and maintains this business application to infrastructure mapping automatically over time. The generated dependency views can be exported, using industry standard protocols, to service management tools, such as BMC Atrium, Managed Objects, Compuware Vantage and Interlink.

Benefits

• Reduces the cost of manually maintaining business service views by up to 80%
• Clear understanding of critical dependencies and the business impact of change
• Provides demonstrable control of applications for IT governance and compliance
• Faster problem resolution and root cause analysis, leading to fewer service outages and reported incidents

Powerful Comparison Tools

Tideway Foundation's powerful comparison tools analyze configuration items and their dependencies to track how applications and their associated Configuration Items (CIs) are changing over time. These changes can then be reconciled against change requests to validate that they are approved, and correctly implemented. Changes can be tracked for individual CI attributes or for the contents of configuration files. Tideway Foundation's comparison tools can also be used to highlight differences between CIs – for example hosts in live and disaster recovery environments, or between development, testing and production stages, ensuring non-standard configurations and risk are identified.

Benefits

• Eliminate configuration related risk between live and disaster recovery environments
• Faster Mean Time To Repair (MTTR) in the event of a change-related incident through comparison of CIs before and after change
• Better change governance with visibility of all changes in the environment

Flexible Reporting and Dependency Visualization

Tideway Foundation's powerful browser-based reporting engine and dependency visualization tools provide transparency of the IT environment. Reports can be run in seconds to provide answers to critical questions that used to take weeks – from the simple "How many Solaris 8 servers do I have in my environment?" to the complex "What changed in the configuration of my global trading application since yesterday?". Dependency visualization makes management of complex applications far simpler and can include switches, routers, hosts, processes, software packages, business applications and other business entities. Dependency visualization can be used for a variety of activities including audit, change impact analysis, planning, and troubleshooting.

Benefits

• Dynamic reports providing quick and easy access to contextual business information
• Daily reports and dependency visualizations that would be impossible to generate manually
• Fast access to critical IT control data
• Accurate change impact analysis
• Simplifies understanding of complex application architectures

Scalable, Low Impact, Hybrid Data Center Indexing

Tideway Foundation's native highly scalable and configurable agent-free data center indexing engine is capable of refreshing its picture of the entire global enterprise infrastructure on an intraday basis across thousands of servers, with negligible load on the network. Data center indexing can be federated to localize traffic across geographical regions and time-zones, or to enhance data center indexing speed. Tideway Foundation is the only product that can operate in a truly agent-free manner across Windows, Linux, UNIX and Netware environments. In addition, Tideway Foundation can enrich the discovered information by reconciling configuration data from third-party data sources, such as agent infrastructures and inventory management systems. This allows Tideway Foundation's configuration database to be enriched with existing, trusted and non-discoverable business contextual data to be included. The reasoning engine uses these streams of configuration data to intelligently recognize hardware, operating systems, software editions and versions, as well as business applications, removing manual effort, and dramatically improving data quality. Tideway Foundation has proven scalability in infrastructures of up to 50,000 servers.

Benefits

• Transparent, traceable and auditable data center indexing mechanisms
• Reduced cost of collating and keeping up-to-date configuration information
• Enhanced quality of configuration information derived directly from live systems and trusted inventory databases
• Improved departmental communication through one shared model for IT organizations

Open, Accessible and Extensible

Tideway Foundation ships with an extensive knowledge library containing thousands of patterns and lifecycle information for a broad range of infrastructure products. Simple or complex patterns can be created allowing Tideway Foundation to command additional discovery processes to retrieve further more detailed information of the hardware, software or business applications. Tideway works in partnership with key infrastructure vendors to constantly generate new content. These are then automatically populated into Tideway Foundation on a regular basis via TKU, the Tideway Knowledge Update, ensuring the pattern library is always up-to-date with new hardware, products, software editions and versions.

Benefits

• Large proportion of IT infrastructure recognized out-of-the-box
• Flexible pattern-based recognition allowing the creation of custom content reduces professional services time required by other products
• Regular updates to Knowledge Library reduces maintenance costs and prolongs investment
• Customer extensible patterns enhance business agility to adapt to changing IT landscape without changes to core product technology

Flexible Cross-Tier Relationship Model

Tideway Foundation's Configuration Database ships with a pre-defined best practice graph-based 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. Explicit data quality, confidence and full data provenance make it easy to verify the coverage, accuracy, completeness and currency of the underlying information.

Benefits

• Best practice schema provided out-of-the-box
• Data Quality rating highlights areas of information that require additional focus
• Full data provenance recorded for every data item and relationship
• Extensible to precisely reflect the customer environment
• Any-to-any modeling ideal for increasingly virtualized environments

Integrates into the Enterprise Service Management Eco-System

Tideway Foundation has open interfaces that allow integration into the rest of your Enterprise Service Management eco-system to support true model driven service management. Next generation export adapters feature easy configuration directly from within Tideway Foundation, with no programming experience required, enabling fast integration to CMDBs, BSM tools and most other third-party applications. Tideway Foundation ships with sample mapping sets out-of-the-box, for standard service management tools, so that you can start integrating configuration data within minutes, not hours or days. Data can be transformed on the fly, making it ready-to-use as soon as it is exported, and in most cases, time-consuming post-processing is eliminated.

Benefits

• Reduces manual effort of building business service views by up to 80%
• Keeps service views accurate for true model driven service management
• Simple set up of mapping and transformation to target data models using industry standard protocols
• Out-of-the-box mappings to third-party CMDB and BSM tools

Visibly Accurate Information through Data Provenance

Tideway Foundation increases confidence in the underlying information captured from the IT infrastructure through the use of data provenance, making it easier to identify issues such as the failure to discover current information due to failure of discovery commands or credential problems, all of which take time and effort to diagnose. The ability to trace the information back to its source drives down the deployment and ongoing costs of Tideway Foundation. Information that is potentially incorrect, for reasons such as being out of date, is highlighted ensuring immediate visibility.

Benefits

• Provides additional supporting information for regulatory & process compliance
• Verifiable source of data feeding your CMDB projects
• Defensible and trustworthy data, traceable back to the source

Fast Roll-Out and Easy Maintenance

Delivered as a system of one or more appliances, or as a fully managed service, Tideway Foundation arrives preconfigured, and is up-and-running in minimal time. Because Tideway Foundation uses agent-free data center indexing techniques, there is no agent infrastructure to install and manage removing the problems typically associated with implementing and maintaining agents across thousands of servers. Tideway Foundation's user interface is totally browser-based, so roll-out to the IT organization is greatly simplified.

Benefits

• Low Total Cost of Ownership (TCO)
• Fully hardened and penetration tested appliance for high security
• Fast deployment, and therefore time-to-value
• Easy creation of custom content using powerful script based pattern language (TPL)