This section identifies the changes and enhancements that have been made in since the last release of Tideway Foundation (7.1.7).

Hardware Reference and End of Life Data

Tideway Foundation has extended its Data Model further by adding support for modeling Hardware Reference (specification) Data in relation to the discovered physical hosts.

Hardware Reference Data provides the following vendor specification data:

• Size (Rack Units)
• Power (W)
• Power (VA)
• Heat Output (BTU).

Import of Hardware Reference data (HRD) into Tideway Foundation will enable customers to associate discovered systems with physical assets and report on both directly from Tideway Foundation. The figure below shows the Hardware reference Data Dashboard:

Clicking any of the links displays the Hardware Reference Data page for that host type.

See the Hardware Reference Data Page, and Importing Hardware Reference Data for more information.

Operating System and Software Instance End of Life Data

The data model is further extended by adding End of Life (EOL) data which provides the dates for the End of Life, End of Support, and End of Extended Support for many Operating Systems and Software Instances. The figure below show EOL data for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 (RHEL 5).

For more information, see the OS Support Page.

SQL Discovery

Foundation's discovery just became even more powerful with the addition of SQL based access. There are two ways in which SQL database information can be used:

• As a new Discovery mechanism. Foundation can now interrogate discovered databases more deeply. This could for example be used to acquire licensing information or schema and table information, or as a way of inferring dependencies between databases and the applications they support. This is described in Software Credential Groups.
• To integrate Foundation with existing sources of business contextual information to automatically enrich the model. For example host ownership information could be automatically added at scan time by querying an existing asset register. This is described in Integration Points.

Both mechanisms integrate the data by making it available to patterns. The Release ships with patterns that build the structure of Oracle, Sybase, Micrsosoft SQL Server, MySQL, and Postgres.

There are also template patterns demonstrating these uses available from the pattern management page. The TPL code used for integration with SQL databases is described here.

Consolidation

The data from multiple Foundation instances can now be consolidated onto a single appliance. This can be of benefit in several scenarios:

• Firewalled environments – where an environment is divided by firewalls so that a single appliance is unable to reach all parts.
• Restricted scanning windows – where a discovery window is short it is possible to share the IP addresses between multiple scanning appliances meaning each smaller scan can be completed in less time. The combined results can then be viewed on the consolidation appliance.

See Consolidation for more information.

Discovery Metadata

The transparency of Foundation's discovery process has been extended. The user is given a deeper insight into what was done when retrieving the raw data from which the model is built. This allows for easier trouble-shooting of access failures than ever before. When viewing a DiscoveryAccess the user is presented with information regarding the successes and failures (including drill-through to the related configuration artifacts) in the following areas:

• Access methods and credentials
• Discovery scripts
• Low level discovery commands

See the DiscoveryAccess Page for more information.

Pattern Configuration

With the introduction of pattern configuration the user can easily modify pattern behavior without needing to edit the pattern code itself. Configuration can be specific to a single pattern, or be used to control the behavior of groups of patterns.

See Pattern Configuration for more information.

The release ships with a TKU that has been modified to allow configuration of many of the patterns.

Manual Pattern Execution

Manual pattern execution allows a pattern to be run independently of a scan. The pattern is run in isolation against a specific set of (possibly only one) trigger nodes, and feedback of the pattern's actions is given in the UI. Pattern execution can make use of existing data fetched during previous scans, rather than making new discovery requests.

Pattern execution is useful for quick turnaround and debugging during pattern creation, and to apply patterns with a minimum of impact on hosts (for example, a pattern that adds ownership information to hosts by querying a central database can be applied without rescanning all hosts to which ownership information is to be added).

See Manual Pattern Execution for more information.

Windows Server 2008 and Windows Vista Support

Foundation now supports the discovery of Windows Server 2008 and Vista Hosts. See Windows 2008 for more information.

Easier Slave Installation

7.1 made installing the slave much easier, and 7.2 goes even further. The slave installer now allows configuration of the user it will run as inside the installation wizard, and will start the slave for you. It also allows for very quick registration of the slave with its appliance by opening a pre-filled form in a web browser. See Installing Slaves for more information.

Many other smaller improvements

• Better credential testing page.
• The Administration Page restructured to make finding things much easier.
• Better debugging of WMI queries
• Full identification of processors on Windows 2008/Vista
• Raw history view restored
• Warning in the UI of a host that is about to be removed due to aging
• Better highlighting of hosts that have changed their identity
• All attributes shown in node comparisons.
• Mass actions improvements
  • Usability improved
  • Now includes the ability to scan Host, Subnet and DiscoveryAccess nodes
• It is now possible to restore Appliance Snapshots when using Firefox.
• Sub-table sorting in the UI.