The following new features and enhancements have been introduced in the release of BMC Atrium Discovery version 8.3. This release of BMC Atrium Discovery was released October 2011.
New users of BMC Atrium Discovery are urged to use the Getting started Guide as an introduction to using BMC Atrium Discovery.
Collaborative Application Mapping (CAM)
BMC Atrium Discovery version 8.3 introduces a sophisticated new user interface to help you map your business applications. It is now possible to model complex applications without writing any TPL.
Some features available for application mapping are also applicable in other areas of the product, including:
Manual groups: Part of BMC Atrium Discovery 8.2, this feature is enhanced in version 8.3 because it provides a more flexible way to collect items of interest. You can store everything that is relevant to your particular task in a single group using the new ability to store multiple node kind per group. You can also organize and understand the contents of your group by using subgroups and adding notes. You can easily share the annotated contents of your group as part of your mapping prototype by generating a PDF.
The query builder, which is now available on search results, is used inside CAM for building functional components, and used in a modified form for filtering the data sent to the CMDB, has several improvements:
It now supports traversals, helping you browse around your data by, for example, traversing from a set of hosts to the software running on all of those hosts.
Attributes and traversals are initially limited to the most commonly used ones, to make it easier to find them, though you can show all with a single click.
It is now possible to select attributes that are not in the taxonomy. This is useful for filtering on things like TKU-populated attributes on software instances, such as "Catalina Home" for Tomcat SIs.
Discovery
BMC Atrium Discovery version 8.3 also has the following additional improvements:
J2EE
Discovering detailed information about Tomcat by JMX (added in version 8.2) has a significant drawback: Tomcat has to be configured specifically to allow it. In version 8.3, BMC Atrium Discovery uses configuration files instead, so that no JMX configuration or credentials are required. BMC Atrium Discovery retrieves the following additional detail in this way:
discovered user-defined resources
databases and mail resources (also discovered in version 8.2)
resources related to the webapps that are using them
Extended discovery of WebSphere and Weblogic using configuration files
BMC Atrium Discovery can relate LPARs running Linux to the frame that they are running in (version 8.2 discovers the LPARs, but does not provide any linking).
VIO (Virtual I/O) LPARs are discovered and related to the frame. This allows you to follow the dependencies of an application running on an LPAR to the physical network and HBA interfaces on the frame.
HMCs (Hardware Management Consoles) are discovered and related to the LPARs and frames that they are managing.
HBA
The Host Bus Adapters (HBA) discovery scripts have been revised and updated from a monolithic script to one in which multiple scripts are provided, each one discovering using a single technique.
BMC Atrium Discovery now retrieves more HBA information on more platforms and more card types. The new techniques used are vendor agnostic, meaning that Emulex and QLogic are fully supported, but you should also get information from other vendors. These methods are supported on the following platforms:
Linux (2.6 and 2.4 kernels)
VMware ESX/ESXi
Solaris
AIX
Windows
VMware
VMware ESX/ESXi has been supported for a long time using ssh. BMC Atrium Discovery adds the ability to use the vSphere API, which is fully supported by VMware and may become the only access method in the future.
ESX/ESXi hosts can be scanned directly, or they can be scanned using vCenter.
Windows
The Windows Slave has been renamed the Windows Proxy in BMC Atrium Discovery version 8.3.
To enable you to better scale your Windows discovery capabilities, Windows Proxy Pools enable you to group sets of Windows proxies together. The system distributes discovery requests across the pools to properly balance the load.
The Windows proxy management user interface has been improved to make it more consistent and easier to use.
Edge switch connectivity
Network topology discovery has been replaced with a new feature called edge switch connectivity discovery. This new method of gathering switch-to-host connection information significantly improves on topology discovery by being properly integrated into discovery runs (no separate topology run is necessary). It is fully compatible with consolidation, and it puts far less of a memory and CPU usage load on the appliance. If you are upgrading and have previously used topology discovery, you can easily change to edge switch connectivity.
Mainframe discovery
Mainframe discovery now retrieves evidence of applications running inside WebSphere, WLM, and MVTA. This information can be used in collaborative application mapping to model applications that include (or are exclusively run on) the mainframe.
Error feedback has been significantly improved.
Mainframe credential testing now provides a lot of information about the configuration of the agent, enabling you to ensure that it is installed correctly before starting normal discovery.
SNMP
BMC Atrium Discovery now supports discovery of devices using SNMPv3.
SNMP discovery is significantly faster in version 8.3 than in previous versions.
In previous versions, for a scan on a given endpoint, sufficiently different results from an SNMP scan and a subsequent scan using login credentials did not always identify that the host was identical. Consequently, duplicate hosts could be created. In BMC Atrium Discovery 8.3, the likelihood that this behavior will occur has been significantly reduced.
Printer discovery
BMC Atrium Discovery recognizes printers as a new inferred node kind, similar to hosts, network devices, and so on. Printer definitions are shipped in TKU in the same way as network device definitions. See supported printers for a list of printers that can be discovered with BMC Atrium Discovery version 8.3.
CMDB sync
CMDB sync blackout windows, configured using a file on the command line in version 8.2, can now be configured in the user interface.
A CMDB status summary channel has been added to the home page, similar to the Discovery dashboard, that enables you to quickly get an overview of your synchronization status.
New reports enable you to find all nodes that were not successfully synced to the CMDB on the most recent attempt. There is also a link to this information from the CMDB sync user interface.
CMDB sync supports multitenancy by setting the Company attribute on all synchronized CIs. The Company to set can be selected on each discovery run, or can be overridden on a host-by-host basis.
TPL
TPL now provides the following functions to specify how nodes should be removed when what they represent no longer exists:
The credentials user interface has been improved to make things work better and more consistently. Test mainframe credentials to help you check information about the mainframe agent and its capabilities before performing a discovery.
Miscellaneous
The upgrade handles user customizations better. If you have customized the taxonomy or the visualizations using /usr/tideway/data/custom and /usr/tideway/data/customer, any problems that might have occured because of updates in the new version will be handled more effectively. The system will start smoothly, and it is easy to find what needs to be fixed to bring the custom definitions up to date with the new version.
The command line MIB dumper tool, used for capturing information about unsupported network devices for sending to BMC for future support, has been replaced with a user interface. It is easier to find unsupported devices in a report, drop them into the device capture user interface, and watch the progress of the capture. The command line option, now called tw_device_capture, is still available.
The appliance configuration page has two new sections:
The color of the banner at the very top of every page can be configured. This is useful for distinguishing several instances of BMC Atrium Discovery by setting corresponding color schemes.
A new hardware section displays a summary of the hardware on which BMC Atrium Discovery is currently running, including the number of processors, RAM, and disk sizes. It compares this information against the defined appliance sizing guidelines and warns if the hardware is underpowered.
Since 8.2.00
The following changes are new beginning after version 8.2.00, but have appeared in maintenance releases on version 8.2.
A standalone Windows scanning tool has been added. This is a manual tool for gathering data from Windows machines that are not connected to a network to complement the equivalent UNIX scanner scripts. This tool does not allow the interactive running of patterns to gather the full depth of data that a Windows Proxy provides; however, it allows these otherwise unreachable hosts to have basic discovered information in BMC Atrium Discovery and synchronizes the information to the CMDB.
SNMP and WMI discovery is signinficantly faster.
The OIDs used to discover devices by SNMP are now displayed in the user interface, in a similar fashion to platform commands.
CMDB synchronization uses newer APIs to talk to the CMDB where possible, improving performance and reducing load on the CMDB.
Better diagnostics information is displayed when a discovery run is put on hold in order to wait to scan an IP address not in a current window. Without the diagnostics information, this can look as though the run is "stuck".
The Windows proxy supports a WMI timeout option, so that you do not have to wait for the full system timeout of 30 minutes.
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