Tideway Betas New Release of Application Dependency Mapping Software

November 18, 2008 Alex Woodie

Curious about what undiscovered IT assets might be lurking in your data center, and what relationship they have with the systems you work with everyday? Tideway Systems, a provider of application dependency mapping (ADM) software, yesterday announced the beta for Foundation Community Edition, a new product aimed at helping small and mid size shops better understand their systems.

Tideway’s Foundation series automatically provides data center discovery capabilities to help customers create an inventory of all the servers, applications, and network nodes in their IT environments, as well as mapping inter-system dependencies and relationships. The software helps administrators pinpoint weaknesses in their systems, including virtual environments, and is also useful for tracking growth and groups of users.

Foundation Community Edition is a scaled-down version that gives users a taste of the full product. The Community Edition allows users to “shallow scan” everything in their data center, and to “deep scan” an additional 30 hosts. A shallow scan uses port scanning techniques to provide customers with an educated guess about what types of assets they have (which may trigger firewalls or intrusion detection systems), while a deep scan fully scans the attributes of each node by logging in with credentials, Tideway says.

Community Edition provides discovery, visualization, reporting, and search capabilities. Customers that opt for additional features–such as monthly “pattern” updates for popular middleware and applications, integration with development tools, or single sign-on–should consider the professional or enterprise versions. Users get support for Foundation Community Edition through the Tideway Community Forum and Configipedia, Tideway’s encyclopedia of IT configurations.

Foundation Community Edition has been in beta since September, and is a free download at www.tideway.com/downloads/foundation.