Collation looks to ease application management

ORLANDO - A management software start-up last week unveiled a product designed to automatically discover and monitor configuration changes across network elements that support business-critical applications.

At BEA's eWorld conference, Collation introduced Confignia, which can map the components and interdependencies among the databases, switches, routers, load balancers, Web and application servers that comprise an application environment. The software also records configurations and tracks changes made.

Confignia runs on a Solaris server and uses standard protocols such as SNMP, Java Management Extension, HTTP and SQL to query network devices, databases, load balancers, security devices, and Web and application servers for configuration data.

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ORLANDO - A management software start-up last week unveiled a product designed to automatically discover and monitor configuration changes across network elements that support business-critical applications.

At BEA's eWorld conference, Collation introduced Confignia, which can map the components and interdependencies among the databases, switches, routers, load balancers, Web and application servers that comprise an application environment. The software also records configurations and tracks changes made.

Confignia runs on a Solaris server and uses standard protocols such as SNMP, Java Management Extension, HTTP and SQL to query network devices, databases, load balancers, security devices, and Web and application servers for configuration data.

Companies such as Collation, and its competitors Dirig and Relicore, provide autodiscovery features, which can reduce the amount of time it takes to configure the software.

While these vendors attack the problem with different approaches, they each provide some automation to a typically manual process, which could help many network managers, says Audrey Rasmussen, research director at Enterprise Management Associates. But the products remain immature at this point.

"Now they do the discovery and the mapping. The next generation should move into actual management capabilities," she says.

Kim Ross, CIO at Nielsen Media Research, says he deployed Confignia to track the relationships between system components and applications.

"This information is essential to doing a good job of managing the performance and availability of applications," Ross says. He says today's Java 2 Platform Enterprise Edition applications and multitiered network architectures require users to find an automated means to tracking and recording configurations. With automated updates, the software shows Ross' staff where any changes might have occurred, which helps to more quickly determine the source of application problems.

"This information would be impossible to stay on top of without a tool like Confignia," Ross says. Yet he wants to see more from Collation. He says he's requested Confignia include more depth in its tracking of Sybase databases and Windows servers.

Pricing for Confignia depends on network configuration. A 100-server installation would cost about $120,000.

Read more about infrastructure management in Network World's Infrastructure Management section.