Introducing Customizable Business Applications, Affinity Groups gets a Facelift in v15.16.00

Business Applications

We are excited to introduce Business Applications in Device42 v15.16.00. Business Applications are a powerful new way to visualize the relationships between the resources driving your critical business functions. Business Applications can be created and customized in a variety of ways: by starting with one or more existing Affinity Group(s) and leveraging the devices and connections that are already present, by adding or editing specific devices and/or connections manually, or by building a a Business Application completely from scratch.

How are Business Applications different than Affinity Groups?

Affinity Groups are calculated from the automatically discovered connections between your devices, which can include connections that are shared between business functions or that are not critical to a specific business function. Business Applications are instead designed and customized by you, and include only the resources that you identify as critical to a given business function!

Below is an example of small, yet mission 3-tier critical Business Application. This business web app includes two front-end web servers, a Tomcat middle-ware layer with a hot fail-over, a MySQL back-end database server, and a backup server for the database.

With Business Applications, you can:

Diagram all the devices supporting a business function
Add and remove devices and connections
View and edit connectivity between devices
Customize labels and layout of resources and connections
Save the custom layout and view for each business application you define

Business applications information is available through our query language (DOQL). To support business applications and their relationships, the following views were added:
view_businessapplication_v1, view_businessapplicationelement_v1, and view_businessapplicationconnection_v1.

To get started using Device42 Business Applications, be sure to update your Device42 instance to v15.16.00, and then check out the Business Applications documentation.

Affinity Groups

V15.16.00 includes significant changes to the way Affinity Groups are calculated. These changes broaden the scope of Affinity Groups, making them more inclusive to better support the new functionality in Business Applications.

Affinity Groups are created when a pinned service (databases by default, but any other service can be pinned) is detected listening on a device or server instance. Incoming connections are followed up to the next device along the chain, and those are then added to the Affinity Group.

Should the remote connecting service (or a related application component) also be a listener, its connections are also followed and those remote connections are added to the group calculation. Additionally, if there are any other listening services found on these devices, incoming connections to these are now included in the Affinity Group calculation, as well.

The final big change is that devices with starred services are now also included in the calculations.

Now with OS logos and a new look

The look and feel of Affinity Groups was significantly updated in this release. The following are the major changes to Affinity Groups in v15.16 (check out each new feature, numbered in the preview image below!):

Device icons now include OS logos, making it much easier to differentiate Windows and Linux servers.
Affinity Groups charts now display device to device connections for a simplified relationship view has been simplified.
Service to service connection details can now be viewed by clicking on the connection between devices, which are then displayed on the right side of the browser window.
The effective date of each Affinity Group is now displayed on each chart. View groups from specific points in time by simply choosing the desired calendar date.
Connections from unknown IPs are now grouped as one connection making for an overall cleaner view.

On-demand Affinity Groups recalculation

You can also now kick off Affinity Group recalculation on demand. From the Affinity Groups screen, simply select “Configure”, and you’ll see the “Affinity Groups Configuration screen” which both shows the last time the groups were processed, and a “Process Now” button that will kick off calculations immediately.

Finally, all updated Affinity Groups info also now available through our DOQL (Device42 Object Query Language). The following new views were added to support these relationships:

view_affinitygroup_v2
view_affinitygroup_custom_fields_v2
view_affinitygroup_custom_fields_flat_v2

view_deviceaffinity_v2
view_serviceaffinity_v2

Updated documentation will be published shortly, and will include more details on these updates.

Enhanced Windows Discovery without Local Admin

Windows discovery has been further enhanced to enable Service Port and Application Dependency Mapping without Local Administrator privileges. When setting up a discovery job, you can now specify a local share on the device where your data is located. You will only need to give the scanning account read privileges to the new share location.

Additional Updates

The following features or changes are also included in v15.16.00:

An option to bypass port-checks in SNMP discovery jobs.
Updated the Python LDAP back-end library from v2.5.2 to v3.0.0.
Support for AD/SYNC Universal Groups with nested groups.
Discovery support for Dell Compellent Storage Arrays.
Discovery support for Talari devices.

Known Issue

When creating reports in the Cloud Recommendation Engine, be sure to select the “No tags” checkbox *if you are not selecting any tags* to avoid an error.

Bug Fixes

Fixed an issue with PowerVC discovery
Fixed an issue with LDAP connectivity in AD after Cert updates
Fixed an “Internal Server Error” on wrong AD/LDAP password
Fixed an issue that resulted in PC NETBIOS names being added as end users.
Fixed an issue that could cause active AD/LDAP users to be removed during a cleanup.
Fixed an issue that could cause SNMP jobs to generate a file handle error
Fixed an issue with OpenStack discovery on public URLs
Fixed an issue with discovery not importing CPU, Memory and OS information on HP-UX devices.