Relicore Offering Helps Users Fix Apps QuickerRelicore Offering Helps Users Fix Apps Quicker

Systems-management products often miss application problems because they're too busy looking for them in the bowels of the infrastructure. Relicore Inc. and its Clarity product is designed to work with products from vendors such as BMC Software Inc. and Hewlett-Packard to share information about apps that will keep them up and running smoothly.

Clarity, available Dec. 9, discovers and tracks all the elements of the infrastructure that an application relies on. Administrators automatically get an end-to-end view of the app's topology and don't have to stroke a key once the software's installed. Instead, they can implement application and server consolidation more easily, troubleshoot application problems faster, and manage the apps through any infrastructure changes, including database or server.

Clarity includes three components: MapIT, DiscoverIT, and TrackIT. MapIT starts it all with the relationship of the application to the rest of the infrastructure, maps business processes to the app's infrastructure, and detects new or altered dependencies in real time. DiscoverIT identifies customized applications and pinpoints attributes including the version of an app, the file system, patches, and memory of a server. TrackIT identifies who made changes in the application, records and creates a bill of materials for everything added to an app, and adds user-labeled notes about the infrastructure.

One analyst says Clarity is necessary for any company changing its infrastructure. "If you don't know about changes to the app, redeployment is a big problem," says Jean-Pierre Garbani at Giga Information Group. "When customers have 300 servers that go 15 apps deep, without a tool like Clarity, nobody understands the relationship between them all."