Figuring out what software runs on which pieces of IT infrastructure has been an ongoing challenge ever since the first data center. Tideway Systems, on of the few independent players left in this space, has improved its change management reporting in its latest release.

The market, application dependency mapping, helps systems admins pinpoint which pieces of infrastructure are consumed by each application, so that if you upgrade an SAP application, you’ll get a better idea as to which servers are likely to get hammered. It has obvious use with adoption of ITIL, as it would be nice to correlate metadata describing the configuration items stored in a CMDB with the applicators that are consuming the infrastructure resources represented by them.

Although an age-old problem, tooling that can generate the mappings has only emerged within the past five years, with BMC, CA, EMC, HP, and IBM building or acquiring presence. (And there are many specialized forms of app discovery that cover areas like security vulnerability assessment.)

For the most part, these application infrastructure discovery tools trace how apps consume servers; some such as EMC Smarts also draw connections to databases, storage, and network devices.

Tideway, which has obviously not been acquired, has competed based on its ability to map out homegrown applications, which for obvious reasons, are not as well documented or easy to map as off the shelf packages. The new version adds pre-built change reporting, providing ready-built templates so you don't have to roll your own from scratch. As the name implies these reports document what applications have changed, and how their infrastructure footprint has changed accordingly.

It has also added a feature similar to what HP has with The Opsware Network, providing an updating service on changes that applications vendors have made to their offerings. Tideway’s angle is that it can correlate those changes with the change dependency reports that you would generate for your environment.

The company, whose revenues are in the low eight figures, doubled its business last year.

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