Application Mapping Tool and Server Infrastructure Map Software

Application mapping is the process of creating a visual display of applications and the underlying infrastructure those applications depend on. Instead of using spreadsheets to note application relationships, admins can now leverage easy-to-use maps.

Application maps can include the connections and dependencies between components, and the status of individual components. For instance, they can show availability and outages for at-a-glance insights into any health and performance issues.

Application maps can be geographic or schematic visualizations. The maps can also be global, regional, or limited to floor, building, or department and customized to show different element types and statuses.

IT infrastructure mapping is the process of creating a visual topology of the basic architecture of your networks. Since applications can depend on this infrastructure, this mapping process can help you understand the geographic and interactive layout of your network. For troubleshooting, infrastructure mapping can help you quickly understand how an application issue might relate to a hardware problem.

An IT infrastructure map can include information about your systems architecture, IP/port systems, and data collection systems for servers, databases, routers, firewalls, and similar components.

An infrastructure diagram is the visual document created by the IT infrastructure mapping process. The resulting infrastructure diagram can show the actual infrastructure and devices on your network at a scale useful for you. The diagram can also show the current availability of your IT infrastructure components.

A key component of your infrastructure diagram is your server infrastructure, which includes different layers of your server operations. A complete server diagram can help show the relationship between the components of your server operating on different layers, like application and cloud layers, so you can better understand application dependencies among across a layer architecture. With this kind of infrastructure diagram, you can gain improved insight into the relationships between elements and individual network components.

The application mapping process starts with discovery, which involves polling servers, applications, and determining their dependencies and interactions. The discovery process can typically be determined through IP ranges and subnets.

Setting up a regular scanning process can allow for up-to-date server discovery. Especially for larger networks, a periodic scanning process is important for maintaining up-to-date documentation of a fluctuating number of nodes. Using a network polling tool with the ability to scan your network can allow you to more easily detect multi-layer server components necessary for application mapping.

An application map can help show you the status of applications, especially whether a component is experiencing downtime. Regular application mapping can also ensure configurations are updated for individual components.

The result of application mapping is a complete picture of your application and server infrastructure allowing you to quickly see when and where problems are occurring.

Application mapping can allow you to troubleshoot more effectively using a comprehensive understanding of the network’s geography and the working relationships among its components by helping you trace issues back to each step in the dependency chain. The ability to monitor these dependent connections can also allow you to diagnose the source of downtime and other performance issues.

In addition, because applications can provide a great deal of data other than their port and server locations, application mapping can provide a range of useful information. With application maps, it can be possible to simply click on the node in question to see additional status and health details.

Overall, an updated application map can provide a visual understanding to help admins understand performance issues much more quickly, because there’s less textual information to sort through and process.

SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor uses a network polling system with scalable capabilities, suitable for both large and small networks. SAM is built to provide an intuitive dependency mapping software, and visual, customizable geographic maps with drag-and-drop modification.

In addition to the 1,200-plus application monitoring templates included, SAM is designed to allow you to easily configure your application mapping tool to monitor and detect custom applications.

With customizable alerts, SolarWinds SAM can also help you address application issues like dependency uptime, response time, packet loss, and more as soon as possible by helping you more easily drill down into monitoring metrics to quickly solve performance problems.

Using a comprehensive service mapping tool can provide invaluable insights into your environment.

For example, the mapping feature in the Orion^® Platform is designed to auto-generate contextual maps of software and hardware components in your environment, display the relationships, and automatically update as changes occur. When you use SAM to map and monitor your infrastructure in the Orion Platform, you’ll be able to view which services and devices rely on each other and what the network connection between them is like.

For example, when monitoring an
Exchange server with SAM in Orion Maps, you’ll be able to see the Exchange application and its dependencies. You can also zoom in to see how many Exchange servers are communicating with one another and understand the connection quality by viewing their packet loss and latency statistics. If you want to drill a little deeper, you can click on the connection between the servers to see the connection type and status or other application dependency details.