Application Discovery 7.2 User Guide

Refining Application Discovery
Refining discovery is the process of optimizing agent and template configurations to enrich data
display in Application Discovery.
How discovery works
Application Discovery includes a set of application templates that cover a spectrum of typical
application types expected to be found on systems operating within a network or data center. A
template is a set of rules that defines the matching criteria for the processes that constitute an
application. This default set of templates allows Application Discovery to find, identify, and display
information for a significant percentage of installed packages and running applications and
processes.
On any one system, a percentage of processes found to be active on a host might not be matched
to a provided template or a discovered package. These are referred to as unmatched processes.
Of these unmatched processes, some may reflect the presence of custom or third-party software.
Application Discovery helps you to refine discovery in the following ways:
• It provides the state of discovery for systems running the Application Discovery agent.
• It provides a way to edit existing application templates and create new ones. When you
modify or add templates to better adapt them to your environment, you refine the ability of
Application Discovery to report application behavior in your particular network.
TIP:
At times, you might simply need to find where an application is running or installed. For this
information, click the Applications tab to browse current data.
Understand your current discovery state
To view the current state of discovery, click the Admin/Config tab, and then the Discovery tab.
Discovery ratio
From the Discovery tab, you can see the discovery ratio for each managed system running an
Application Discovery agent, as well as the total discovery of processes and packages for all
monitored systems. Use this information to help determine where to expend effort to improve
discovery.
The following figure shows a segment of process inventory data.
Figure 1 Segment of process inventory data
For example, if the discovery ratio is low, the number of processes that Application Discovery is
matching to templates is low. Because more data can be gathered from known relationships, a
low ratio indicates that much less can be known and displayed for the processes that are using
resources on that host.
Conversely, if the discovery ratio is high, Application Discovery can provide extensive amounts of
data on system behavior. This information is a richer source for informed decision-making about
resource allocation.
10 Components and concepts