In the 7.2.90.1 Community Edition of Tideway Foundation, which Tideway admits is still very much beta code, there is an interesting new feature that they are working on.  In the prerelease notes for this version, they refer to the feature as Host Grouping.  The claim is that it will enable an IT shop to get a quick handle on critical dependencies between hosts, without having to do any sort of modeling or code development to get the feature to work.  Early testing of the solution is promising as it appears to be able to show these relationships without any intervention from the administrator.  It is not the same level of detail that one would get from completing a full pattern and associated visualization, but if you are under a tight schedule to get your arms around the host to host dependencies that exist in a data center, this feature will help immensely.

It is able to do this by assimilating the network communications that exists on each of the hosts in the estate and then begins to programmaticly “connect the dots” to quickly show you dependencies.  So, for the feature to work, you need to ensure that you are accurately collecting this information from your Unix and Windows Based hosts.

As I test this more, I will report back on the results; hopefully that will be before the product actually gets released.  This is a much needed feature in the product, in that it will help quickly answer some key questions with very little effort on the user’s part.  It will be interesting to see what the final product looks like.