Configuring application discovery

Automatic application discovery is driven by the way end users access and request services from your business applications. End users access the web application through a URL, and App Visibility provides a way to name applications by identifying common URL construction and patterns.

You, as an application specialist, can configure application discovery so that you can group requests with a common purpose under one application name, and separate requests with different purposes accordingly.

For example, suppose users access your application through one of the following URLs:

• http://news.mycompany.com/today
• https://blog.mycompany.com/by-department/mobile-products
• https://photos.mycompany.com/events/ReleaseCelebration

Depending on your requirements, you can group all of these requests under one application name, My Company, or separate them under different application names: My Company news, My Company blog, and My Company photos.

You can also identify and discard requests that are not relevant to your application monitoring environment, for example, requests that originate from the application servers and not from end users.

This topic describes the following topics:

Parts of a URL

The name of an automatically discovered application is determined by the application URL. You can configure the application discovery based on pattern matching in the domain, path, or both. The parts of the URL are displayed in the following diagram.

Parts of a URL

The domain part of the URL includes the host name (www), subdomain (if applicable), domain (example), and the top-level domain (com).

The path part of the URL is the full path to the resource. For example, the path can include the directory (weather) and file (today.jsp) names.

For configuring App Visibility application discovery, the protocol or query parts of the URL are not used.

Before you begin

• Install and configure App Visibility components.
• To perform this procedure, you must have Application Administrator-level access.

Configuring application discovery

You can tune the application discovery, grouping some applications together, separating some, and discarding those that are not useful for your evaluation. Define patterns in the application URL to configure the application discovery.

1. From the Operations Management console navigation pane, select Configuration > Application Discovery.
2. From the Application Discovery Rules action menu, select Edit.
3. Add a discovery rule using one of the following methods:
   • To add a rule to the top of the list, from the Edit Application Discovery Rules action menu, select Add Rule.
   • To add a rule under an existing rule, click the Add Rule icon.
4. Select Path or Domain and enter the required pattern.
   • Rules can include only alphanumeric Latin characters, spaces, and the following characters:
     ! " # $ % & ' ( ) * + , - . : ; < = > ? @ [ ] ^ _ ` { | } ~
   • Path names are case sensitive, although they might be treated as case insensitive by some servers.
   • You can use a wildcard (*) to represent a part of the domain or a part of the path, but not both.

   Examples of wildcard use in the Domain or Path fields

   • Match part of the domain name

     Domain: *.mycompany.com

   • Match part of the path for a specific domain

     Path: /app/*

     Only if domain is: corporate-intranet.com

   For more examples, see Examples of application discovery rules, below.

5. Select Map to name, and enter a name or name pattern, or select Discard to remove the application.
   If you used a wildcard (*) in the Domain or Path fields, you can enter the wildcard as part of the application name. In the application name, the wildcard represents the same string that it represents in the domain or path.

   Example of wildcard use in the application name

   If you use a wildcard in the Domain field, such as, *.mycompany.com, you can use a wildcard in the Map to name field, such as, My Company *.

   For more examples, see Examples of application discovery rules, below.

   Note

   Ensure that the resulting application name is no longer than 255 characters. Application names greater than 255 characters are not displayed in the Operations Management console.

6. Click the Enter icon to confirm the addition of the rule.

   Warning

   After you enter or edit a rule, it is not saved in the system until you click the Save button.

7. Click the Move Up or Move Down arrows to adjust the order of the rules.
   Rules are implemented in the order of the list: after a rule applies to a request, the following rules are ignored for that request.
8. Click Save.

Examples of application discovery rules

The following examples show how to define rules to show descriptive application names:

Preconfigured application discovery rules

Where to go from here

Perform one or more of the following procedures:

• Set the event thresholds (SLAs) for your automatically discovered application.
• Start monitoring applications.

Related topics

Setting up applications for monitoring

Setting up and managing synthetic transaction monitoring

Application models