Application models

An application model is a graphical representation of a business or IT application, and the relationship of the infrastructure components (that is, devices and groups) that are required to support or provide functionality to the application. A device is any computer that needs to be managed in order to deliver an IT application, and a group is a selected set of devices or monitors, determined by your operating needs

The following figure is an example of an application model:

Manually created application models

In the Operations Management console, an application specialist can manually create application models using devices and groups from BMC TrueSight Infrastructure Management, or devices discovered by BMC TrueSight App Visibility Manager, or a combination of components. In a manually created application, you can create the model and define the relationships and dependencies between the components. An application that is manually created in the console generates events based on the event conditions that are specified with the devices.

For information about creating applications, see Creating an application manually.

Automatically discovered application models

The assignment of an application server as a web or business node depends how the App Visibility agent recognizes most of the transactions on the server:

• Web: A monitored server where most transactions are Transaction­-type requests, that is, the server is the first to receive transaction requests within an application. For example, a web server that mostly receives end-user transaction requests, or a server that mostly receives requests from a non-monitored component (such as a PHP server), is recognized as a web node.
• Business: A monitored server where most transactions are Request-type requests, that is, the server receives most requests from a monitored server.

For information about fine tuning automatically discovered applications, see Configuring application discovery.

Events and event propagation in application models

An event is an indication of a threshold that has been exceeded, such as for high CPU use or for latency on a transaction on a server. The severity of an event depends on the configured levels of the different thresholds on the node. If an event is associated with a specific device or group, the severity of an event is displayed on the relevant node in the application model. The severity level of a node in the application model is determined by the event with highest severity.

The nodes in application models are dependent on one another. When you create a model, you determine the dependency and whether the event status is propagated—that is, whether the status of a "lower" node influences the status of a "higher" node, and, ultimately, the status of the application. (If you do not connect the nodes, or if events are not propagated, then the node status has no impact on the status of the application.) In an automatically created model, the nodes are automatically dependent and events are automatically propagated.

For information about events and applications, see the following topics:

• Creating an application manually
• Configuring event thresholds (SLAs) for automatically discovered applications
• Monitoring events

Advantages of application models

Application models in BMC TrueSight Operations Management offer the following advantages:

• Create and maintain application models in the Operations Manager console.
• Keep models up to date with App Visibility, which adjusts models automatically with your changing environment.
• A single application model represents all the objects in your IT infrastructure. You do not have to depend on any other software to create or view the application models.
• Visualize multiple applications in a single dashboard.
• Perform probable-cause analysis across all objects, across multiple servers, and on a single screen.
• Cross-launch to other TrueSight products to drill-down to the actual cause of the problem.
• Manage events and devices in the context of a selected application.

Related topics

Application context

Setting up applications for monitoring

Getting started with application monitoring