By Dick Stark

On Wednesday, RightStar and BMC presented an excellent webinar, “ADDM: What’s New v 10.1, How to Tame Your Discovery Data and Increase Your Value to the Business.”  ADDM v10.1 was released late last year with several significant improvements over the prior release including: storage and load balancer discovery, big discovery (faster scanning), and improved data mining.

The line is now starting to blur a little between monitoring, and discovery and data mapping. For example, ADDM not only identifies what’s in the data center, or on the network, but how applications are mapped to related software and hardware.  If monitoring software such as BPPM detects a slowdown or outage with an application such as SharePoint, then ADDM provides the relationships to the OS (Windows), CPU, RAM, IP, and MAC software instances and network devices.  Without the mapping, it could take much longer to pinpoint the real cause of the problem.

Given that ADDM populates data into the Atrium CMDB, organizations can also populate the CMDB with data collected from SCCM as well as manually such as from barcode scanners to reconcile data such as physical locations—sites, floors, and rooms.

Additionally, at one particular DOD customer, RightStar fully integrated ADDM into the CMDB. Using ADDM, all newly discovered, newly removed (not seen for a minimum 7 days) and changed (moved) assets are tracked and compared to see if a Change Request was indeed created for these installs and moves. If a Change Request was not created, an alert is sent to the administrator to investigate. The result is not just improved asset management effectiveness and a reduction in cost, but risk mitigation when making changes due to a better understanding of the change and its impact to the affected underlying infrastructure.

RightStar has already tested out the new ADDM Storage Discovery (requires additional licensing) and is thrilled with its capabilities.  For example the previously mentioned customer, like most DOD agencies, has strict policies about data retention on decommissioned disk drives. Those drives must be destroyed whenever the computer is to be put on a different classification network. Previously, the customer had no way of knowing whether the required disk action had occurred.  Now, they have access to each disk by serial number.  Additionally, with some configuration work, we have set up a closed loop change request to ensure that the proper disk was destroyed or decommissioned.

The RightStar webinar also pointed out several other new features of v10.1: big discovery, which provides faster discovery for large datacenters, and improved analytics.  ADDM customers can slice, dice, and analyze data right in the user interface.