Technology

nLayers InSight is a highly scalable solution designed for the most demanding environments. It includes several core components that work together to help provide you with the timely information you need to make intelligent decisions about your critical business initiatives. The core components are:

nLayers Application Behavioral Modeling (ABM) engine is the industry’s first and only technology that creates a time based, three-dimensional model of the IT infrastructure that includes the application component inventory, relationships and interdependencies between physical and logical components within the infrastructure, and real-time usage and demand.

nLayers’ auto discovery process identifies entities at a rate of over 500 per minute. This rapid discovery process enables organizations to realize a quick-time-to-value with their investment in this real-time, continuous discovery and mapping solution.

nLayers Federated CMDB (FCMDB) is built upon the industry-standard Oracle RDBMS and is the foundation on which the ABM resides. The FCMDB is continuously updated in real-time and is highly extendible and flexible. The FCMDB is the central repository for all CI information including:

• Server and service configurations
• Relationships and dependencies
• Usage and demand
• Change Log
• Historical data

nLayers Hybrid Passive/Active Discovery engine is the industry’s only discovery engine that provides instant, passive discovery for immediate, end-to-end real-time visibility and the flexibility to selectively “drill down” and compile more detailed information on specific servers or services. nLayers InSight’s passive discovery engine collects data at a rate of 500 entities per minute by listening to and inspecting packets on the network without scanning, spidering or probing the network.

nLayers InSight’s active discovery engine is agentless and requires credentials to gather CI information remotely from the discovered servers and services using SSH, SNMP and WMI. The active engine is highly configurable, allowing strict control on the servers to focus on and a flexible scheduling engine manage the frequency and times when information is gathered.

Discovery Aggregation engineperforms high-level analysis and refinement on the data collected from multiple sources including both nLayers passive and active discovery engines, as well as third-party connectors such as HP NNM, IBM TBSM, IBM Autonomic Computing and more. Data from all these sources is analyzed for accuracy and conflicts, and rationalized before being presented.

nLayers Fingerprints™ are the core of the nLayers ABM.  They uniquely identify all packaged and custom developed in-house applications. nLayers InSight ships with a very comprehensive Knowledgebase of fingerprints including fingerprints for the majority of commercially available hardware and software components. In addition, nLayers also groups individual discovered components to create compound Fingerprints for business applications such as SAP, Siebel and Peoplesoft.

The typical IT infrastructure consists of more than just commercially available applications; on the contrary, there are numerous custom applications that support an organization’s business. The nLayers Knowledgebase for Active & Passive discovery engines is highly configurable allowing nLayers to identify, fingerprint and catalog all of these elements and store them in our FCMDB.

nLayers Open Architecture allows organizations to take advantage of the data collected and stored in the FCMDB. Organizations can take advantage of integration with system management solutions like IBM Tivoli or HP OpenView or utilize the export capabilities with XML and open APIs.

nLayers also offers a comprehensive XML based software developers kit (SDK) for integration allowing customers to gain complete visibility into their IT environment. The SDK is used by nLayers partners and customers including Managed Objects, Bladelogic, Opsware and others.

In addition, nLayers InSight ships with a robust Policy engine that detects and alerts on changes in application topology, usage and demand, and every little CI. The Policy engine supports triggering custom scripts that can integrate with products like IBM Tivoli, HP OVO, BMC Patrol, CA Unicenter and more.

nLayers Solver contains the analytics and optimization services that run on top of the ABM. It is the part that automatically transforms the ABM data into useful, actionable insights.

To learn more, contact us and one of our engineers will be happy to tell you more about our technology.