Riverbed Cascade (formerly Mazu) Discovery for BMC Atrium

Your CMDB is only as effective as your ability to populate it with complete and accurate information. Identifying and maintaining all of your organization's configuration items and their dependencies is a challenge. Manual inventory methods are expensive, time consuming, and error-prone. Approaches which use scanning and agents can be expensive to deploy and can affect the performance of systems and networks. Cascade Discovery offers a new way to accurately and efficiently keep your Atrium CMDB up to date.

Scanning-based approaches typically have coverage gaps due to their inability to scan the entire environment. Scanning solutions are only able to identify dependencies that exist at the time of the scan. This lack of knowledge of dependencies outside the typical scan window creates a large gap in the CMDB's effectiveness. Agent-based solutions can provide a dependency view over time but are expensive to deploy and can rarely be deployed broadly enough to provide an adequate dependency mapping solution. Cascade Discovery offers a new way to accurately and efficiently maintain up-to-date application dependency relationships in your CMDB.

As a BMC Atrium user, you have a single, consolidated view of your IT infrastructure through a federated CMDB environment. The Atrium CMDB is populated via a scanning process. While this scanning process provides deep information about your configuration items (CIs), there are a few challenges associated with this approach:

• Certain systems aren't available to scanning due to firewalls and/or network configuration or credential issues
• Scanning can only provide information on application dependencies that are running during the scan, which typically lasts less than a minute
• Pervasive scanning can affect network performance

Cascade Discovery for BMC Atrium addresses these challenges by providing a new way to passively discover configuration items and their dependencies across the entire enterprise. It complements your BMC Discovery deployment to ensure complete and accurate population of your CMDB without time or coverage gaps.

How it Works

Cascade Discovery's primary data source is network traffic flow data - such as NetFlow, sFlow, cflow, and IPFIX - provided by most routers and switches. All devices transmitting any traffic over the network are included in the discovery, ensuring that the data collected is complete regardless of when or for how long applications run.

The appliance can be deployed to discover CIs in a subset of your network or across the entire enterprise; in either case, you will have comprehensive CI inventory and dependency information within hours.

The Cascade Discovery/ BMC Atrium integration allows in context drill down at the CI level

Key Features

• Continuous, network-wide discovery - No gaps in time or network coverage
• Passive deployment - No credentials or agents needed
• Complete dependency mapping - Understand actual dependencies based on real-time usage and business service priority
• Fast deployment - Uses network flow from your existing routers and switches