Index

Foundation builds a complete topology of your applications and infrastructure including switches, servers, operating systems, software, configuration files and logs, and business applications and dependencies – and updates it as often as you need. Unlike other solutions, Foundation operates agent-free across Windows, Linux, UNIX and Netware environments. It enriches discovered data with information reconciled from third-party data sources such as agent infrastructures and inventory management systems to provide a single, automated view of all the IT assets and resources in your data center.
Andy Ormsby, Foundation’s Product Manager, talks about Tideway’s Knowledge Update Service

Discover

Foundation’s unique pattern language automatically identifies and analyzes IT components and configurations. Simple, powerful and open, the pattern language codifies expert knowledge – the investigative, exception handling, filtering, alerting and interpretation processes used by system administrators. Patterns automatically interpret raw, discovered data at the level of granularity that you require – from individual software processes to large scale distributed business applications. Foundation comes pre-populated with patterns to recognize a large number of off-the-shelf operating systems, infrastructure products and vertical applications – and adds more patterns monthly to ensure the broadest, deepest data center coverage. Andy Ormsby, Foundation's Product Manager, talks about Tideway's Knowledge Update Service

Search

The Foundation search bar offers super-fast, free text search of the entire data store and takes you directly to the IT resource that matters most to you in seconds. Advanced search functionality lets you narrow your searches to specific object types. For power users, Foundation provides the richness of the Search Query Language. Searches are exportable in XML and CSV formats so the data can be easily shared with colleagues and other systems.

Report

Tabular reports and charts can be created in seconds to provide answers to critical questions that used to take weeks – from the simple “How many Solaris 8 servers do I have in my environment?” to the complex “What changed in the configuration of my global trading application since yesterday?”. Foundation comes pre-populated with useful reports – and also lets you create your own using the Search Query Language. Roll your favorite charts up into dashboards so you have all the metrics that matter to you at a glance.
Adam Kerrison, Tideway’s CTO, Talks About Foundations Reporting Capabilities

Visualize

Visio is dead. Foundation automatically builds visualizations that show dependencies between switches, routers, virtual and physical hosts, processes, software packages, business applications and other business entities. Users can navigate large dependency visualizations just as they would Google Maps – by simply dragging their mouse. Print them out and take them to your change approval meetings to cut out the guesswork. This 360-degree view of application and infrastructure affords you a whole new level of productivity.

Track

Watch the changes occurring in the domains that are important to you. Whether you're interested in a specific business application, or in your VMware server estate – Foundation's 'change intelligence' tracks permitted and prohibited configurations – and highlights them directly to you. Need to know what changed and when? Foundation’s comparison feature lets you compare configuration changes between any two points in time.

Collaborate

Assign ownership for every IT component - from servers to business applications. Need to build a change approval group? Find infrastructure and application owners highlighted in a change impact report. Share infrastructure views with your team, take or assign ownership of configuration issues, and stay in the loop with full investigation and issue resolution logs. Learn and benefit from the community – Foundation users share useful search queries, and patterns on Configipedia.