Automated discovery and mapping tools can help with application monitoring and configuration management tasks, he says. Increasingly, mapping functions are being merged into larger product sets, such as system monitoring and management suites, or configuration management applications.

Quixtar Inc., an online retailer of beauty and nutrition products, bought Mercury Interactive Corp.'s Business Availability Center to consolidate its numerous monitoring consoles and better diagnose problems with its Windows .Net- and IBM WebSphere-based infrastructure. The product includes diagnostic tools, a configuration management database, service-level management and the Mercury Application Mapping (MAM) tool.

Greg Robinson, Quixtar's senior systems support specialist, says he experienced only two problems during installation. One involved the installation of a MAM agent on an application outside the firewall. The other challenge was figuring out which types of data Quixtar wanted to collect. "At first, I was overwhelmed with the amount of information," Robinson says.

The tool provides a way to create different views of the infrastructure and systems, depending on the role or need of the user. "We can slice and dice the view of the dashboard and create different views with differing levels of complexity," says Steve Keselring, manager of IT infrastructure at Ada, Mich.-based Quixtar.

Mapping tools also help developers and operations staff to identify problematic changes to applications. Liberty Mutual Group Inc., a Boston-based global insurance company, began using Mercury's MAM product a year ago in order to get a better handle on configuration changes.