Towards generic application auto-discovery

The increasing complexity of enterprise applications, the expanding number of networked machines, and the rapid deployment of Internet-based business applications (E-commerce), emphasize the importance and value of application management. One of the main problems in current application management products is the amount of time and effort needed to install and customize them. Application auto-discovery is a key technology for solving this problem. In this paper, we present a generic approach to application auto-discovery along with some examples. Our approach is to create a model-based discovery engine that is driven by an application template model. While the application template model captures the variation from one application to another, the auto-discovery engine uses sophisticated mechanisms such as scoping to execute an invariant auto-discovery process.