A management solution needs to locate and identify whatever it needs to manage. This process is called discovery, where the management solution locates and identifies all the targets. This is typically done using management agents that are deployed on servers that contain the targets that need to be managed. Discovery of targets enables administrators to have a picture of the environment along with the various components that need to be managed.
For any small, medium, or large enterprise, the challenge is to manage several disparate targets from a single console. The traditional hardware and software components such as servers, storage devices, operating systems, databases, middleware, and applications have been managed by system management solutions. However, a new breed of BPEL-based applications and infrastructure poses new problems. First, they need to be managed along with existing hardware and software. Second, as the BPEL projects proliferate across...