To enable valuable information that supports decision making, Evolven Comparison™ collects granular environment configuration, analyzes automatically differences and changes and presents the critical items on which one should focus in a convenient manner.

1. Collection - Evolven Comparison collects environment configuration using any of three types of agents: i) remote agents; ii) local agents (to collect information that is not accessible remotely); iii) offlineagents - collecting information in a file that is then uploaded to the Evolven Server (for environments that has no communication with Evolven server).
   
   The collection itself can either be on-demand or scheduled (e.g. every night during the maintenance window). To ensure low overhead on infrastructure, Evolven Comparison applies a piecemeal approach where collection is done incrementally and following the original snapshot - only through the collection of deltas.
   
   Environment configuration is collected at the most granular level of configuration parameter allowing for the capture of even the most minute of root-causes of environment incidents.
   
   
2. Analysis - collected environment configuration information is compared against the information collected from a different environment, or a historical snapshot of the same environment or a golden baseline.
   
   Being that Evolven Comparison dives deep and collects environment configuration at the most granular levels, it can be a challenge to compare information in a way that will produce valuable and usable information. The Comparison Engine™ includes a set of proprietary analytic technologies that help users focus on critical differences. The technologies include: i) the Impact Knowledge Base: this customizable knowledge base determines the impact and severity of each difference identified; ii) the Rule Mechanism - which handles the aggregation, tagging and normalization of information to make it clear and consolidated; and iii) the Noise Reduction mechanism - filtering out irrelevant or expected/required differences.
   
   
3. Presentation- the results of comparisons are presented through Evolven Comparison's rich browser-based client, and consequently deliver: i) comparison results in a graphic format that allows users to get a clear, comprehensive and easy to understand view of environmental risks and their potential impact; ii) Visibility into the complete Environment Configuration Repository often for more advanced users (i.e. subject matter experts) that want to have the entire environment configuration view and the ability to drill down to the most granular levels of the environments they manage.

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