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

Collection

Evolven Comparison collects environment configuration using any of three types of agents:

• Remote agents: Running on servers (either multi-purposed servers or servers dedicated to the agent collection task) that collect information from remote servers and push it to the Evolven Comparison application server.
• Local agents: (to collect information that is not accessible remotely) Running directly on servers and pushes information to the Evolven Comparison application server.
• Offline agents: Running in an ad hoc manner either from a mount point or a USB key. These agents run deliberately and collect information locally and are then uploaded to the server from one of the other agents in the environment. These agents can be run on servers that are blocked by firewalls, or in situations where servers are disconnected from the Evolven Comparison application server.

The Evolven Comparison collection process can carried out as either on-demand or scheduled (e.g. every night during the maintenance window). To ensure low overhead on the infrastructure, Evolven Comparison applies a piecemeal approach, where collection is done incrementally and following the original snapshot - only through the collection of deltas.

The environment configuration is collected at the most granular level of configuration parameters, allowing for the capture of even the most minute of root-causes of environment incidents.

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.

Evolven Comparison dives deep to collects environment configuration information at the most granular levels. With the immense volume of granular information collected, 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 helps users focus on critical differences.  This includes:

• Impact Knowledge Base: Customizable knowledge base determines the impact and severity of each difference identified
• Rule Mechanism: Handles the aggregation, tagging and normalization of information to make it clear and consolidated
• Noise Reduction mechanism: Filters out irrelevant or expected/required differences.

Presentation

The results of comparisons are presented through Evolven Comparison's rich browser-based client. The user interface delivers

• 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
• 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.