Application Organization

Applications are complex entities in systems management. Determining what constitutes an application from a management perspective can be difficult, particularly when applications are distributed and rely on many external services to operate properly. For this reason, you should organize applications before installing Sun Management Center. Do not defer consideration of the cause and effect relationships until a problem is actually encountered. Some initial analysis contributes to increasing the efficiency with which application-level problems are resolved.

When configuring an application-oriented Sun Management Center environment, the topology containers typically contain a mix of hosts, modules, and specific objects. Some hosts might be completely dedicated to that application, while other hosts might only be partially responsible for the application's proper operation. For example, in the case of an application that makes use of a corporate directory service, the health of the directory service is critical to the operation of the application, but the health of other services on the server are not critical to or needed by the application.