IBM Turbonomic Glossary

Ansible is an IT automation engine for cloud provisioning, configuration management, application deployment, intra-service orchestration and more. Based on YAML, it uses no agents or additional custom security infrastructure. Turbonomic uses Ansible Inventory and Play Books to discover VM configuration data and to build application topologies.

See Affinity Rule

An API  is a specification of supported interactions with a software component or resource. APIs make components reusable, and public APIs enable you to tap into functionality developed elsewhere over the web.

Turbonomic uses target APIs to discover applications, platforms, and infrastructure in your environment. The Turbonomic REST API exposes Turbonomic data and processing to remote access via HTTP.

Turbonomic documentation includes a REST API Guide to help you script interactions with the Turbonomic software and develop integrations between Turbonomic and other software applications. 

See also REST

AppDynamics is an Application Performance Management (APM) tool that  provides code-level visibility for on-prem and cloud applications. When you configure AppDynamics targets, Turbonomic provides a full-stack view of your environment, from application to physical hardware.

Turbonomic supports discovery of applications that are managed by AppDynamics, and can make  recommendations and take actions to both assure performance and drive efficiency with the full knowledge of the demands of each individual application experience.

An Application is a program or group of programs designed to perform specific processing for end users. The end users can be human or machine.

An application can be deployed as a single process running on a single host, or as a distributed set of processes running on one or more hosts. For distributed applications the Turbonomic Supply Chain can include a Business Application entity, with underlying Business Transaction, Service, and Application Component entities. The application is ultimately hosted on one or more VMs or Containers.

An Application Component is a software component, application code, or a unit of processing that consumes resources to enable it to perform its function for the Business Application. Examples of resources include memory or CPU.

Turbonomic can recommend actions to adjust the amount of resources available to Application Components.

Application Insights is an Application Performance Management (APM) target type that Turbonomic supports for Microsoft Azure environments.

According to the Microsoft Azure documentation, “Application Insights, a feature of Azure Monitor, is an extensible Application Performance Management (APM) service for developers and DevOps professionals.” (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-monitor/app/app-insights-overview -- “What is Application Insights?“)

Turbonomic supports workload management of the application infrastructure monitored by Application Insights, and provides a full-stack view of the infrastructure, from application to hosting server.

APM is the monitoring and management of performance and availability of software applications. APM strives to detect and diagnose complex application performance problems to maintain an expected level of service. (Dragich, Larry (4 April 2012). “The Anatomy of APM – 4 Foundational Elements to a Successful Strategy”. APM Digest.)

When Turbonomic discovers Business Applications and provides visibility into the full application stack. Turbonomic supports targets from such leading vendors as Dynatrace, New Relic, and AppInsights.

Application Resource Management (ARM) is a top-down, application-driven approach that continuously analyzes applications’ resource needs and generates fully automatable actions to ensure applications always get what they need to perform.

ARM is the Turbonomic mission to simultaneously optimize performance, compliance, and cost of your applications and infrastructure in real time. Turbonomic manages the complete application stack, automatically. Applications are continually resourced to perform while satisfying business constraints. APM runs 24/7/365 and scales with the largest, most complex environments.

ArangoDB is a graph database that runs in the Repository component of Turbonomic.

ArangoDB is a free and open-source native multi-modal database system. It natively works with graphs, documents, and full-text search in one database.

See also Repository.