A system to automatically gather attribute data about elements such as networks, network interface cards, operating systems, device types, installed software, processes in execution, financial data, etc. in an organization or a designated subset of the organization. Fingerprint files are used, each fingerprint file corresponding to an element of a specific type and each containing a list of attributes that will be found if that element exists in the system. Each fingerprint contains or points to one or more collection instructions which control a data collector process to attempt to gather attribute data. Each fingerprint contains or points to rules that are used to analyze the attribute data gathered to calculate the probability that the element exists. The rules can be fired sequentially, in if-then-else fashion or can be incorporated in a script in loops and with mathematical manipulations, tests and branching for more sophisticated analysis. Fingerprints can be turned on and off by configuration data and can be used in a logical order to do discovery without any prior knowledge of the systems being analyzed. A refresh schedule and collection calendar control how often the fingerprints are used in some embodiments, and collected data is stored with time stamps to enable analysis of changes in the data over time.
A data conversion job used for data conversion is separated into a data conversion server job for executing conversion processing on a data conversion server and a storage job for instructing a copy of a table on a storage device. Then, the storage job is executed to instruct the storage device to copy the table. The data conversion server job is executed only for fields that need to be converted, and thereby data conversion is performed for the copied table.This makes it possible to reduce a load of the data conversion server when converting data of a database, and also to enable a designer of a data conversion job to easily design the data conversion job.
Sending a discovery agent to a computing device determines the services provided by that first computing device. As a result, a first set of information is received from the agent that provides information indicative of the services provided by the computing device. That information can then be compared to other information, either from the same computing device at a different point in time, or from a second computing device. The other information is indicative of services performed by that computing device at a different point in time or the second computing device. From that, services provided by the computing device that were previously different on the first computing device or that are not available on the second computing device can be determined.
