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Making the Right Application Discovery and Dependency Mapping (ADDM) Investment

Dennis Drogseth

This is the second in a series taken from Chapters Three, Twelve, and Appendix B in CMDB Systems: Making Change Work in the Age of Cloud and Agile. It is not meant as a substitute in any way for the book, but should provide you with a good beginning point for thinking about the technology selection process. Our first blog was on core CMDB selection.

The Application Discovery and Dependency Mapping (ADDM) market is evolving rapidly, and in multiple directions at once. While this can be confusing, it is overall a good thing. Through this diversity, vendors delivering ADDM capabilities are, as an aggregate, seeking to be more responsive to a yet broader set of constituents, use cases, and roles than ever before. This includes requirements emerging from internal and external (public) cloud, the extended enterprise across ecosystems, agile application development, and a dramatic upswing in currency, ease of deployment and modularity.

In some cases you will want to be sure to select an ADDM package that integrates with your core CMDB at initial deployment. In other cases it may come at a later time as a separate investment. On the other hand, depending on use case and overall readiness, an ADDM package may be the right starting point for growing your CMDB System in Phase One even without a core CMDB.

Multi-Use Case versus Performance-Optimized

Image removed.Probably the first place to start in evaluating the ADDM opportunity is to group vendor solutions into two general categories: multi-use-case and performance-optimized. While there has been some blending, each group is optimized for distinct values.

Multi-Use Case: ADDM first became an area of intense innovation roughly 10 years ago with the initial tidal wave of interest in CMDB deployments and the need to capture service-related interdependencies more effectively. Subsequently, that first crop of companies was largely acquired by leading platform solutions with native CMDB integrations. As a group, these ADDM pioneers were and still are focused on capturing configuration-related changes as well as application-to-infrastructure residency, with use cases targeted at asset and change management.

Performance-optimized ADDM: About five years ago, the industry began to see a new crop of ADDM solutions more focused on performance interdependencies, transactional awareness, and more real-time dynamic currency. Many of these also supported CMDB integrations; all were highly automated and, to some degree, were complementary to ADDM-related investments from the first wave. Vendors in this category are raising the bar on in-depth transactional awareness; dynamic, operational insights into application-to-application and application-to-infrastructure interdependencies; and higher levels of automation in terms of discovery and currency.

As the ADDM market progresses, both groups are beginning to harvest strengths from each other, and in this respect, they are becoming more alike. On the other hand, at least for the foreseeable future, there will be numerous situations where a complementary relationship between two separate ADDM packages may well be the right choice.

Read: 6 Key Points of ADDM Evaluation

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IT spending is expected to jump nearly 10% in 2025, and organizations are now facing pressure to manage costs without slowing down critical functions like observability. To meet the challenge, leaders are turning to smarter, more cost effective business strategies. Enter stage right: OpenTelemetry, the missing piece of the puzzle that is no longer just an option but rather a strategic advantage ...

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Today, organizations are generating and processing more data than ever before. From training AI models to running complex analytics, massive datasets have become the backbone of innovation. However, as businesses embrace the cloud for its scalability and flexibility, a new challenge arises: managing the soaring costs of storing and processing this data ...

Making the Right Application Discovery and Dependency Mapping (ADDM) Investment

Dennis Drogseth

This is the second in a series taken from Chapters Three, Twelve, and Appendix B in CMDB Systems: Making Change Work in the Age of Cloud and Agile. It is not meant as a substitute in any way for the book, but should provide you with a good beginning point for thinking about the technology selection process. Our first blog was on core CMDB selection.

The Application Discovery and Dependency Mapping (ADDM) market is evolving rapidly, and in multiple directions at once. While this can be confusing, it is overall a good thing. Through this diversity, vendors delivering ADDM capabilities are, as an aggregate, seeking to be more responsive to a yet broader set of constituents, use cases, and roles than ever before. This includes requirements emerging from internal and external (public) cloud, the extended enterprise across ecosystems, agile application development, and a dramatic upswing in currency, ease of deployment and modularity.

In some cases you will want to be sure to select an ADDM package that integrates with your core CMDB at initial deployment. In other cases it may come at a later time as a separate investment. On the other hand, depending on use case and overall readiness, an ADDM package may be the right starting point for growing your CMDB System in Phase One even without a core CMDB.

Multi-Use Case versus Performance-Optimized

Image removed.Probably the first place to start in evaluating the ADDM opportunity is to group vendor solutions into two general categories: multi-use-case and performance-optimized. While there has been some blending, each group is optimized for distinct values.

Multi-Use Case: ADDM first became an area of intense innovation roughly 10 years ago with the initial tidal wave of interest in CMDB deployments and the need to capture service-related interdependencies more effectively. Subsequently, that first crop of companies was largely acquired by leading platform solutions with native CMDB integrations. As a group, these ADDM pioneers were and still are focused on capturing configuration-related changes as well as application-to-infrastructure residency, with use cases targeted at asset and change management.

Performance-optimized ADDM: About five years ago, the industry began to see a new crop of ADDM solutions more focused on performance interdependencies, transactional awareness, and more real-time dynamic currency. Many of these also supported CMDB integrations; all were highly automated and, to some degree, were complementary to ADDM-related investments from the first wave. Vendors in this category are raising the bar on in-depth transactional awareness; dynamic, operational insights into application-to-application and application-to-infrastructure interdependencies; and higher levels of automation in terms of discovery and currency.

As the ADDM market progresses, both groups are beginning to harvest strengths from each other, and in this respect, they are becoming more alike. On the other hand, at least for the foreseeable future, there will be numerous situations where a complementary relationship between two separate ADDM packages may well be the right choice.

Read: 6 Key Points of ADDM Evaluation

Hot Topics

The Latest

Businesses that face downtime or outages risk financial and reputational damage, as well as reducing partner, shareholder, and customer trust. One of the major challenges that enterprises face is implementing a robust business continuity plan. What's the solution? The answer may lie in disaster recovery tactics such as truly immutable storage and regular disaster recovery testing ...

IT spending is expected to jump nearly 10% in 2025, and organizations are now facing pressure to manage costs without slowing down critical functions like observability. To meet the challenge, leaders are turning to smarter, more cost effective business strategies. Enter stage right: OpenTelemetry, the missing piece of the puzzle that is no longer just an option but rather a strategic advantage ...

Amidst the threat of cyberhacks and data breaches, companies install several security measures to keep their business safely afloat. These measures aim to protect businesses, employees, and crucial data. Yet, employees perceive them as burdensome. Frustrated with complex logins, slow access, and constant security checks, workers decide to completely bypass all security set-ups ...

Image
Cloudbrink's Personal SASE services provide last-mile acceleration and reduction in latency

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 13, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses hybrid multi-cloud networking strategy ... 

In high-traffic environments, the sheer volume and unpredictable nature of network incidents can quickly overwhelm even the most skilled teams, hindering their ability to react swiftly and effectively, potentially impacting service availability and overall business performance. This is where closed-loop remediation comes into the picture: an IT management concept designed to address the escalating complexity of modern networks ...

In 2025, enterprise workflows are undergoing a seismic shift. Propelled by breakthroughs in generative AI (GenAI), large language models (LLMs), and natural language processing (NLP), a new paradigm is emerging — agentic AI. This technology is not just automating tasks; it's reimagining how organizations make decisions, engage customers, and operate at scale ...

In the early days of the cloud revolution, business leaders perceived cloud services as a means of sidelining IT organizations. IT was too slow, too expensive, or incapable of supporting new technologies. With a team of developers, line of business managers could deploy new applications and services in the cloud. IT has been fighting to retake control ever since. Today, IT is back in the driver's seat, according to new research by Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) ...

In today's fast-paced and increasingly complex network environments, Network Operations Centers (NOCs) are the backbone of ensuring continuous uptime, smooth service delivery, and rapid issue resolution. However, the challenges faced by NOC teams are only growing. In a recent study, 78% state network complexity has grown significantly over the last few years while 84% regularly learn about network issues from users. It is imperative we adopt a new approach to managing today's network experiences ...

Image
Broadcom

From growing reliance on FinOps teams to the increasing attention on artificial intelligence (AI), and software licensing, the Flexera 2025 State of the Cloud Report digs into how organizations are improving cloud spend efficiency, while tackling the complexities of emerging technologies ...

Today, organizations are generating and processing more data than ever before. From training AI models to running complex analytics, massive datasets have become the backbone of innovation. However, as businesses embrace the cloud for its scalability and flexibility, a new challenge arises: managing the soaring costs of storing and processing this data ...