Application signatures

Application signatures are organized and displayed in the Tiers pane inside of the SAV application window. A signature always lives inside of a tier.

Application signature contains the following data:

• A name.
• A signature, which is a set of rules that users provide and that SAV uses to identify a process family or mapping. For application signatures, these rules use data such as process name, command line, listen port, environment variable, executable path, and so on.
• Object properties such as name, color, and whether this object is used by default each time the user opens up an application.

You can add, edit, delete, cut, copy, and paste signatures in the Tiers tree. You can paste a signature before or after a selected position in the Tiers tree to rearrange the order. The order of signatures (and the tiers that contain them) is significant because it affects the order that the process families and mappings are assigned to signatures.

SAV comes with a set of predefined default signatures that recognize a variety of commonly used application process families, such as Apache HTTP, Microsoft IIS, WebLogic, JBoss, Oracle, and so on. So, if your server has any of these applications installed, SAV is able to recognize and display them in the Tiers tree and the maps.

SAV also includes a set of SA signatures, such as the Server Agent, SA Build Manager, NA Syslog Server, SA Command Engine, and so on. Many of these signatures appear only if you use SAV to scan the server or servers that the SA core is installed on, while others, like the Server Agent, appear on all reachable managed servers.

Application signatures do not capture process family information on VMware ESXi hypervisor servers.

List of application signature discovery properties

The full list of application signature properties that can be used to find applications and their process families include:

• Process Name
• Command Line
• Connected To Port
• Listener Port
• Executable Path
• Open Files
• Open Modules
• Environment Variable Name and/or Value

The means by which an application signature discovers applications and process families for environment variables allows you to match application signatures by the name of an environment variable, its value, or both.

“Environment variable” is an application signature property that can be added using the following syntax:

NAME=VALUE

where NAME is the name of the environment variable, and VALUE is its value. You can type either name, the value, or both to find matching process families. However, if you want to find an exact match, you must use both NAME=VALUE.