AWS Application Discovery Service
Learn how to plan and monitor the migration to the AWS cloud using AWS Application Discovery Service.
Business agility, reduced IT infrastructure costs, and improved security are the primary reasons why businesses today are migrating their workloads to the cloud. AWS helps businesses by planning their migration from on-premises servers and databases to the cloud. For seamless migration, AWS provides multiple services, and AWS Application Discovery Service is one of them.
AWS Application Discovery Service collects information such as configurations, usage, connection, and performance data about on-premises servers and databases. This helps businesses understand their on-premises applications, websites, servers, databases, and performance metrics, and plan migration accordingly.
Application Discovery Service uses AWS Migration Hub and AWS Database Migration Service Fleet Advisor. AWS Migration Hub helps keep migration track by confining the tracking statuses of all servers in a single console.
AWS Database Migration Service Fleet Advisor helps companies decide what migration option would work best for their workloads. This includes helping them choose the target database and migration method and estimating costs.
Performing discovery and collecting data
Application Discovery Service has two ways of discovering and collecting data about on-premises servers. Let’s understand each one in detail:
Agentless discovery
The first way of discovering performance is Agentless discovery performed by using AWS Application Service Agentless Collector. Customers can collect resource utilization and performance data of each VM in vCenter, without installing AWS Application Discovery Agent on each VM.
The Agentless Collector is deployed through the VMware vCenter. After this, it can be used to get important details about VMs and hosts in your vCenter. It can collect server hostnames, IP addresses, MAC addresses, resource allocations, database versions, and schemas.
AWS Application Service Agentless Collector can also be used in case of having a database and analytics server in an on-premises enviornment. It has a separate module, Agentless Collector database and analytics data collection module, that can capture metadata and database capacity, offering important insights about the data and database. The primary metrics collected by this module are available memory and storage on OS servers, number of CPUs, schemas, tables, triggers, views, stored procedures, database version, and schema structure.
Agent-based discovery
To capture detailed data such as system performance and configurations, network connection information, and details about running tasks, AWS Application Discovery Agent is used. It is installed on physical servers or VMs that we wish to migrate. The agents only support Windows and Linux operating systems.
The agent works by collecting data from VMs or physical servers on which the agent is installed. All the data collected is transferred safely using Transport Layer Security (TLS) to the Application Discovery Service. During the collection and discovery process, the agent pings Application Discovery Service every 15 minutes for configuration data.
Collected Data | Agentless Collector | Discovery Agent |
Static server configuration data | ✅ | ✅ |
Database configuration data | ✅ | ❌ |
VM utilization metrics | ✅ | ❌ |
Database utilization metrics | ✅ | ❌ |
Time series performance information | ❌ | ✅ |
Network inbound/outbound connections | ❌ | ✅ |
Running processes | ❌ | ✅ |
How AWS Application Discovery Service works
Application Discovery Service is based on agent-based and agentless discovery. Customers deploy the Agentless Collector on their servers. The Agentless Collector uses public APIs within the on-premises environment to discover configuration data and utilization metrics. If detailed information about physical servers or VMs is required, the Agent Collector is installed on each server. It can then provide information about running processes, network connections, and performance.
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