Without dependency information how do you manage availability and optimise continuity? However, building dependency data purely from change and release management and standard discovery data is very challenging - often resulting in lots of 'data' and no information. Yet this information delivers one of the key benefits that many organisations seek from configuration management ; the ability to dynamically visualise impact in a ‘dashboard’ style view and react to events more effectively. When ITAMS engage with clients we often come across situations where two servers mapped individually in the CMDB to two seemingly different business applications are actually interdependent because they host databases that share information. When one server fails in this situation then both applications are affected. Having access to this information directly affects availability and incident and problem response efficiency. Unfortunately, traditional change, release and discovery mechanisms would not expose this dependency. In recent years a new breed of technology has appeared that complements CMDB using specialist port level scanning and monitoring techniques coupled to application foot-printing. Using this, the two example servers would be located using agent-less scanning. The presence of the database (e.g. Oracle) would be inferred by the way the servers are communicating and then the packets flowing between them would be mapped and visualised such that the dependencies are clear. At ITAMS we have already assessed newly released application dependency mapping technologies and we can share our findings with you and decide together whether this is right or not for your organisation.