A dirty little secret in IT is that we don’t always know everything we have, what our systems are doing or fully monitor them. The Assimilation Project integrates continuous discovery and monitoring, creating a graph CMDB of your infrastructure and services - scalably monitoring them with near-zero configuration. Come learn how to easily put your infrastructure knowledge in one place, monitor your systems, services and configurations, and automatically update it and compare it to best practices.

The open source Assimilation Project provides integrated IT discovery and monitoring aimed at risk management and mitigation. It discovers systems, switches, services and dependencies. Discovery uses agents which run local commands, listens to packets without network privileges, which create and update a graph-based configuration management database (CMDB) of your infrastructure and services without setting off security alarms. This model includes services you aren’t monitoring and systems you’ve forgotten about. This is important since about 30% of outsider security breaches come through forgotten systems, and services you’re not monitoring can’t be properly managed. Monitoring is extremely scalable due to its radically distributed architecture. Because discovery informs monitoring, most monitoring doesn’t require any configuration.

Easily extensible discovery enables administrators to let the Assimilation software keep information they are interested in a central database and continually up to date instead of in ad hoc flat files. This enables straightforward best practice audits (including security audits) without touching every machine. Our graph-based CMDB is natural for visualization and supports interesting queries about root causes and impact analysis

The Assimilation Project software provides extremely scalable easy-to-configure monitoring, and creates a continually up to date detailed CMDB based on the Neo4j graph database. This talk gives an overview of the Assimilation project - its capabilities, scalability and architecture, future plans and includes a demo of zero-configuration discovery and monitoring.

Overview site: http://assimilationsystems.com/
Project URL: http://assimproj.org/
Videos of past  talks: http://assimilationsystems.com/category/videos/
Alan's Bio: http://assimilationsystems.com/alan-robertson/