Use cases and migration paths for Migration Toolkit for Applications

Application inventory

The application inventory is the entry point and natural integration interface for all tools within the migration toolkit for applications. It enables organizations to manage their portfolio in a centralized fashion and, from there, classify applications and launch any actions that might be related to them, such as analysis and assessments.

On its own, the application inventory provides a way to rationalize an organization's application portfolio through an extensible tagging model that allows the classification of applications in multiple dimensions. The tool comes with a series of curated tags related to typical aspects of application development, such as the programming languages, operating systems, or databases it consumes. Users can extend it however they want to accommodate concepts like the custom corporate framework used to develop an application. 

The application inventory also lets users group applications by the business service they belong to as well as provides a way to manage dependencies between applications.

Assessment

The assessment module helps organizations evaluate their application portfolio to determine the suitability of containerization and enable adoption leads to make informed decisions on the migration strategy for each application or application type. This is achieved via a questionnaire-driven approach, covering all essential topics related to technology and application lifecycle management.

Based on the responses, the tool can detect any potential risks that might prevent an application from running in containers, providing insight to help the project lead select the best migration strategy for each case. The adoption team can also add information about the estimated effort to migrate the application and assign priority based on the business criticality.