Reengineering IT Infrastructures: A Method for Topology Discovery

ICT systems are made of software, middleware and hardware components and are usually distributed over a network. Middleware and hardware components are combined on what is usually designated an "IT Infrastructure (ITI)". It is upon that ITI that application software is run. The topology of that ITI poses constraints on software algorithms, data structures and software configuration, due to concerns such as fault tolerance, latency or synchronization. In large ITIs that topology evolves constantly. Therefore, when faced to the challenge of maintaining a legacy ICT system, it is important to use reengineering techniques to discover the ITI topology. We propose a reengineering technique to discover the topology of a distributed IT infrastructure, based on a multinomial logistic regression model and a set of topology stereotypes. To demonstrate the feasibility of the approach we applied the model to several organizations with distributed ITIs and, among other aspects, we found that the most recurrent stereotypes are the centralized and backbone ones.