Explore application inventory

This article describes how you can use Azure Migrate to define applications running in your datacenter by logically grouping servers and workloads as an application. These applications can be used to plan and execute the migrations more efficiently. You can add applications by performing a bulk import using a CSV file or by adding them one at a time through the portal. You can also initiate automatic discovery of applications where Azure Migrate uses naming patterns, inferred environments, and derived server roles from workloads discovered using Azure Migrate appliance or Collector or CSV Import.

Current limitations

Defining applications using CSV import is currently not supported for projects set up with private endpoint connectivity.

Before you start

Ensure that you have an Azure Migrate project.
Based on your requirements, select a discovery method, Azure Migrate Appliance, Collector, or CSV Import to perform discovery of your datacenter.
You can select the discovery method hat best suits your needs and organizational policies:

Azure Migrate appliance- A continuous discovery mode that helps with discovery of VMware or Hyper-V or Physical environment. You can also configure server credentials for discovery of software, dependencies, web apps, and database workloads.
Collector- A disconnected discovery mode that supports discovery of VMware or Physical environment. You can also configure server credentials for discovery of software, web apps, and database workloads (Gathering of network dependency data not supported currently).
CSV Import- A snapshot-based discovery mode that supports only discovery of servers from any environment.

Review inventory & server dependencies

After completing discovery using any of the modes, go to your Azure Migrate project and review the discovered inventory in All inventory under Explore inventory.
If you have configured an Azure Migrate appliance, you can review the collected dependency data in your project through Dependency analysis under Explore applications. Here you can visualize dependencies across all discovered servers in your Azure Migrate project.
The visualization shows logically spread server nodes with their connections, indicating their network affinity to help you identify applications running in your datacenter. Learn more
You can add or edit tags on the servers, you identify to be part of the same application group. Tags can help you define application entity in the Azure Migrate project.

Add applications

You can start identifying the applications running in your datacenter. Here are the steps you can follow to get started:

You can either go to Overview and select Add applications from the All inventory summary card to Auto discover applications or Import applications or Create new application or you can go to Applications under Explore applications and select Add applications to Auto discover applications or Create new application. Alternatively, select Import to Import Applications.
The applications can be added in one of three ways-

Auto discover applications- Azure Migrate automatically groups discovered workloads into applications and derives Application Name, Type, Business Criticality, and Complexity using discovered metadata of workloads.
Import applications- Add Applications at scale by importing a CSV file with Application Names added in an exported CSV file with all discovered workloads.
Create new application- Use portal to create one application at a time by providing basic details, grouping discovered workloads and adding application properties and tags.

Auto discover applications

Azure Migrate supports automatic application discovery by grouping servers discovered using Azure Migrate appliance, Collector, or CSV Import.

To start automatic discovery, go to Add Applications > Auto discover applications in Applications view. In the side pane, select Discover applications to initiate the process.
You can run this process only once (it's recommended to initiate it after you complete the discovery of your servers and workloads). The operation can take up to one hour depending on the total number of discovered workloads.
Each autodiscovered application represents a logical grouping of servers (and workloads running on those servers) automatically identified using server-naming patterns, inferred environments, and derived server roles.
Azure Migrate performs automatic grouping of Applications, provides an Application Name , derived from server names grouped together, identifies the Application Type (Custom or Packaged) from the software running on the servers and also identifies the Business criticality & Complexity of an application (High or Medium or Low) based on the count and type of workloads grouped together. The Description of the application covers the explanation on how Azure Migrate derived all these details automatically.

Note

The Application type Packaged refers to the Commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) applications you are running in your datacenter. In case the metadata from discovered workloads is insufficient, the Application Name will be set as 'Application_01', 'Applications_02' etc., the Application Type will be defaulted to 'Custom', Business Criticality and Complexity will be set to 'Medium' by default. You can review the applications and update these details as required.
Azure Migrate sets Managed by property to 'System' for automatically discovered applications. The property is set to 'User' for manually added applications (either via portal or CSV import).
Azure Migrate also defines a property Confidence score which is a system assigned score to represent the accuracy of the application grouping. The user-defined (manually created) applications don't have a confidence score value so it's set to '-'.
After the automatic discovery is complete, you can review and update the application details, grouping, properties, and tags by scoping them in the Applications view.

Note

When you review and update the application details, grouping, properties, or tags, the Managed by property will be changed from 'System' to 'User', indicating that the system-defined applications have been reviewed and now managed by the user.
You can select one or more autodiscovered applications to Create assessment, Add or edit tags or Delete applications.

Import applications

To define applications at scale, you can select Import> Import applications in Applications view. This action opens a side pane where you can follow the steps.
Define application groups by adding the application names against the discovered servers and workloads in the prescribed template, which is an export of all discovered inventory.
Select Export all inventory which downloads a CSV file with the details of all discovered inventory across servers, databases, and web applications.
In the exported CSV, you can add names of the applications, a workload is a part of. You can add more than one name if the workload is shared among multiple applications. For instance, if a database- "SQLDB01" is shared by two applications, then you can add- "App01, App02" under Application name column in the same row.

Note

The Application name(s) are case-sensitive and can include alphanumeric and special characters except ',' and '\'. The All inventory export contains a column named 'App ARM ID Name(s)' which is the ARM representation of the application resource- do not add or edit any values in the column as that can lead to errors in importing the application grouping.
In each import operation, you can add up to 5000 application names with a maximum grouping of 500 workloads per application subject to an overall limit of grouping 30,000 workloads per CSV import.
After saving the CSV file with application names, you can browse and select the CSV file in the side pane on the Azure portal.
If the selected file passes the validation checks, you can select Import to upload the details of the applications, as added in the CSV file. Based on the volume of the workloads grouped, each import operation can take up to 3 hours to complete.
After the import is complete, you can see the import status and review the number of applications created and check the error file if any failures occur.

Note

Currently, import applications feature only supports adding workloads to an application and does not support removing existing workloads. To remove a workload, use the portal to review and edit the specific application. CSV import also does not support deleting an Application by removing its name from CSV file. You can use portal experience to perform bulk delete of applications.
The imported applications contain only application names with grouped workloads and don't include any more details or properties. It's recommended to select Import> Import application properties to add or edit application details, properties or tags at scale using the prescribed template.

Import application properties

When the application is defined using import, a warning icon appears next to the application name to indicate that mandatory properties need to be updated. You can update these properties individually by selecting the application in the Applications view, or update them at scale using Import> Import application properties.

Update the properties of applications in the prescribed template, which is an export of applications inventory.
Select Export applications to download a CSV file containing details of all applications added manually (via CSV import or the portal) or automatically by Azure Migrate.
In the exported CSV, you can add/edit application details like Name, Description, Type, and mandatory properties like Business Criticality and Complexity, especially for applications added through CSV import. You can also edit the properties of applications that were added manually (CSV import or portal) or automatically by Azure Migrate.

Note

Don't edit the App ARM ID column in the CSV file. You can add application properties across multiple import operations but avoid triggering multiple imports in parallel.

For the Application properties, the following values are supported in the CSV file:

Property	Required	Description	Values
Business criticality	Yes	Specify the criticality of the application to your business	Choose from High, Medium, Low
Complexity	Yes	Specify the complexity in terms of workloads and dependencies	Choose from High, Medium, Low
Publisher	No (Optional)	Specify the names of the publisher of application (Packaged) or its workloads (custom)	For example, SAP if it's a Packaged application or Microsoft if it's a Custom application running on .NET IIS web application and SQL database
Technology stack	No (Optional)	Specify the technology used like runtimes, frameworks, languages, etc.	For example, .NET, SQL, MySQL, Tomcat, etc.

If the file passes validation checks, select Import to upload the application details captured in the CSV file.
After the import completes, review the import status, the number of applications processed, and check the error file if any failures occur.

Create new application

Select Add applications> Create new application. Start by providing basic details of an application like Name, Description, and Type. You can choose to provide same name for the application as on-premises, add a description with details about the application, and choose between Custom or Packaged for application type.

Note

The application Name also allows for alphanumeric and special characters except ',' and '\'. The type Packaged refers to the Commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) applications you are running in your datacenter.
In the next step, you can link the workloads that are hosting this application. You can select Link workloads to go to the All inventory view, which helps you select the workloads that you want to add to this new application.
You can scope the All inventory view by searching for specific workloads or filtering workloads by Category, Type, OS name, Tags, etc. and Add the selected workloads.

Note

The Application column in the All inventory view indicates if a workload has already been grouped as part of another application. A workload can be shared between multiple applications.

In the next step, you can specify properties associated with the application. Here are the properties you can add:

Property	Required	Description	Values
Business criticality	Yes	Specify the criticality of the application to your business	Choose from High, Medium, Low
Complexity	Yes	Specify the complexity in terms of workloads and dependencies	Choose from High, Medium, Low
Publisher	No (Optional)	Specify the names of the publisher of application (Packaged) or its workloads (custom)	For example, SAP if it's a Packaged application or Microsoft if it's a Custom application running on .NET IIS web application and SQL database
Technology stack	No (Optional)	Specify the technology used like runtimes, frameworks, languages, etc.	For example, .NET, SQL, MySQL, Tomcat, etc.

Note

The Properties can help identify the application uniquely and can be used to filter and perform scoped migration planning for different types of applications.

After adding the properties, you can add tags to the application you're creating. You can use tags to group and visualize similar applications based on specific tags, such as environment, department, or datacenter etc.
In the final step, you can review the details of the application and proceed to Create the application.

Review applications

After defining the applications using Auto discover, Import or Create new application, you can review the applications any time from the Applications view.

In the Applications view, the applications are sorted by their Creation Time so that the recently defined applications show on top of the table.
You can use the prefiltered cards to switch between Custom and Packaged applications.
In this view, you can see the application names with Type, Managed by, Workloads (count), Properties, and Tags.
You can scope the view using search or by applying filter on one or more application attributes.
You can also select one or more applications to Create assessment, Sync code changes, Add or edit tags or Delete applications.

Update applications

You can select any application name to review and update the basic details, added workloads, properties or tags. Here are the steps you can follow:

After selecting an application, you're taken to the Overview of the application. Here you can Sync code changes for the application or Edit the basic details such as Description and Type of the application.
In the Overview, you can review the distribution of linked workloads by type and by OS support status.
You can go to Activity logs from left menu to review the activities performed on the application.
You can review the Workloads to add or remove any workloads any time after the application was defined.
You can also review and update the Properties or Tags associated with the application.

Note

When you review and update the details/grouping/properties/tags of an automatically discovered application, the Managed by property is changed from 'System' to 'User', indicating that the system-defined applications have been reviewed and now managed by the user.

Delete applications

You can select one or more applications from the Applications view to delete the unwanted applications.
When you select Delete, a side pane opens with the names of applications you want to delete.
Before deleting the applications, you should ensure that they aren't part of any Assessment or Migration Wave. Application deletion can lead to change in assessment computation and execution planning for the workloads associated with the applications.
The delete action cleans up the application resource and ungroups the workloads associated with this application.
You can confirm to "delete" the applications to proceed. Note that this operation will permanently clean up the application resource and there's no way to retrieve it again.
After deleting the applications, you can refresh the Applications view for the change to take effect.

Next steps

Build Business case
Create Application assessment

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Last updated on 2026-06-15