Application assurance - from the data centre to the Cloud

Virtual Instruments has introduced the next generation of VirtualWisdom, the industry’s most comprehensive hybrid infrastructure management and AIOps platform. By visualising the infrastructure in the context of the application, VirtualWisdom 6.0 enables organisations to proactively gain full control over the performance and availability of the applications across their modern hybrid data centres. In doing so, VirtualWisdom delivers improved control, greater business agility and reduced costs. Furthermore, it brings an end to the costly, unproductive and antiquated “IT war rooms” typically created to resolve critical application slowdowns and outages.

Tuesday, 23rd October 2018 Posted 6 years ago in by Phil Alsop

Today’s enterprises are increasingly evolving to a hybrid data centre model in order to utilise cost-effective and flexible compute and storage via the cloud, while retaining the control and security provided by on-premises infrastructure. However, the reality is that the scale and complexity associated with these highly virtualised, multi-cloud environments is beyond human comprehension. In attempts to navigate this complexity, enterprises often implement monitoring tools in a siloed fashion, resulting in an incomplete view of the health, utilisation, capacity and performance of the underlying infrastructure supporting the business-critical applications. This fragmented visibility leads to a lack of control over application delivery, which results in poor business performance in the form of unmet service level agreements (SLAs), reactive IT, and unconstructive, silo-centric finger-pointing within IT war rooms.

The breakthrough new release of VirtualWisdom eliminates these obstacles by holistically monitoring, analysing and optimising the health, utilisation, capacity and performance of IT infrastructure within the context of the application. VirtualWisdom discovers and maps applications to the infrastructure to understand where each application lives and how it behaves on top of the infrastructure, in addition to discerning the business value and SLA tier of each application. Once this end-to-end visibility is established, VirtualWisdom then applies real-time, AI-based analytics that include machine learning, statistical analysis, heuristics and expert systems, allowing enterprises to ensure the performance and availability of the mission-critical applications across their highly complex hybrid data centres.

By leveraging Virtual Instruments’ highly scalable wire and machine data instrumentation and app-centric analytics, the new VirtualWisdom6 platform delivers four key capabilities: Application Service Assurance; Predictive Capacity Management; Workload Infrastructure Balancing; and Problem Resolution and Avoidance. These complementary capabilities enable organisations to proactively identify and resolve infrastructure-related performance, capacity and utilisation issues that are impacting business-critical applications, which removes the need for costly reactive firefighting that is the hallmark of traditional IT war rooms.

“Even in today’s age of digital transformation and rapid innovation, one of the most consistent pain points for enterprises is their lack of visibility and control over the performance of their mission-critical infrastructure,” said Paul Bevan, Research Director at Bloor Research. “To meet their customers’ ever-increasing expectations for always-on, high-performing apps and services, enterprises need to break down silos and gain full control of their application service delivery – and that starts with holistic visibility across the entire infrastructure. The app-centric and cross-domain approach of VirtualWisdom provides a new way for enterprises to collaborate – across the entire organisation – to ensure optimal performance, availability and utilisation of their IT infrastructures.”

Key features of the new version of VirtualWisdom include:

Updated dashboards that now integrate Proactive Analytics, with new visualisations and configuration data that:
- Identify workload balancing opportunities and display the recommendations directly on any dashboard
- Deliver new inventory status charts to provide “at-a-glance” control of deployed infrastructure configuration
- Provide the ability to annotate dashboards with embedded images and text through the new Freeform card
Enhancements to Trend Matcher, the industry’s leading AI-based cross-silo correlation analytic. The AI-based correlation is now app-centric and topology-aware, which overlays correlation directly onto the topology map - making it easier to understand the impact of infrastructure issues across all silos
Application-centric Topology enables easy understanding of the complete the end-to-end path of applications from compute to data storage
Correlation of native application and infrastructure discovery with Dynatrace, in addition to existing correlation with AppDynamics, ServiceNOW, VMWare vApps, Netflow and host discovery
New ability to rapidly correlate the impacts of end-user response time to infrastructure performance through enhanced event integration with AppDynamics
New Operating System Integration provides agentless collection of OS level metrics from either Linux or Windows hosts across cloud, virtual, and physical instances
Operating System Integration support for Amazon’s AWS and Microsoft’s Azure cloud platforms
New iSCSI wire data monitoring support in the NAS Performance Probe, which complements existing NFS and SMB monitoring capabilities
New Storage integrations to monitor the health, performance and capacity of Dell/EMC’s VMAX/PowerMAX and IBM’s SVC, including the abilities to balance workloads and reclaim capacity

New Predictive Capacity Management, which helps an enterprise optimise its infrastructure capacity; identify capacity exhaustion risks; and proactively recover unused capacity by:
- Predicting and optimising infrastructure capacity
- Planning and optimising the deployment of new infrastructure
- Monitoring and forecasting capacity consumption rates
- Helping avoid capacity exhaustion

“Most enterprises face an uphill battle in trying to proactively manage and automate their hybrid data centres because their organisations have been built in a siloed approach using legacy monitoring technologies,” said Philippe Vincent, CEO of Virtual Instruments. “As a result, when a business-critical application experiences a problem that cannot be immediately remediated, the enterprise retreats to the IT war room to begin an expensive, inefficient and contentious trouble-shooting process. The new VirtualWisdom platform ends that silo-centric finger-pointing by helping our customers collaborate via a shared context across the entire infrastructure stack in the context of each application. This enables the enterprise to gain control of application service delivery and restore enterprise IT’s ability to move the business forward and innovate.”