Five steps for a modern monitoring framework

We hear from a lot of companies that they already monitor their IT performance. They say they already know which data provides the best insights and how to find it. Now, it makes sense that IT execs and staff would have a good understanding of their own infrastructures and how to manage them. However, we hear just as often that more modern technologies such as virtualisation and cloud computing have pushed some older monitoring frameworks into obsolescence, meaning even those who understand their infrastructures may not be getting enough out of them. By Chris James, Marketing Director EMEA, at Virtual Instruments.

9 years ago Posted in

IT IS IMPORTANT TO UNDERSTAND the current state of play when it comes to monitoring performance. In the past, where you had relatively small amounts of components and low volumes and speeds going on, you could use rolled up data and that would be enough. Today, what many understand to be a reading on performance metrics is very often not, but instead actually utilisation metrics or error counters. This produces misleading results that are skewed dramatically from what is actually going on.

The way we collect and analyse data – and the information we choose to gather in the first place – has to change as we start using new technologies because the simple truth is the digital world is expanding at an extreme pace. Effective performance management and monitoring is now about more than just finding problems. It’s about making every process in an IT ecosystem as efficient as possible.

Here are five steps to ensure your monitoring framework is valuable for today’s heterogeneous data centres and supports the expectations of speed and reliability in modern IT:

Understand which data is relevant
Identifying critical workloads comes with an understanding of the figures most likely to impact them – positively or negatively. Increased latency for a critical application is the kind of thing you need to have a firm grasp on to move forward with improvements. The relevance of a piece of information is largely based on the kind of application that generates it and the way your end users interact with that application. With the onset of virtualisation, the challenge now is that workloads are increasing – for example, where you previously had a single server with one workload, you could now have thirty, which dramatically increases the amount of information going across the wire, making it more important than ever before to have detailed data. To say that relying on simplified data in the form of a rolled up average to tell you what’s going on is still adequate – is an enormous understatement.

Develop a method of gathering end-to-end data
Just looking at a few latency periods for an application over the course of a day or a week isn’t going to help you monitor its performance effectively. End-to-end data gives IT workers a better understanding of application performance in virtualised infrastructures because there’s a complete picture of the performance available to them.

Identify real performance metrics and analytics
Data on its own isn’t enough. The next step is creating meaningful analytics, and finding the right metrics on which to act is as important as developing them. Ignore averages and focus on real-time data to ensure that analytics are designed to illustrate successes and failures throughout an application’s lifecycle.

In addition, not all monitoring methods are created equal. When comparing data across vendors, it is important to be aware that when it comes to gathering finite metrics, the way in which data is reported is not necessarily going to be the same. The metric units reported across varying vendor components can be very different, leading to disparate and inaccurate data. This can be very difficult to reconcile later on if you don’t have a way to compare the metrics you’re seeing across different vendors. A system that uses the exact same protocol when monitoring, regardless of vendor components, will produce accurate and dependable results.

Use those analytics to find real answers
Once you nail down which analytics are most significant for each application, it’s important to have buy-in throughout the organisation to act on them. The conclusions reached based on analytics and data have to be trusted to help your company solve problems. In the old days, companies would just overprovision whenever there was a problem. Modern IT demands agility and your performance framework must be designed to integrate conclusions based on your analytics.

Make better decisions faster
The final piece of a modern performance framework is being able to make sound decisions quickly. CIOs have historically relied on their teams to manually piece information together from various sources in disparate organisations, making system-wide correlation difficult, and introducing the opportunity for manual interpretation of the data. Today, it is crucial for enterprises to have a purpose-built Infrastructure Performance Management solution. Such a solution should be specifically designed for granular, real-time monitoring of IT performance within the infrastructure, giving the IT the resources to manage mission critical applications. This agility comes from an integrated infrastructure performance management solution that enables your company to optimise critical workloads by sharing real-time data and using it to make improvements. Once you have answers from your data and analytics, IT managers and CIOs need to act quickly to make decisions as needed to promote IT cost optimisation without sacrificing performance.

The digital economy in which we all operate in 2015 demands speed. If not properly managed, IT has the potential to be a laggard, slowing down every process with overprovisioned infrastructures and legacy solutions at every turn. Those days are over, and it’s critical that companies find ways to ensure their modern IT systems have similarly novel performance frameworks to keep them going.

VirtualWisdom 4.3 provides advanced analytics on hybrid cloud workloads
VIRTUAL INSTRUMENTS specialises in providing performance management analytics on your virtual infrastructure. In August 2015, the company released the newest version of its VirtualWisdom product.

The VirtualWisdom platform provides insights into the performance and availability of your infrastructure–across physical, virtual and cloud environments. Consisting of software probes and purpose-built hardware, it intelligently correlates and analyses an unmatched breadth and depth of data, transforming data into answers and actionable insights.

In version 4.3 of VirtualWisdom, organisations can get an in-depth look at the inner workings of their hybrid infrastructure. VirtualWisdom 4.3 is vendor agnostic, meaning the product will work with most any hypervisor including Hyper-V and PowerVM.

Another feature of VirtualWisdom 4.3 is that it gives administrators the ability to move its platform appliance data into the cloud. By putting these analytics into the cloud, administrators can gain more visibility into their infrastructures by being able to get on demand information about their deployments. With VirtualWisdom 4.3, systems administrators can gain significant insight into the inner workings of its hypervisors, data stores or interconnects.

The largest enterprises in the world trust VirtualWisdom to guarantee the performance of mission-critical applications and drive better performance from their infrastructure. Whether you’re concerned about your retail customer experiences, patient data availability, national security, or anything in between, VirtualWisdom helps IT teams across industries guarantee performance and availability.