3 Steps to a Comprehensive View of IT Operations How to Improve Visibility in Mature Virtual Environments and the Cloud

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3 Steps to a Comprehensive View of IT Operations How to improve visibility in mature virtual environments and the cloud

The Challenge You Can’t See As companies grow their virtual infrastructures and transition into cloud computing, one of the greatest challenges they face is the lack of visibility into their IT environment. Getting a unified view of system capacity, performance, and underlying hardware information is often a manual exercise. The number of different tools required to maintain and manage multiple clouds and a mix of proprietary and open-source databases and hardware extends this challenge. In fact, a recent Forrester Consulting research report shows that tools creep and lack of visibility are big problem areas for companies. Additionally, the research showed that only 24 percent of companies could provision infrastructure in a matter of hours instead of days or weeks.1

Challenges Evolve as Companies Virtualize More Infrastructure “What are the top challenges you face managing your virtualized infrastructure?” (Ranked as top three)

Low virtualization High virtualization (N=63) (N=63)

T1. Lack of visibility across 1. Too many different tools 48% infrastructure domains

T1. Ensuring adequate capacity 2. Lack of visibility across 46% exists for workloads infrastructure domains

3. Inability to scale infrastructure 40% 3. Lack of expertise/skills 40% as needed

4. Lack of expertise/skills 37% 4. Infrastructure too complex 38%

T5. Lack of collaboration across 5. Infrastructure too complex 33% teams

T5. Ensuring adequate capacity T6. Too many different tools 32% 33% exists for workloads

T6. Lack of collaboration across 32% 7. Disconnect from business need 27% teams

8. Inability to scale infrastructure 8. Disconnect from business need 21% as needed

Base: 210 US and European IT decision-makers responsible for virtualization Source: A commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of VMware, March 2016

1Source: “Accelerate Your Virtualization and Cloud Journey,” a Forrester Consulting paper commissioned by VMware, June, 2016.

WHITE PAPER | BLUE MEDORA | 1 IT pros face system monitoring, alerting, and reporting challenges on multiple fronts for physical and virtual systems. The greatest challenges present themselves to IT personnel who have the responsibility for maintaining system and service uptimes. One of the most-common challenges facing support teams is that there’s no visual Blue Medora’s vRealize-focused representation of relationships among hardware, storage, compute, and applications. management software solutions No single group has the “big picture” and support staff, no matter how technically “play an important role in extending strong, can’t put together a definitive root cause for failures. And because no one can the reach of VMware vRealize provide definitive root cause analyses, there’s no corresponding entries into knowledge across a broad array of business- bases, no triage training, and no preventative measures taken. Without the ability to critical applications, compute, take a deep dive into the underlying hardware, software, and relationships among network and storage technologies. the components, future failure analysis and troubleshooting must begin from scratch Blue Medora and VMware plan on each occurrence. to continue to work together to deliver endpoint management Close to 80 percent of all companies plan to grow their virtualization footprints in 2016, solutions that enable end-to-end but have yet to make significant advances in doing so. The challenges of the lack visibility into the software-defined of unified tools, poor automation, and provisioning time continue to plague efforts in data center. widespread adoption of cloud computing. – SAJAI KRISHNAN Vice President, Product Marketing Management Inevitably, technical staffers find themselves caught between software vendors and Suites Business Unit, VMware hardware vendors who point the finger at each other, which further exacerbate support challenges. Every software and hardware vendor has its own component or equipment management software, which doesn’t integrate with other vendor software and hardware. This segregation essentially creates a situation where every department in an IT or support organization operates independently of every other department, with no visibility into other environments. The only times that all departments collaborate is during outages. The only person who has a big picture view of the network and its infrastructure is often a single IT architect who has access to all components and access to every management interface.

In smaller companies, multiple management applications and disparate, non-integrated software tools mean longer learning curves, more task switching, and less attention to detail in any single application. And in business critical environments, regardless of size, lengthy mean-times-to-restore (MTTRs) and a lack of a full-spectrum view of infrastructure and applications can result in loss of revenue and unresolved root causes for outages. Close to one-third of high-virtualization organizations (those who have virtualized more than 50 percent of their workloads) use more than five tools to manage virtualized infrastructure. According to the Forrester report, a mere six percent of the high-virtualization companies use a single tool for virtual infrastructure management.

Management of critical systems doesn’t stop with simple operational views; it also includes alerting, predictive analytics, and capacity planning. A separate tool for each function and environment further complicates an organizational structure by requiring a separate hardware and software infrastructure for monitoring, management, and support.

2 | WHITE PAPER | BLUE MEDORA 3 Steps to a Comprehensive Visibility The solution, it seems, is to deploy an integrated management application that not only views individual components, but also allows support staff to view relationships between applications and infrastructure. A unified approach supports cross-team collaboration outside crisis events and increases the ability to pinpoint problem areas faster, more accurately.

1 Decide on a platform of truth From an “in the trenches” perspective, having a single interface from which IT decision-makers in companies of all to view your whole environment is far more efficient than attempting to sizes across all industries in the US become proficient at multiple applications from different vendors. A single and in Europe agree that having a single application that already exists in your infrastructure is a better answer. interface for managing compute, One that has the capability of being extended by third parties makes it a storage, and network for all teams is desirable choice for infrastructures of any size. a high priority. If you’re one of the hundreds of thousands of organizations running VMware vSphere, VMware’s vRealize Operations (vROPs) management software may already exist in your environment. Your support staff could already be familiar with and comfortable with its interface and its ease of use. Your easiest path to better visibility may be to add modular integration for your server hardware, network hardware, Oracle databases, SAP environment, storage solution, databases, and other virtualization technologies such as XenApp, XenDesktop, and KVM. We liked Blue Medora’s products because they gave us an all- vROPs is a single application that provides deep insight into your environment. “inclusive approach to managing • Capacity Management our network. Instead of DBA • Performance and Troubleshooting (database) engineers looking • Apps to Infrastructure at their particular management • Physical, Virtual, and Cloud software and SAN managers • Capacity Reclamation, Optimization and Planning and server and hardware people • Workload Placement looking at their respective • Infrastructure Costs, Metering and Consumption management software windows, • Health, Performance and Troubleshooting Blue Medora combined all three.

• Real-time Log Analytics for Root Cause Analysis – KEN BROWER • Application Dependency Mapping Director of Information Systems, Cherry Health • Storage and Network Visibility • OS, Database, Middleware and Application Monitoring

WHITE PAPER | BLUE MEDORA | 3 Operational Benefits from Deploying vRealize Operations in a vSphere Environment: Degree of Improvement

Average Improvement: ND Incremental Improvement: OpD Total Improvement with OpD

Overall Cost IT Infrastructure 36% 26% 53% Management

Downtime: Tier 1 Apps 34% 30% 54%

Time On Diagnostics and 24% 16% 36% Problem Resolution

Time On Change 23% 20% 38% Management

Time On Incident Isolation/ 21% 13% 31% Remediation

Number of Trouble Tickets 18% 18% 33% of Respondents Improved Respondents of % Time On Trouble Tickets 19% 18% 34% Management

Time on Patch Management 30% 29% 50%

Time Spent on Compliance 21% 23% 39% Management

ND: vRealize Operations Not Deployed N=78/62/39/59/29/62/42/45/43 OpD: vRealize Operations Deployed

Source: “Study Shows Businesses Experience Significant Operational and Business Benefits from VMware vRealize Operations”, VMware white paper, http://www.vmware.com/content/dam/digitalmarketing/vmware/en/pdf/products/vCenter/vmware-management-insight-study-shows-businesses- benefits.pdf

And vROPs is an open and extensible platform, which means that third party plug-ins further extend vROP’s visibility into your cloud-computing environment that makes it easier to manage and to maintain.

Deciding on vROPs as your single platform of truth can reduce downtimes of Tier 1 applications by as much as fifty percent, decrease costs up to fifty percent, offer a high rate of return (2.4X) on your investment, reclaim as much as thirty percent of your unused capacity, cut your root cause analysis times in half, and present you with an overall gain in productivity of up to sixty- seven percent. These gains and savings are significant and can streamline your operation by reducing overhead, decreasing MTTRs, and allocating resources more efficiently. The vROPs suite puts you closer to a comprehensive cloud management platform.

4 | WHITE PAPER | BLUE MEDORA 2 Gather as much data as you can The health status of each component is color coded for easy identification Blue Medora’s Management Packs enable of problem areas. The BIG-IP Management Pack also connects to other VMware vRealize customers to leverage Management Packs installed in vROPs to provide an integrated view of related VMware vROPs for monitoring, alerting, components, such as the BIG-IP Pool, Pool Members, and the Virtual Layer predictive analytics and capacity planning. that includes the virtual host systems and storage. On the same screen, an administrator can observe the statuses of NetApp LUN and Volume. Additionally, the administrator can see the UCS Blade and Chassis without switching screens or applications.

This unified view allows the administrator to see the Application Layer, the Virtual Layer, the Storage Layer, and the Computer Layer all on the same screen. A single interface displays the entire stack under the BIG-IP Pool.

The Management Pack for BIG-IP also ships with seven dashboards and reports that provide additional data and insight.

The rise of IT Operations Analytics (ITOA), gathering data is easier than ever before on complex and often mixed (physical, virtual, and cloud) environments. Plus, that big data gathered by operations tools means that you’ll avoid missing critical details of your operations and troubleshooting won’t take as long. The problem with so much data is how to process it. That’s when you leave the backend processing to a single platform to translate it into usable metrics for you. This “big data for IT” phenomenon allows administrators and managers alike to gain new visibility into operations, costs, and efficiencies.

For example, the F5 BIG-IP Management Pack installs into vROPs and allows administrators to view real-time F5 performance data. The administrator can also see how each of their resources relates to one another inside vROPs. They can see internal relationships between BIG-IP components, such as the System to the Pool and external relationships such as Pool Member to Virtual Machine.

Figure 1: Full stack visibility in the Blue Medora True Visibility Suite with F5 BIG-IP Management Pack

WHITE PAPER | BLUE MEDORA | 5 3 Visualize with individual priorities in mind But all that data and all that insight won’t do anything for you, if you can’t actually use the data to take action in your environment. Taking action rapidly with fewer resources and with minimal overhead is critical to infrastructure and application management success. Blue Medora’s Management Packs do just that. They gather data from your environment, package it into a simple interface, and provide you with actionable results. For you, those actionable results mean lower MTTRs and MTTIs, which in turn means quicker recovery and more uptime for your mission- critical environments.

For those administrators who don’t require so much data for their particular vantage points, administrators can customize their dashboards in order to focus effort on what matters to them. For example, if an administrator only wants to see network information, he can customize his dashboard to hunt down bandwidth vampires without affecting anyone else’s dashboard. By customizing an individual dashboard, an administrator can take the big picture view of what’s going on in the environment or dissect out individual pixels.

Getting the Bigger Picture What do consolidating your monitoring, alerting, application stack, hardware infrastructure, health checks, management, and troubleshooting into a single application really accomplish for your organization? In other words, what problem do these integrated dashboards, reports, management interfaces, and infrastructure relationships solve for your company?

34% 37% improvement in more uptime on capacity utilization tier 1 applications

26% 2.4x additional cost savings return on on IT infrastructure investment management

Study Shows Businesses Experience Significant Operational and Business Benefits from VMware vRealize Operations”, VMware white paper, http://www.vmware.com/content/dam/digitalmarketing/vmware/en/pdf/products/vCenter/vmware- management-insight-study-shows-businesses-benefits.pdf

6 | WHITE PAPER | BLUE MEDORA Consolidating your monitoring increases visibility. Using VMware’s vRealize Operations as a foundation for keeping a watchful eye on your entire computing Why Blue Medora operation, means greater visibility into your environment. While some vendor management applications take a deep dive into their systems, they don’t integrate Blue Medora creates software that or provide visibility into upstream or downstream devices, applications, or extends the capabilities of VMware capabilities. At best, they provide a narrow view of one particular piece of what’s vRealize Operations (vROps), New really going on in your network and nothing else. Relic, Oracle Enterprise Manager

A single tool is more efficient. A single tool that’s shared by all departments and (OEM), and IBM Tivoli Monitoring (ITM). support organizations is far more efficient and reassuring to support staff and Blue Medora software exposes more to those who watch the clock and the checkbook. Rather than creating siloes of elements of your underlying hardware expertise around your organization, you can leverage the common vROPs interface, and software solutions to provide and buffer those pockets of high value and high cost experts with an application you with detailed performance metrics that every staff member can view all aspects of the computing environment and in-depth analytics. What you and infrastructure. get is comprehensive visibility into However, the benefits of a consolidated or unified, interface don’t stop with passive your physical and virtual infrastructure observation by support staff; the benefits extend to predictive performance for root cause analysis, predictive analytics, capacity trends, and pre-emptive troubleshooting by examining architecture, analytics, and overall infrastructure relationships, and real-time system health information. management.

With vRealize, you can observe and manage your VMs, hosts, and datastores and gather basic metrics on a limited piece of the whole compute picture. Blue Medora’s Management Packs expand those limited views into a single environment throughout your entire hardware and software stacks. Imagine being able to view applications, virtual machines, databases, datastores, storage, network, and more in a single application that you already have.

You can also visit https://bluemedora.com/platforms/true-visibility-suite-for- vmware/vrealize-operations/ and download any of the Management Packs for a free trial to see for yourself how easily that Blue Medora’s products can give you a bigger picture of your computing environment.

Learn more at bluemedora.com