WHITE PAPER 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 of Respondents % 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