1. Secure multitenant platform

Data privacy and security are a primary concern for customers and a critical responsibility for their MSPs. At the same time, as an MSP, you must be able to implement and manage distinct solution stacks for individual clients. Virtana supports multitenancy with comprehensive data isolation to meet these requirements.

2. Comprehensive monitoring and management

Virtana empowers you to efficiently monitor, manage, and optimize their clients’ IT infrastructure, including infrastructure performance monitoring, capacity planning, and resource optimization.

3. Scalability

Virtana’s solutions are highly scalable, allowing MSPs to easily accommodate the needs of a growing client base. Whether you’re managing a small handful of clients or hundreds, Virtana can meet your needs.

4. Cost optimization

Virtana helps you optimize costs by identifying underutilized resources, rightsizing infrastructure, and optimizing workload placement. With improved resource utilization and performance, you can reduce costs for your clients while maximizing your own ROI. 

5. Hybrid and multi-cloud support

Your clients have diverse IT environments and hybrid/multi-cloud strategies. With Virtana, you can monitor and manage clients’ infrastructures across on-premises data centers, public clouds, and private clouds.

6. Reliability and performance

Virtana has a proven track record of delivering enterprise-grade monitoring and management solutions with reliability and performance to give you confidence in the solutions’ ability to support your clients’ mission-critical IT operations.

7. Customizable policies

Different clients might require distinct alert routing and handing policies. And noise reduction criteria will vary by organization. With Virtana, customizing policies to meet client requirements and defining alert policies using code is straightforward.

8. Open integrations

For maximum benefits, AIOps solutions must seamlessly integrate with ITSM and monitoring and notification systems. Virtana’s AIOps prioritizes an API-first approach, enabling easy and seamless integration with existing technology stacks.

9. Single sign-on

Virtana can integrate with the SSO solution deployed in your clients’ environments to simplify the authentication process for users. This improves efficiency and the overall user experience while maintaining security.

10. Audit trail

When you are responsible for managing a client’s environment, you need to track changes to demonstrate accountability and compliance. Virtana’s AIOps solution tracks all changes by default and shows the most active users and frequently failed actions.

11. Tool rationalization

The typical enterprise environment uses eight to ten monitoring tools, which can create alert management challenges. With Virtana, you can filter and correlate alerts generated by the various monitoring tools to facilitate the process.

12. Custom branding

Virtana’s solution offers seamless customization options so you can provide enhanced services under your brand to retain authority over your clients’ user experience.

13. Deployment flexibility

Many enterprises prefer not to migrate their data to the cloud. With Virtana, you have the flexibility to deploy the solution within your environment or opt for a SaaS offering so you can make the right choice for your clients.

Virtana: The AIOps and observability choice for MSPs

The Virtana Platform offers MSPs a comprehensive set of monitoring and management solutions designed to help them efficiently manage clients’ IT infrastructure, optimize performance, reduce costs, and drive business growth. Our full-stack observability and AI-powered AIOps monitoring deliver actionable insights into application health, migration, performance, multi-cloud cost management, and monitoring. We work with many MSPs and have built in the multitenant capabilities and billing features you need to support your business requirements. Request a trial

The post Why MSPs Are Choosing Virtana for AIOps and Observability appeared first on Virtana.

Monitoring and management efficiency to streamline operations

As an MSP, you need your as-a-service AIOps platform to allow you to monitor and manage the IT infrastructure—including performance metrics, anomaly detection, and potential issue identification—across diverse environments for multiple clients all from a single dashboard. You also want to be able to automate routine tasks throughout your incident detection, troubleshooting, and resolution workflows. This enables you to focus resources more strategically and deliver higher-quality services more efficiently.

Proactive issue identification for reduced downtime and costs

The sophisticated machine learning and analytics applied by an AIOps platform enables you to predict potential issues before they affect clients’ operations, and to take proactive measures to ensure the stability and reliability of their systems. The analytics capabilities can also be used to optimize resource allocation to reduce operational costs.

Integration with existing tools and processes + scalability and flexibility for enhanced client satisfaction

You need to ensure that your AIOps as a service solution integrates with your existing tools and processes—such as ticketing systems, service desks, and monitoring tools—to leverage your clients’ investments and provide a seamless, unified operational environment. And the solution needs to be scalable and flexible to adapt to evolving needs and requirements, support new clients as you grow, and accommodate fluctuations in workloads. This enables you to deliver proactive and responsive support to your clients, leading to higher levels of satisfaction and loyalty.

Virtana: The AIOps as a service choice for MSPs

The Virtana Platform delivers AI-powered AIOps monitoring for full-stack visibility that delivers actionable insights into application health, migration, performance, multi-cloud cost management, and monitoring. We work with many MSPs and have built in the multitenant capabilities and billing features you need to support your business requirements. Request a trial

The post AIOps as a Service for MSPs: What to Look For appeared first on Virtana.

As an MSP, you need to achieve a delicate balance of service quality, responsiveness, and cost-effectiveness, which can be challenging. AIOps can help you optimize resource allocation to meet customer demands faster and more effectively. More specifically, AIOps can help you:

• Prevent SLA-killers, which cost money, directly through financial penalties and indirectly through lost customers.
• Increase operational efficiency, which can strengthen margins and profitability.
• Make better decisions, which can drive improvements in all areas of your business.

Here are six ways AIOps can deliver these benefits and be a game changer for MSPs.

Prevent SLA-killers

1. Proactive issue identification and resolution

Problems don’t usually strike out of the blue—there’s often a condition or set of conditions that, left unchecked, ultimately lead to an SLA-impacting issue. Even if—especially if—that all happens within a short time frame, you want to be able to spot those problems before they affect your clients. AIOps with machine learning algorithms and predictive analytics allow you to anticipate potential problems and address them preemptively so you maintain consistently high service availability and reliability.

2. Predictive maintenance

Hardware failures can create downtime that’s costly both for your clients and your reputation. Unfortunately, such outages can happen even with the most rigorous planned maintenance strategies in place. Using AIOps, you can analyze historical data to identify patterns that demonstrate performance degradation or indicate potential pending hardware failures. This enables you to proactively perform needed maintenance or replacement activities outside of regularly scheduled windows to prevent unplanned downtime.

Increase operational efficiency

3. Automated operations

The more you and your team can accomplish the same things with less time, effort, and resources required, the more efficient you can be. And accomplishing more with less, trite as that saying may be, opens up additional options for your business—such as taking on more clients or reallocating resources more strategically. AIOps enables you to automate routine and repetitive tasks and processes such as monitoring, alerting, and remediation, so you can streamline workflows and reduce manual efforts.

4. Enhanced security posture

No matter what kind of IT services you manage for your clients, security is paramount. AI-driven security analytics to monitor network traffic, analyze user behavior, and detect anomalous activities enables you to proactively identify and address potential breaches or compliance violations before they become full-blown incidents.

Make better business decisions

5. Optimized resource allocation

Running your business responsibly requires you to balance investments in resources with client needs. Overprovisioning your environment is safe from a client SLA perspective but a waste of money, while underprovisioning keeps costs low but puts your SLAs at risk. Finding that rightsized balance, however, can be easier said than done. AIOps enables you to analyze workload patterns, performance metrics, and utilization trends to select the optimal resources at the best cost to meet evolving business demands.

6. Data-driven insights and reporting

AIOps generates actionable insights and reports based on continual analysis of vast amounts of IT operations data, performance metrics, and SLAs that you can use throughout your business. For example, on the client side, you can use the outputs to demonstrate the value of the services you deliver and provide transparency. Operationally, you can use the insights to drive continuous service delivery and performance improvements.

Differentiate yourself in a crowded market

MSPs can leverage the power of AIOps to deliver more proactive, efficient, and reliable managed services that support business outcomes for their clients—and their own businesses. With so many game-changing use cases for AIOps, MSPs have the opportunity to build stronger client relationships, enhance their reputation in the industry, and stay ahead of the competition.

Virtana: The AIOps choice for MSPs

The Virtana Platform delivers AI-powered AIOps monitoring for full-stack visibility that delivers actionable insights into application health, migration, performance, multi-cloud cost management, and monitoring. We work with many MSPs and have built in the multitenant capabilities and billing features you need to support your business requirements. Request a trial

The post 6 Ways AIOps Is a Game Changer for Managed Service Providers appeared first on Virtana.

If you’ve been keeping up on what’s buzzing in the IT operations and software development space in the past few years, then you know that the concepts of AIOps and observability have been getting a lot of attention. And while they are related, they each address a different aspect of managing and monitoring IT systems.

What is observability?

Observability is the ability to infer the internal state of a system based on its external outputs or behaviors—in other words, what you can observe about the system without directly affecting it. In the context of software systems, observable items include metrics, events, logs, and traces. The purpose of observability is to provide insights into how different components interact and behave to help you understand, debug, and optimize complex, distributed systems.

What is AIOps?

 AIOps—short for artificial intelligence (AI) for IT operations—is the use of AI and machine learning (ML) techniques to enhance IT operations. It involves applying automation, analytics, and ML algorithms to analyze vast amounts of operational data to derive insights, make predictions, and take appropriate action. The purpose of AIOps is to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of IT operations by automating routine tasks, detecting anomalies and issues, identifying the root cause of problems, and providing actionable insights to optimize performance and reliability.

The relationship between observability and AIOps

Observability provides the inputs—visibility and data—about the environment or system. AIOps uses those inputs to automatically perform analysis to identify patterns, anomalies, and correlations. AIOps enhances observability by leveraging AI and ML, as well as automation, to handle vast amounts of data and deliver actionable insights to anticipate and understand issues for more effective troubleshooting, as well as uncover opportunities to improve the reliability, performance, and efficiency of the system.

So, which is better, AIOps or observability? That was a trick question. It’s not an either/or proposition. Observability and AIOps complement each other, and organizations benefit from implementing both in their IT operations and monitoring strategies.

Bring observability and AIOps together with Virtana

The Virtana Platform enables you get applied hybrid observability. What does that mean? It’s AI-powered full-stack visibility that delivers actionable insights into application health, migration, performance, multi-cloud cost management, and monitoring—so you can find and fix problems faster and make better data-driven business decisions. Request a trial

The post AIOps vs. Observability: Which Is Better and Why? appeared first on Virtana.

AIOps Automated RCA with Fishbone Diagrams for MSPs 

Our AIOps platform now boasts an automated Root Cause Analysis (RCA) feature, incorporating Fishbone Diagrams to streamline and accelerate the issue resolution process. Built with Managed Service Providers (MSP) in mind, this game-changing tool simplifies the daunting task of navigating alerts and pinpointing underlying issues, offering immediate insights and a clear visualization of cause-and-effect relationships. The introduction of this feature marks a significant leap towards more intuitive, efficient, and effective infrastructure management. 

Why It’s a Game-Changer

Enhanced Visualization: RCA, in the form of a fishbone diagram, offers a clear and structured visualization of the root causes, making it easier to understand complex relationships at a glance. 

Faster Analysis: By automatically presenting potential causes in an organized manner, our solution drastically reduces the time needed to diagnose and address issues. 

Click here to learn more  

Comprehensive Audit Logging 

Security and operational efficiency are paramount in today’s digital age. Recognizing this, we are introducing Comprehensive Audit Logging, a feature meticulously designed to enhance security and streamline operations. By providing a detailed record of every user action within the Virtana Platform, organizations can now effortlessly monitor, control, and secure their digital environments. 

Why It Matters

Enhanced Security: Every action is tracked, dramatically minimizing the risk of unauthorized access. 

Compliance Made Easy: Adhering to regulatory standards like HIPAA and GDPR is simplified with stringent tracking and auditing. 

Click here to learn more  

On-Premises Storage Array Capacity Management 

As hybrid infrastructures become the norm, managing costs and optimizing resources across both on-premises and cloud environments is increasingly challenging. Virtana’s extension of its Cloud Cost Management capabilities to on-premises infrastructure addresses this challenge head-on, providing a unified view that ensures cost and performance optimization. 

Our Solution: 

Enhanced Analysis: Automated analytics offer detailed visibility into storage utilization. 

Strategic Planning: Insights into storage capacity enable informed decision-making, ensuring optimal resource allocation. 

Click here to learn more

Custom Cloud Governance for GenAI Workloads 

In response to the growing adoption of serverless architectures and Generative AI (GenAI) applications, Virtana introduces custom cloud governance policies. These policies, tailored for platforms like AWS Sagemaker and Azure Cognitive Services, empower organizations to manage their GenAI resources effectively, ensuring efficiency, compliance, and cost-effectiveness. 

Benefits Include

Increased Transparency: Deeper insights into GenAI deployments. 

Risk Mitigation: Proactive identification and resolution of potential risks. 

Click here to learn more

Elevated Application Monitoring Performance 

Virtana’s suite of performance enhancements revolutionizes Application Monitoring, addressing key challenges and enhancing user experience. From improved visibility for headless services in Kubernetes environments to faster initial load times and optimized resource usage, these enhancements ensure that applications run smoothly and efficiently. 

Why It Matters

Enhanced Visibility: Dynamic mapping improves visibility and troubleshooting of traffic to headless services. 

Faster Performance: Optimizations reduce initial load times, enhancing responsiveness and efficiency. 

Click here to learn more  

Enhanced Alert Modules 

Virtana’s Enhanced Alert Modules streamline the monitoring process, offering greater control and efficiency. Features like Daily Alert Renewal for ongoing issues and instant alerts for Azure service state changes ensure that you stay ahead of potential problems, maintaining optimal performance with ease. 

Innovations for Efficiency

Intelligent Alert Management: Keeps long-standing issues in focus without cluttering the dashboard. 

Instant Azure Service State Alerts: Ensures immediate awareness and response to service disruptions. 

Click here to learn more  

Virtana is dedicated to empowering organizations with the tools and insights needed to navigate the complexities of modern IT environments. These latest features and capabilities are a testament to our commitment to innovation, security, and efficiency. Explore these new offerings and discover how Virtana can elevate your infrastructure management to new heights. For more information or to get started, reach out to your authorized Virtana representative today. 

The post Introducing Next-Level Innovations on Virtana’s AIOps Platform  appeared first on Virtana.

Big acquisitions like this always create questions for the customers of both organizations, but mostly for those of the acquired entity. When they involve complex technologies that are foundational to the management of your enterprise infrastructure, such as Aria Operations, the stakes are high. The good news is that in these cases, it can often take time for changes to unfold—whether they ultimately end up being good or bad for you—giving you the opportunity to consider the future, weigh your options, and make thoughtful decisions about how to move forward.

Considerations for VMware Aria Operations customers

In the benefits column, VMware/Broadcom is touting the advantages of a single-stack provider, and there is merit to that argument, though of course there are also advantages to a best-of-breed approach. Additionally, Broadcom’s strategy is to move in the hybrid/multi-cloud direction, which is good for customers.

However, announcements and signals coming from the company is giving industry experts pause—not about the single-stack argument in general but about the direction this specific consolidation seems to be heading toward. We won’t rehash those concerns here (you can read out them in articles from Network World, SDxCentral, and others); instead, we want to focus on what you can do about it within your organization.

When thinking about the future of Aria Operations within your enterprise, here some questions to ask yourself:

How Broadcom-heavy is your environment?

If you’re all-in on the Broadcom stack, Aria Operations may continue to be a good fit for you. But when a platform is absorbed into a particular vendor stack, it’s natural to assume that R&D investments will focus primarily within that stack. So, if you have a lot of non-Broadcom vendors—such as Cisco or Nutanix—you might find that new functionality and enhancements for those systems are delayed, at best, or even dry up completely. The risk is that you lose the full network/fabric visibility you need to manage your IT environment. If this is a concern, you want an independent (vendor-agnostic) solution that won’t “play favorites.”

Are you currently juggling multiple, vendor-specific tools?

The proliferation of vendor-specific monitoring tools is a natural, almost inevitable, result of IT infrastructure evolution over time. If your team is working with a host of different tools, this is a timely opportunity to consolidate. By replacing a suite of different tools with the right unified platform, you can centralize visibility, streamline workflows, and enhance efficiency.

Do you work with a trusted partner?

When it comes to VMware resellers and service providers, Broadcom is starting from scratch. If you have a trusted partner that you work with—and want to continue to work with—they may not be able to regain their status, leaving you no choice but to find a new partner or establish a direct relationship. This in itself may not be a primary driver in the decision whether to stay with or replace Aria Operations, but it’s an important question to factor in. Even if your partner isn’t left out in the cold, that partner could end up reducing their own investment in and focus on VMware.

How critical is comprehensive and timely customer support?

VMware’s recent layoff of over 2,000 employees raises questions about support resources and coverage, particularly in light of the partner shakeup. Again, this may not be the driving factor in your decision-making, but it should be an important consideration.

The Virtana Alternative for Infrastructure Monitoring

Virtana Infrastructure Monitoring is the only full-stack observability platform for your on-premises, cloud, or hybrid infrastructure that provides the breadth and depth of actionable insights into the performance and health of your global estate in real time and in an easy-to-consume format.

Virtana is independent and vendor-agnostic, with massive ingest of wire, machine, and ecosystem data combined with AIOps, ML, and data-driven analytics for more complete infrastructure visibility and insights.

We believe that support is just as important as technology, and we invest in delivering great customer service and in making it easy to do business with us. Part of that is allowing you to work with your preferred partner.

And innovation continues to be a strong focus and is a driving factor in our industry leadership.  

Contact us to learn more—or try Virtana for yourself.

In part 2, we’ll discuss options for VMware CloudHealth customers—stay tuned…

The post The Path Ahead for VMware Aria Operations Customers appeared first on Virtana.

Events

An event is simply an occurrence or a change in the operation of a system network, process, or workflow. Events can be planned or unplanned, and can happen automatically or as a result of human intervention. Think of an event as “raw data” about something that happened, without qualifying whether it is good, bad, or neutral.

Alerts

An alert is a qualified event that is deemed “bad” and requires attention, for example from DevOps, a system admin, or the SRE team. If an event is a flag, then an alert is a red flag. Because the typical enterprise experiences thousands of events each day, they should be deduplicated to eliminate redundancy, which cuts down on the noise, and enriched to provide informative details, which helps speed time to resolution. 

Incidents

Once it has been determined that an alert negatively affects the organization in some way and that it requires immediate attention—perhaps involving a cross-functional team of responders, constant stakeholder communication, and an after-the-fact post mortem—an incident is created. Not all alerts become incidents, particularly if they are less severe and can be worked by a single responder. Often, alert reviews and incident collaboration and problem-solving happen in an IT situation room (also sometimes called a war room).

The differences between events, alerts, and incidents in action

Here are two examples that illustrate the progression from event to alert to incident.

Storage example

• Event: The average read or write byte rate of a flash array exceeds the expected range.
• Alert: Because this could represent a potential problem that needs to be fixed, a system admin analyzes why the bucket is full and determines it was simply a transient occurrence and no remediation is required.
• Incident: No incident is created.

E-commerce example

• Event: A shopper gets an error on the checkout page generating an event. The internal system hits a low-memory threshold and generates another event.
• Alert: These two events are correlated and, because this is clearly a problem, a system admin or SRE team analyzes the related events and determines that the system is running out of memory. 
• Incident: Because business is impacted, potentially affecting revenue, this needs immediate attention, so an incident is created to identify and implement a resolution.

Manage events, alerts, and incidents with CloudMonitor

Virtana’s CloudMonitor, which powers the Virtana Platform, provides a single view of hybrid and multi-cloud infrastructure so you can get the most of your multi-vendor resources. Out-of-the-box and custom policies enable you to effectively navigate events, alerts, and incidents. Our ServiceNow integration allows for two-way communication between ServiceNow and CloudMonitor, which means you’ll see the latest incident information no matter which system it’s created or updated in. Contact us to learn more or to book a demo.

The post Events vs. Alerts vs. Incidents appeared first on Virtana.

The Dell and Virtana relationship runs deep, going way back to when both companies had different names. Rewinding back to 2006 when I was a project manager at EMC, if we needed to do deep troubleshooting analysis on block storage solutions (Clariion and Symmetrix/DMX at the time), we would call in a Finisar Probe. The Finisar Analyzer was a 2U appliance with four ports capable of analyzing 1GB and 2GB fibre channel traffic, and it had to sit inline with a customer’s production data path. It was clunky, but it was effective for solving the most complex support issues.

I just found this guy on eBay for $30:

Jumping ahead a bit to 2008, some of the Finisar IP was spun out to found Virtual Instruments. The solution paired with passive traffic access points, which meant the device no longer needed to sit directly in the data path, making it a bit more elegant. There was also a new UI: NetWisdom. EMC customers were now leveraging Virtual Instruments’ ProbeFC not only to reactively solve complex VNX and VMAX infrastructure challenges, but also to proactively monitor performance in complex SAN environments.

Then came the explosion of virtualization technology, which only increased the complexity of these environments. This was a likely driver for EMC to partner closely with and ultimately acquire VMware. It was also the catalyst for Virtual Instruments to start development on agentless, software-based data collection, with ProbeVM for vCenter being the inaugural integration for VirtualWisdom (now Virtana Infrastructure Performance Management).   

Fast-forward to the era of hyperconverged and cloud compute. In 2016, in a strong signal of ever-converging infrastructure, Dell acquired EMC. This was also around the time that Virtual Instruments merged with Load Dynamix, a workload generation company, and acquired Metricly, a cloud optimization startup, and became Virtana. This only deepened the relationship, as Dell/EMC was, and continues to be a customer of the Load Dynamix (now Storage Load Testing) product line to test hardware products and code releases for stability and scale before releasing to the public. This enabled connections at the product and engineering levels that have aided Virtana development efforts toward software-based integrations with the Dell/EMC storage portfolio. 

And here we are today. Dell is currently the largest (by a lot) reseller of Virtana products. We programmatically help their technical support organization, deploying a virtual edition of VirtualWisdom as part of Dell’s level 3 support cases. Dell and Virtana products are leveraged together, with many of Dell’s top accounts depending on both companies’ technologies to run their businesses.

Virtana and Dell are Better Together—and Here’s Why

As Dell customers seek cutting-edge technology to power their mission-critical applications, they also need an intelligent way to contextualize, monitor, and manage those workloads. Virtana’s high-fidelity and application-centric monitoring, cross domain-visibility, and workload intelligence complement the entire portfolio of industry-leading Dell solutions.

Cross-Domain Visibility

Virtana’s network, compute, hypervisor, and container integrations expand insight beyond the storage layer to provide a unified view of performance across tooling that’s traditionally siloed. This enables alignment of cross-functional teams through a common set of data points and capabilities. It provides a topology view that contextualizes the complete data path from application to storage volume.

Application-Centric Monitoring

With Virtana, you can guarantee continuous availability and performance against SLO/SLA for mission-critical applications. Virtana automatically maps infrastructure components to the applications that are consuming its resources, adding business-level context to high-fidelity data. This enables you to understand application and infrastructure interdependencies as the foundation for digital transformation initiatives.

Advanced Analytics

High-fidelity data collection and persistence facilitate highly accurate results and recommendations from our AI/ML-based analytics engine. With Virtana’s advanced analytics you can be alerted to observed deviations in workload behavior and leverage runbook-style investigations with remediation steps that can trigger autonomous action through bi-directional integration with Service Now. You can constantly ensure that your workloads are balanced and optimized, and consistently predict infrastructure bottlenecks and time to compute, network or storage resource exhaustion.

Workload Intelligence

Virtana delivers granular performance metrics for intelligent workload placement. Workload profiling enables data-driven digital transformation decisions, enabling you to “know before you go” for successful technology refresh in the private cloud and to determine which workloads are best fit for hybrid cloud solutions like APEX. You can see how applications will perform in their destination state, and what will they cost compared to on-premises deployment. And you can improve capacity forecasting with highly accurate predictions of future resource consumption across compute, network, and storage.

Rich Dashboards

VirtualWisdom’s comprehensive understanding of the data supply chain provides the basis for rich dashboards that deliver service assurance, visibility, and control to administrators, architects, and executives.

Ease of Deployment

It’s never been easier to deploy Virtana and Dell technologies together. VirtualWisdom has evolved into a modern, distributed microservices-based architecture that can be deployed on VMware. You can now even leverage the AppsON capability of PowerStore’s internal vCenter to deploy infrastructure-wide monitoring directly on the array. And, while you can still leverage our flagship performance probes for up to 32G FC traffic, we now have agentless, software-based integration with coverage across:

• All major Dell storage offerings: PowerMax, PowerStore, PowerScale, PowerFlex, VxRail, XtremIO, Unity, and VPLEX (coming soon)
• Connectrix switching: Brocade (Including SANnav) and Cisco (including Nexus and telemetry streaming from MDS),
• Compute: operating system (Linux, Windows, Solaris), hypervisor (ESX, Hyper-V, KVM), Kubernetes, Cisco UCS

Technology-Specific Integrations

Block and File Storage Solutions

PowerMax

PowerMax is a fitting solution to power the most mission-critical workloads that can’t afford any downtime or compliance issues. Paired with our software-based integration for PowerMax (formerly VMAX), VirtualWisdom can ensure continuous availability and performance at any scale. You can:

• Guarantee end-to-end performance and avoid upstream infrastructure bottlenecks while leveraging the fastest storage media and protocols (NVMe, flash, or storage class memory)
• Add business-level context by automatically grouping related infrastructure components and high-fidelity metrics into applications
• Ensure business continuity by monitoring replication functions like SRDF and SnapVX
• Use predictive capacity forecasting to track your infrastructure’s efficiency, and alert you to potential future resource exhaustion and bottlenecks
• Pair with industry-leading wire data collection and switch telemetry for deep protocol analysis of every transaction at massive scale

PowerStore

According to Dell.com, “the groundbreaking PowerStore family of all-flash data storage appliances transforms traditional and modern workloads with a data-centric, intelligent, and adaptable infrastructure that delivers revolutionary new capabilities such as AppsON.” With the VirtualWisdom integrations for PowerStore, you can fully realize the value of these industry-leading innovations. You can provide business-level context to applications that are hosted on external compute, as well as those leveraging the “AppsON” embedded vCenter. Paired with our Kubernetes integration, Virtana helps guarantee performance of PowerStore’s container storage module (CSM) for file- and container-based workloads at block storage speeds. Combined with our hypervisor integration for vCenter, Virtana provides unified observability for storage provisioned as vVols and other VMware functions like VAAI and VASA. You can leverage Virtana’s workload intelligence and analytics engine to validate and augment PowerStore autonomous operations, including automated data placement, resource balancing, dynamic node affinity, and assisted migration. And, you can pair with Virtana’s legacy Dell/EMC storage integrations, like Unity and XtremIO, to effectively plan, monitor, and benchmark application performance before, during, and after migration to PowerStore.

PowerScale: Any Data, Anywhere

PowerScale supports a wide range of data types and diverse workloads. Combined with our software-based integration for PowerScale (formerly Isilon), VirtualWisdom provides full-stack end-to-end visibility of PowerScale clusters, protocol flows, and the applications and servers consuming those resources. This enables you to:

• Assure the performance, availability, and efficiency of workloads on PowerScale clusters regardless of protocol (NAS [NFS, SMB], big data [HDFS], S3, HTTP, or FTP)
• Gain comprehensive visibility and unparalleled correlation for easy identification and root cause analysis, even for the most challenging issues
• Validate policy-based workload placement and resource tiering
• Ensure the storage efficiency of OneFS, and proactively identify upcoming resource constraints  

Unity / Unity XT

Unity XT storage arrays are designed for performance, optimized for efficiency, and built to handle multi-protocol and hybrid-cloud workloads. These hallmarks all align directly with Virtana’s key competencies:

• Provide application context for workloads running on Unity infrastructure
• Combine with OS, vCenter, and Kubernetes integrations for full compute to back-end storage visibility regardless of storage pool resource type (block LUNs, file systems, or vVols)
• Enable predictive capacity forecasting to project time to required expansion or refresh
• Enable data-driven decisions on best technology refresh and workload placement options based on granular insights from VirtualWisdom
• Guarantee seamless technology refresh before, during, and after migration, combined with our PowerStore or other storage integrations for the destination array

XtremIO

Enterprise customers have historically deployed some of their most resource-intensive applications on XtremIO storage. Combining XMS-level data from Gen1 and Gen2 XtremIO systems with the cross-domain visibility of the Virtana Platform helps ensure availability and performance of these applications in their current state, and also helps plan for their future. You can combine real-time and historical capacity usage, performance, and health information from the physical and logical components of the X-brick architecture with additional metrics from related interconnected infrastructure. You can gain visibility into which XtremIO resources an application is consuming, as well as gather latency metrics at the host, volume, and application levels, and understand how these relate to tracking against application SLO/SLAs. And you can enable seamless technology refresh by providing unique insights into the workloads that currently reside on XtremIO:

• Before: Data-driven decisions on workload placement pre-technology refresh
• During: Combine with PowerStore, PowerMax, or other storage integration to monitor during migration
• After: Benchmark performance vs. legacy systems

VPLEX

Dell/EMC VPLEX creates a flexible storage architecture that enables data portability and helps maximize asset utilization across active-active data centers. Today, VPLEX customers can leverage VirtualWisdom’s wire-data collection with a hardware monitoring device to definitively pinpoint error conditions and latency within a VPLEX environment. Virtana is currently developing a software-based integration for VPLEX (for release in 2H 2022) to include visibility beyond the abstraction layer of storage virtualization to automatically map application workloads from compute through network to back-end storage.

Software-Defined Storage Solutions

PowerFlex

PowerFlex delivers extreme flexibility, massive performance, and linear scalability as the foundation for organizations to modernize their data center and workload infrastructure. VirtualWisdom provides full-stack visibility across the applications and servers consuming and mounting PowerFlex resources, clusters, and storage pools, and the network flows between clients and resources. It enables you to:

• Gain real-time and historical performance visibility from the PowerFlex system, client (SDC), storage (SDS), volumes, storage pools, and protection domains
• Dynamically map and create logical equivalency between resources discovered by our vCenter integration (like ESX datastores) and PowerFlex entities (like volumes)
• Auto-detect excessive evictions and identify resource hogs and noisy neighbor problems
• Know when a rebuilding/rebalancing process impacts performance
• Pinpoint large file and storage pool filling issues

VxRail

VxRail delivers converged infrastructure, founded on VMware vSAN. You can combine the flexibility of this HCI solution with the performance assurance provided by VirtualWisdom’s vSAN and Kubernetes integrations to create an ideal platform for innovation across core, edge, and cloud: 

• Understand how applications stress converged and hyperconverged infrastructure
• Visualize converged infrastructure topologies from client to storage to device
• Get real-time and historical performance visibility from application to storage
• Continuously monitor CI and HCI environments for capacity issues across compute, network, and storage
• Identify and resolve high write cache evictions, rebuild/rebalance activities, noisy neighbors, and more
• Combine with VirtualWisdom integration or Kubernetes for enhanced visibility into container workloads running on HCI

VxBlock

VxBlock integrates powerful Dell storage and data protection into a turnkey converged system supporting all your high-value, mission-critical workloads—from the core data center to the cloud. VirtualWisdom is certified to deploy directly within VxBlock, and Virtana has software-based integrations for every layer of the VxBlock architecture to completely unite performance monitoring for this converged solution, regardless of the storage, networking or compute configuration options chosen:

• Storage integrations: PowerStore, Unity, PowerMax, XtremIO, and PowerScale
• Networking integrations: Cisco Nexus and Cisco MDS, including telemetry streaming
• Compute integrations: Cisco UCS, vCenter, OS, and Kubernetes layers

Switching Infrastructure (Connectrix)

The Dell Connectrix family of directors and switches moves your organization’s vital business information to where it’s needed quickly and securely, with the highest performance, the highest availability, and unsurpassed reliability. Combine it with Virtana’s software-based switch integrations, which gather data via SNMP/SMI-S or OS-API based sources, to:

• Dynamically map applications to storage resources such as fabrics, switches, vLANs, ISLs, switch ports, and storage array ports
• Gain context into application dependencies and behavior via NetFlow, sFlow, and JFlow data ingestion from PowerSwitch devices
• Automatically identify and resolve slow drain conditions and application workload changes using analytics-driven runbooks
• Trend, forecast, predict, and alert on capacity usage across network resources (ports, switches)
• Create topology-based views in application context with health and utilization metrics from Cisco MDS, Cisco Nexus, and Brocade
• Stream high-fidelity telemetry performance metrics from the Cisco MDS line of switches (Cisco Nexus and Brocade via Apache Kafka Stream from SANnav coming in 2H 2022)

PowerEdge and Host Monitoring

Combine the reliability and performance of the Dell PowerEdge line of servers with Virtana’s OS, hypervisor and container-level integrations for true visibility into the compute layer that powers mission-critical applications. You can:

• Automatically map applications and service tiers to hybrid compute infrastructure
• Trend, forecast, predict, and alert on capacity usage across all compute resources (CPU, memory, network, disk)
• Optimize placement of compute workloads across your virtualization estate to improve performance and eliminate migration churn
• Rightsize application components based on usage and business value, and apply changes within your change governance policies
• Leverage VirtualWisdom integration with UCS Manager to eliminate the challenges associated with abstraction layers introduced by Cisco Unified Compute
• Visualize Kubernetes workloads and their relationships to underlying infrastructure (VMs, physical hosts, networking, and storage)

An Empowering Combination

Virtana delivers unprecedented visibility and actionable insights into the performance, health, and utilization of hybrid IT infrastructure, while Dell/EMC’s storage solutions deliver enterprise-class performance and scale. Together, Virtana and Dell empower you to:

1. Cost-effectively ensure the performance and availability of mission-critical applications
2. Proactively prevent infrastructure-related slowdowns and outages
3. Enable business agility and digital transformation across private, public, and hybrid clouds

Contact us if you’d like to learn more.

The post Aligning Dell’s Industry-Leading Storage and Data Infrastructure Portfolio With a Comprehensive Monitoring and Optimization Platform appeared first on Virtana.

Corporate infrastructures get more complex as they expand, incorporate more applications, become more highly distributed, become more siloed, increasingly hybrid, and handle more data. This is a widely acknowledged phenomenon, even if there’s not yet a “Moore’s Law” of infrastructure complexity.

And complexity invites issues. As anomalies on the infrastructure increase, they may be frequent and occur periodically, or happen sporadically, or just once – leaving DevOps and infrastructure personnel to worry that, someday and with no warning, they could occur again and significantly impact the business.

Even worse, an anomaly may be remedied momentarily but ends up repeating itself over sporadic intervals – as it can when a bug is discovered and patched, but not isolated to its source and resolved. When that happens, resolution times can extend to days or weeks, or the issue can be patched repeatedly while the root cause remains a mystery.

Anomalies can create performance issues or bring the infrastructure to a near halt. According to a recent survey by Forbes, an unplanned data center outage cost more than $7,900 per minute, and, with average incidents lasting around 86 minutes, the average cost per incident has reached $690,200.

When an issue arises, an IT administrator typically conducts first-level triage to pinpoint where the issue lies. With tangible evidence of bottlenecks in their domains, other administrators can dig deeper into the performance of their own silos. Unfortunately, many issues are caused be interactions of various devices that have impact across silos. But what are the chances that manual, silo-specific troubleshooting can identify and pinpoint the root cause of the issue? As problematical as that would be, consider this: An issue often has no single root cause, but may result from a perfect storm of various issues.

The likelihood of sleuthing out the problem under those circumstances swiftly descends towards zero.

AIOps Changes the Equation

Now things are changing, however. Businesses are turning to artificial intelligence (AI) for IT operations (AIOps) to prevent or resolve high-severity outages and other IT Ops problems more quickly on complex, highly decentralized, data-driven infrastructures. AIOps uses big data analytics, machine learning (ML) and other AI technologies to automate the identification and resolution of infrastructure issues. AIOps came about because the sheer scale and complexity of IT systems has reached a point that’s beyond human comprehension, and beyond the ability of humans to react, respond, troubleshoot, and remediate in a timely fashion. 

The AI in AIOps platform automatically learns the normal state of each critical business service and the normal underlying behavior of the supporting hardware and software services, and automatically flags anomalies.

Keep in mind that AIOps is rightly an approach, and not a single technology or point solution. As such, it takes an ecosystem and a consistent approach across that ecosystem to deliver on the promise of AIOps. Practitioners need to be looking at leveraging AIOps from both an application perspective, an IT operations perspective and an IT service management perspective.

In a sense, every fault or issue on the infrastructure is anomalous. If availability is a problem, or performance is lagging, it’s because something is wrong on the infrastructure. And that’s why the ideal AIOps technology works both proactively, monitoring infrastructure to spot potential issues before they become real issues; and reactively, responding to an existing issue or issues. 

AIOps is the driving force behind Virtana’s VirtualWisdom, the industry’s leading hybrid IT infrastructure management and AIOps platform for mission-critical workloads. You can now try a free 30-day trial version of both VirtualWisdom and our latest cloud cost optimization and monitoring platform, CloudWisdom. Request your free trials today, and be sure to stay up on the latest and greatest in hybrid AIOps by following us on Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook.

The post How AIOps Resolves Sporadic Anomalies appeared first on Virtana.