New Infrastructure Monitoring Innovations that Simplify Hybrid Infrastructure Performance Management

Virtana’s IPM, renowned for its robust data collection and insights into performance metrics, utilization, and health data, now offers an interconnected browsing and search experience for IPM entity data. This transformative UI enhancement enables users to effortlessly navigate through the device hierarchy, unveiling relationships between objects. The result? A more intuitive and accelerated issue resolution process, empowering IT teams to pinpoint and address problems swiftly. 

Furthermore, Virtana has simplified product workflows by introducing clickable entities, file-based alarm thresholds, and device summary pages. These enhancements pave the way for seamless navigation within Virtana IPM: 

• Every reference to an entity within the UI is now a clickable link, leading users to the entity’s comprehensive detail page. 
• Device categories such as arrays, switches, and hosts boast dedicated summary pages, facilitating efficient sorting, filtering, and viewing of items. 

• Real-time metric values, such as current CPU utilization, can be instantly graphed over time with a single click, delivering actionable insights at your fingertips. 

By seamlessly integrating these enhancements, Virtana IPM propels organizations towards faster MTTR, better-informed decision-making, and an overall elevated performance monitoring experience. 

To learn more, visit our Virtana Community IPM page

Effortlessly Forecast Cloud Cost and Accurately Attribute Cloud Spend with New FinOps Innovations

In the realm of FinOps, Virtana has harnessed the power of data-driven forecasting to tackle one of the industry’s most pressing challenges: accurate spend prediction. The new capabilities introduced in Virtana CCM provide FinOps practitioners with a robust toolkit for reliable forecasting and budgeting: 

Forecasts on the Overview Dashboard: Addressing the challenge of variable cloud spend, Virtana CCM offers precise, rolling 12-month cloud spend forecasts. With a clear overview of anticipated expenditures, organizations can proactively manage budgets, allocate resources effectively, and maintain financial stability. 

Multicloud Resource Groups: By allowing the creation of up to 10 resource groups, Virtana simplifies resource alignment, making it effortless to correlate metrics with key performance indicators. 

Surface Untagged Resources: CCM tackles the tagging challenge head-on by introducing a dedicated category for untagged resources within each Resource Group. This enables users to implement and enforce a true FinOps practice, effortlessly track tagging progress, identify unassociated resources, and conduct necessary tagging cleanups.

Overview Dashboard Filtering and Sharing: CCM now comes with enhanced visibility and advanced filtering options within the Overview Bill Analysis reports. Organizations can now make better data-driven decisions by slicing their cloud usage based on their specific requirements. Additionally, advanced email scheduling and report download options from the Overview Dashboard facilitate seamless knowledge sharing across teams, ensuring everyone gets the information they need when they need it. 

Easier Access to Savings Policies: Virtana is making it even easier to access the policies page by placing it directly on the Cost Savings Opportunities page. This advancement makes managing and adjusting savings policies faster and easier, enabling organizations to capitalize on potential cost-saving opportunities more efficiently. 

To learn more, visit our Virtana Community CCM page

If you are looking for a way to improve the performance, efficiency, and cost-effectiveness of your infrastructure and cloud environment, then you won’t be disappointed by Virtana’s latest features. To learn more about these and other capabilities, please visit our website or contact us today. 

The post Maximizing Efficiency and Savings: Explore Virtana’s Latest Innovations to IPM and Cloud Cost Management appeared first on Virtana.

A is for Assessing your infrastructure

You need to understand all the elements that comprise your infrastructure—the hardware, software, networks, and applications—and how they work interdependently and can affect performance and availability.

B is for Building a performance management strategy

Your business has a strategy, so why would you leave your infrastructure—which is a critical driver for that strategy—rudderless? You need to set performance targets, establish performance baselines, identify KPIs to measure and monitor, and define the roles and responsibilities of different stakeholders, including IT staff, business users, and external vendors.

C is for Continuous monitoring and improvement

Once you’ve mapped out how your infrastructure should perform, you need to ensure that it’s meeting those expectations on an ongoing basis. This requires tools and techniques to monitor performance in real time, identify issues, and troubleshoot problems. And because change is constant, you need to continuously optimize your infrastructure to improve performance, control costs, and ensure it meets evolving business needs.

D is for Data-driven decision-making

Your infrastructure is too critical to manage based on guesswork and too complex to rely on expertise alone. Data analytics and machine-learning tools are essential for identifying trends, patterns, and anomalies in performance data so you can make better decisions about infrastructure optimization, capacity planning, and resource allocation.

E is for Ensuring security and compliance

If you are responsible for managing the performance of your infrastructure, protecting it from cyber threats and complying with industry standards and regulations are part of the package. You’ll need to implement security protocols, conduct regular security and compliance audits, and stay up to date with the latest security vulnerabilities and regulatory requirements.

F is for Fostering collaboration and communication

There are a lot of stakeholders involved in any enterprise infrastructure: IT staff, executive leadership, business owners, external vendors, the list goes on and on. Dashboards and reports must provide views into your infrastructure that reflect the specific information each stakeholder needs. Additionally, it’s important to establish clear communication channels and protocols to ensure stakeholders are informed about performance issues and progress toward performance targets.

G is for Gathering performance data

You can’t manage the performance of your infrastructure if you don’t have information about the performance of your infrastructure. You need to collect sufficient data from various sources, including servers, virtual machines, storage, networks, applications, operating systems, and other infrastructure components. Both breadth and depth of data are critical to monitor your hybrid cloud infrastructure’s performance, utilization, capacity, and health.

H is for Harnessing the power of automation

Automation is a powerful tool in infrastructure performance management. By automating routine tasks, such as system checks and updates, you can save time and reduce the risk of human error. Automation can also help you identify and remediate performance issues quickly, improving the overall efficiency of your IT operations.

I is for Implementing best practices

Your hybrid cloud infrastructure is too complex and too important to build performance management expertise as you go. Implementing industry-standard guidelines and IT operations best practices for performance monitoring, incident management, and change management help ensure your hybrid cloud infrastructure is optimized for performance and reliability.

J is for Justifying performance investments

Maintaining an infrastructure that meets business requirements and performs to expectations requires resources and budget—and it can be expensive. You need to be able to make a business case that outlines the benefits of proposed investments, and perhaps even the likely consequences of not investing. Successful justification requires you to provide credible data and analysis based on your current infrastructure and the anticipated future state.

K is for Keeping pace with emerging technologies

Right now, artificial intelligence and machine learning are quickly emerging as highly effective tools to transform IPM capabilities. Companies adopting AIOps and leveraging AI/ML for performance management, troubleshooting, capacity planning, and other critical functions can fully optimize their infrastructures and gain a competitive advantage. And who knows what may be on the horizon? Staying current with the latest trends and best practices and embracing emerging technologies will keep you at the forefront.

L is for Leveraging vendor partnerships

Your infrastructure uses a lot of hardware, software, networking, storage, and other components, which means you have a lot of vendors—and potential access to their domain expertise. Working closely with your vendors can provide valuable insights into the operation and performance of individual products.

M is for Monitoring performance metrics

You need to track KPIs such as CPU usage, memory usage, network bandwidth, and other critical factors to understand how your infrastructure is performing and identify potential issues, ideally before they have a discernable impact. With the right monitoring tools, you can automate this process and configure alerts when KPIs fall outside of acceptable ranges.

N is for Navigating hybrid/multi-cloud environments

Most enterprise infrastructures consist of on-premises, private cloud, and multiple public cloud environments. You need to understand how to optimize performance within each environment and how its unique characteristics affect the overall performance of your infrastructure. This includes selecting the right environment for each application or workload, understanding the performance metrics, and using the best tools and services to monitor and manage performance.

O is for Optimizing application performance

Application optimization—which includes identifying and remediating performance bottlenecks, optimizing code and configurations, and leveraging performance testing and tuning tools—offers two benefits. You can optimize to boost performance, increasing user satisfaction and business outcomes. You can also optimize to maintain existing performance levels at a lower cost. And sometimes, you can even accomplish both at the same time.

P is for Proactively managing incidents

The worst way to find out about a problem within your infrastructure is to get a call from a user. It’s far better to identify potential issues before they become significant problems. By monitoring performance in real time and flagging trends that could lead to slowdowns and outages, you can reduce downtime and the associated costs and improve infrastructure performance and reliability.

Q is for Querying dependencies

Examining the relationships and interdependencies between the various components and systems in your hybrid cloud infrastructure provides insights into how changes or issues in one can affect the performance of others. This helps identify potential risks or bottlenecks and facilitates proactive measures to mitigate any adverse effects on overall performance.

R is for Reducing mean time to resolution (MTTR)

Reducing MTTR—the time it takes to resolve incidents and return the infrastructure to normal operation—is critical for minimizing downtime and its impact on users and the business. This requires you to establish response procedures, use tools to understand likely impacts and track root cause, and leverage AI to recommend fixes.

S is for Scaling infrastructure for growth

As your business grows, your infrastructure needs to handle increased demand and workloads without affecting performance and reliability. Supporting this growth requires insights about past performance trends, predictive analytics to anticipate future demand, and recommendations for scalable options to meet those needs.

T is for Tuning workloads

A key component of infrastructure optimization is workload tuning. This involves adjusting resource allocation and settings—CPU or memory allocations, storage configurations, network parameters, etc.—to match the specific requirements of each workload for improved performance and efficiency.

U is for Un-silo-ing the troubleshooting process

Because your infrastructure includes so many components—network, compute, storage, etc., not to mention all of the individual hardware and software components—many different teams and vendors are involved. When something goes wrong, this can result in time-wasting finger-pointing. With data-driven troubleshooting and AI-based resolution recommendations, you can avoid turf wars and focus everyone involved on getting the infrastructure back to normal as quickly as possible.

V is for Validating configurations

You want to ensure that the settings and parameters of various components and systems are configured for optimal performance. Ongoing monitoring and alerting will let you know if performance drifts out of band. And with scenario planning and what-if analysis, you can make decisions about changes that will minimize future risks and keep systems operating at peak efficiency.

W is for Workload balancing

Keeping your infrastructure running at optimal resource utilization and performance levels requires you to distribute workloads evenly across systems to prevent any single component from becoming overloaded or overwhelmed. Workload balancing strategies, which may include dynamic workload allocation, load balancing algorithms, and intelligent resource management techniques, can help you avoid bottlenecks, maximize system capacity, and enhance overall efficiency.

X is for eXploiting AI-powered recommendations

With recommendation engines powered by artificial intelligence, you benefit not just from your own infrastructure data but from analytics that incorporate experience gained from working with other enterprises. Recommendations can provide valuable suggestions for many areas of infrastructure management, including resource allocation, workload balancing, predictive maintenance, infrastructure scaling, problem identification and resolution, and more.

Y is for Yielding comprehensive global visibility

When you break down the many data silos—multi-vendor computing, networking, storage, cloud, VMs, containers, databases, and more—you can open up visibility throughout your entire infrastructure. This is critical for unified observability across all of your private and public cloud environments.

Z is for Zooming in on data

Breadth of infrastructure data is critical—but so is depth. Systems that lack granularity, for example, because they use sampling or averages, can deliver “insights” that are misleading and can steer you to make suboptimal decisions that ultimately result in inefficiencies.

Keeping your hybrid cloud infrastructure running at peak performance

Your hybrid cloud infrastructure must meet the business’s functionality, performance and availability, security and compliance, and cost requirements. Managing all of this complexity requires sophisticated technology and deep expertise. Virtana can help. Virtana Platform is a highly modular, scalable multi-cloud insights platform that offers Infrastructure Performance Management, Capacity Planning, Cloud Cost Management, and Workload Placement to manage your entire hybrid cloud infrastructure more effectively. Try Virtana Platform for free

The post Infrastructure is Fundamental: Learn Your Hybrid Cloud ABCs appeared first on Virtana.

Your hybrid cloud infrastructure must be able to keep up with all of these changing conditions. It’s not merely a technology requirement; it’s an existential business imperative. But to do this effectively, you need to have two things:

• Deep visibility across your hybrid/multi-cloud environment (i.e., you understand what’s happening and the impact across all of your interdependent resources)
• Control (you can confidently make a change when needed)

But what does this mean from an operational perspective?

Here are the essential capabilities to ensure your infrastructure is always servicing the needs of the business, even as those needs change.

Keep workloads optimized based on the organization’s cost, performance, and risk requirements.

Rightsizing workloads is critical for ensuring the performance you need at the lowest possible cost. But there are three important things to keep in mind. First, the workloads themselves are evolving. Even if the shifts are incremental, that drift could mean that current configurations have become suboptimal over time. Second, cloud providers are constantly evolving their offerings. Even if workloads haven’t become misaligned within their current configurations, a new option could be even better on the performance/cost scale. And third, your risk tolerance could change. The amount of latency, for example, you’re willing to live with will depend on the particular workload, influencing how much you’re willing to invest to prevent it. If that risk equation changes based on evolving requirements and priorities, your corresponding rightsizing options will change.

How to keep up:

• Get automatic rightsizing recommendations to keep instances optimized.
• Perform what-if analysis that incorporates your organization’s specific risk tolerance levels to tune sizing.
• Quickly adjust to changes in relevant cloud provider offerings to optimize cost structures.

Monitor and track the service levels required to maximize business value.

Your business applications must meet certain performance levels, whether that’s through explicit SLAs or implicit expectations. Any number of factors in the compute, storage, and network layers of an enterprise infrastructure could cause a slowdown or even a complete outage. Most organizations have tools to manage individual components of their infrastructure architecture, but that only gives them a view of those elements in isolation, or at best, within their immediate context. Because of the complex web of interdependencies within this ecosystem, however, it can be difficult to anticipate how changes will ripple through the system and might affect performance and availability.

How to keep up:

• Consolidate data from all the individual components to create a complete view of your infrastructure.
• Conduct proactive analysis to identify and alert when peak efficiency conditions are at risk.
• Get automated resolution recommendations to mitigate issues before they impact SLAs.

Improve the accuracy of predictive capacity forecasting.

You need sufficient capacity to support business operations, and that calculus is constantly shifting. Core infrastructure changes needed to enable digital transformation will require certain capacity levels. The subsequent growth that successful transformation drives will further increase capacity requirements. Forecasting all of these needs requires a careful balance. Not enough capacity puts performance and availability at risk, but capacity is expensive, so overinvesting unnecessarily locks up budget. Furthermore, you need to be able to make these predictions on your organization’s budget cycle timelines, which may not line up with technical lifecycles.

How to keep up:

• Understand the complete capacity landscape of your infrastructure, including where you have under- or over-allocated capacity, and your growth rate.
• Proactively monitor usage and usage rates to identify when pre-determined thresholds are being reached faster than anticipated.
• Get visibility into the overall health of your infrastructure to make informed update decisions and avoid unnecessary and expensive blanket refreshes.

Adjust, or even move, workloads to meet changing conditions.

Your infrastructure is constantly evolving. It could be significant changes, such as a data center expansion, or more incremental moves, like refreshing hardware or moving workloads to different clusters. As this happens, the ways that applications utilize back-end resources—such as hardware, virtual machines, etc.—also change. You could end up with imbalances that impact performance, increase costs, or both.

How to keep up:

• Optimize how your applications utilize back-end resources to increase the efficiency of capex resources while maintaining SLAs.
• Use sophisticated analytics to detect hotspots that could lead to performance and availability issues.
• Identify unused/underutilized resources and how they can be reallocated to reduce costs.

Improve any-to-any migration planning.

Workloads that run in one particular environment—on-premises, private cloud, public cloud—may need to be migrated to a different one based on evolving business requirements. But not all workloads are fit for all environments, and this can sometimes be difficult to determine in advance. Furthermore, the target environment may have a wide range of configuration options that you have to evaluate to find the optimal selection for your specific needs. And finally, you need to understand how workloads use shared services to ensure that the migration process doesn’t break interdependencies.

How to keep up:

• Test what-if scenarios to understand where and when—and even if—to move your workloads.
• Understand best-fit public or private cloud providers and the most efficient configurations based on specific risk, performance, and consumption parameters.
• Identify application dependencies, as well as shared services, and create prioritized “move groups” for migration efficiency.

There’s always something new right around the corner—Virtana helps you keep up.

Gain visibility into and control over your entire IT infrastructure across on-premises, private cloud, and public cloud environments with Virtana Platform. The highly modular, scalable multi-cloud insights platform offers Infrastructure Performance Management, Capacity Planning, Cloud Cost Management, and Workload Placement to manage your performance, cost, and capacity and take action based on full-spectrum insights. Try Virtana Platform for free.

The post Digital Business Transformation Never Ends—Can Your Infrastructure Keep Up? appeared first on Virtana.

Capacity planning is hard

The vast majority of respondents—87%—are getting capacity planning wrong. While 21% tend to underprovision and 28% err on the side of overprovisioning, a larger number (38%) are both over- and underprovisioning on a regular basis.

One critical occasion for capacity planning is when you’re moving workloads from one environment to another. The capacity calculus changes depending on the particular environment, and most organizations, 98% of them, are doing a lot of migrations. Almost two-thirds (62%) are planning to migrate workloads from the public cloud to private cloud/on premises, and nearly the same number (59%) will be migrating new workloads to the public cloud. Given organizations’ track record, chances are high that capacity for these migrations will miss the mark. 

Data for informed capacity planning is lacking

We asked about top hybrid/multi-cloud infrastructure management challenges, four of which are critical for effective capacity planning, and all showed up in the top five. Almost half of the respondents (47%) struggle with getting a global view of utilization and spend across their entire infrastructure. Without that global view, you’re likely making siloed capacity decisions that may not allow you to be fully rightsized and cost-optimized. And in fact, 40% said that they are hard-pressed to say optimized and rightsized on an ongoing basis. Around one-third of respondents (35%) have difficulty mapping utilization and spending back to business entities, which can make it hard to factor business prioritization and risk into capacity decisions. And one-third (33%) say making appropriate workload placement decisions is challenging.

When asked to identify their top challenge from the list, respondents put getting a global view of utilization in second place (20%) and staying optimized/rightsized on an ongoing basis in third (17%).

Make capacity planning data-driven—and ultimately more accurate—with Virtana Capacity Planning

With Virtana Capacity Planning, part of the Virtana Platform, you can forecast infrastructure demands across your global hybrid infrastructure. Scenario-based capacity projections allow you to anticipate business needs, and AI-powered cloud budget forecasting helps you identify trends and forecast future growth. Virtana Capacity Planning enables you to:

• Forecast future demand based on usage patterns and risk exposure
• Anticipate business requirements based on planned growth or changes
• Identify potential availability issues before they occur

Get the survey report: The State of Multi-Cloud Management

The post Cloud Capacity Planning Is a Hit-or-Miss Exercise That Mostly Misses appeared first on Virtana.

Enterprises are concerned about cloud costs

Controlling cloud spend is an issue that enterprises are concerned about. We asked about top challenges in managing hybrid/multi-cloud infrastructures, four of which are cost-related, including the top two issues cited. In fact, “keeping rising costs under control” was the number-two challenge, cited by 44% of respondents.

Every organization knows at a high level what it spends on the cloud—the monthly bills give you that top-line information as well as some additional breakdowns. But for most enterprises, this is insufficient. In fact, 73% of survey respondents said it’s important or very important to understand their cloud costs at a detailed level. And while 57% say they know exactly who is responsible for all of their cloud charges, that’s a significantly smaller group, indicating that enterprises don’t have all the cloud cost details they need to control their spend.

Organizations struggle to answer key cloud cost questions

Two-thirds of organizations track their cloud costs on a weekly or monthly basis. They’re fairly evenly split, with 33% reviewing those costs weekly while 34% do so monthly.

You might think organizations that need to understand their cloud costs in greater detail would track those costs more frequently, but this is not the case. In fact, respondents who said it’s not important to understand cloud costs at a detailed level are far more likely to track those costs daily—29% vs. 16%.

It’s also essential to understand who within the organization is tracking these costs. IT is carrying the cloud cost-tracking burden. While 89% of respondent organizations involve IT in the process, only 41% include finance/procurement. Given the size and variable nature of cloud spend, this is surprising.

The final question—in addition to who and when—is how organizations track their cloud costs. Most—76%—are using their monthly cloud bills. This is a good start, but as noted above, it is insufficient, especially if you want to understand your cloud costs in detail. The next most prevalent method, used by 57% of respondents, is to upload cost data spreadsheets to BI tools. This will undoubtedly give them the ability to analyze cloud cost data in various ways, but it can be a time-consuming effort.

There’s also the question of how to track costs across multiple CSPs. Multi-cloud is a reality for 83% of respondents, so this is a near-universal concern, but most organizations don’t have an efficient response. Almost one-third (29%) are consolidating the data manually, which may give them a full multi-cloud view into their costs, but it requires time and effort to get there. And more than half (56%) are simply tracking costs from each CSP separately, which makes it difficult to get a holistic view of cloud costs across the enterprise.

Given the variable nature of cloud costs, another important how question is: How do you find out about cost-impacting changes in utilization? The good news is that two-thirds of respondents (64%) get real-time alerts based on specified thresholds, which means they can act fast to prevent the accumulation of hefty charges.

While many of these approaches are highly reactive, that’s not necessarily a problem if they are simply one tool in a well-stocked cloud cost management toolbox. However, about one-third of respondents cited a single method employed to find utilization changes that affect cloud spend. And of this group, only 39% are using real-time alerts. This means that 61% of organizations in this cohort rely exclusively on just one after-the-fact method to learn about cost-impacting changes—and at that point, they may have racked up high costs that could have been avoided or at least contained.

Financial accountability structures are underdeveloped

FinOps is the practice of bringing financial accountability to the variable spend model of the cloud to enable all teams to make informed and appropriate business trade-offs between speed, cost, and quality. Less than one-quarter of respondents (24%) have a mature, effective FinOps practice in place, leaving 76% with incomplete, or even nonexistent, processes and controls to hold stakeholders throughout the organization accountable for cloud costs.

Does insufficient cost tracking hinder accountability? Or does a lack of accountability reduce the pressure to track costs in detail? The answer to this chicken-or-egg question almost doesn’t matter. The truth is, enterprises that want to control their cloud spend need both cloud cost tracking and cloud spend accountability.

Virtana enables detailed cloud cost tracking and accountability

Virtana Cloud Cost Management, part of the Virtana Platform, helps you demystify your cloud costs, enabling you to confidently manage your cloud expense to avoid end-of-month surprises. Real-time data collection and analytics allow you to analyze data easily across your hybrid cloud environments, even as conditions and options change. With deep insight into your spend across cloud providers and the ability to quickly customize reports to meet different functions’ and business units’ needs, you can keep all your stakeholders informed and accountable. Try Virtana Cloud Cost Management for yourself

Get the survey report: The State of Multi-Cloud Management

Control your cloud spend: Try Virtana Cloud Cost Management for free

The post Is Your Cloud Spend Problem a Cloud Cost Tracking and Accountability Problem? appeared first on Virtana.

It’s a hybrid multi-cloud world

Very few organizations aren’t using public and private clouds at all (0.3% and 2% respectively). The vast majority have a solid mix of public and private clouds.

Furthermore, the public cloud isn’t a single environment—83% of respondents use more than one CSP, and 44% use more than three CSPs.

Complexity doesn’t come just from managing multiple CSPs; 77% of organizations manage more than four or more instances, and 22% manage 11 or more.

It’s not surprising that the more CSPs a company uses, the more instances it manages. But even 45% of those using just one CSP have four or more instances. 

The challenges of more

Intuitively, more CSPs and more instances create management challenges. We asked respondents what their number-one challenge is related to managing their hybrid/multi-cloud infrastructure among the following:

• Keeping rising costs under control
• Finding and eliminating wasted spend
• Staying optimized/rightsized on an ongoing basis
• Getting a global view of utilization and spend across the entire infrastructure (on premises, private cloud, all public clouds)
• Mapping utilization and spend back to business entities (LoBs, projects, locations, etc.)
• Making appropriate workload placement decisions
• Ensuring performance and availability
• Understanding the impact of changes on cost and performance
• Lack of skills/expertise
• Understanding/minimizing the carbon footprint of IT operations

The top challenge for respondents using five or more CSPs, cited by 31% of that cohort, was keeping rising costs under control, compared to 17–26% of respondents with fewer CSPs to manage. The number-two challenge, at 25%, was finding and eliminating wasted spend, which was a far bigger problem than for organizations managing fewer CSPs—just 8–14%. This makes sense—with more CSPs in play, there are more places for unnecessary costs to “hide.”

There’s less of a stark difference when we look at the top challenges based on the total number of instances being managed, but there is still a discernable trend. One-fifth (21%) of businesses with more than 10 instances reported that getting a global view of utilization ad spend across the entire hybrid/multi-cloud infrastructure is their top challenge, roughly the same number as the rest of the respondent groups (18–22%). There’s more of a difference in the number-two trend: staying optimized/rightsized on an ongoing basis. This is a problem for 20% of organizations with more than 10 instances but for only 13% of those using less than three. Rightsizing is challenging enough, but with many instances—each likely running different kinds of workloads with their own utilization and risk profiles and performance requirements—it can be impossible to keep up.

You don’t need to simplify your environment—just its management

Less isn’t always more, and the goal here isn’t necessarily to reduce the number of CSPs and instances you’re using. CSPs are not one-size-fits-all, so going multi-cloud to take advantage of specific capabilities is often the appropriate strategy. And your business needs the flexibility to add instances to support evolving requirements. But you can streamline the management of it all. Virtana Cloud Cost Management, part of the Virtana Platform, helps you do just that. With Virtana Cloud Cost Management, you can:

• Find and eliminate wasted spend, such as unused compute instances, storage blocks no longer attached to a compute instance or attached to a stopped instance, unattached load balancers, and idle elastic IP addresses.
• Automatically optimize instances with rightsizing recommendations, and tune sizing based on your organization’s risk tolerance with what-if analysis that includes CPU, memory, I/O, and ingress and egress charges.
• Gain deep insight into your cloud bills across cloud providers, easily slicing and dicing the data to match specific business needs.

All of this—and more—allows you to avoid end-of-the-month billing surprises and stay on budget, even as conditions and options change. Try Virtana Cloud Cost Management for yourself

Get the survey report: The State of Multi-Cloud Management

Optimize storage across your hybrid infrastructure: Try Virtana Cloud Cost Management for free

The post The Complex Reality of Multi-Cloud Environments appeared first on Virtana.

In this blog, let’s explore how a top-notch IPM system can change the way you handle your IT infrastructure and show you how a cutting-edge IPM platform can address these common issues.

1. See Everything in One Place: The Benefit of a United Approach

A fragmented view of IT infrastructure can cause delays and make it harder to spot issues. IPM solutions solve this problem by providing a single dashboard that brings together data from different sources, giving you a complete picture of your infrastructure’s performance.

Imagine an IPM tool that shows everything you need to know in one place, making it easy to spot and fix problems throughout your infrastructure. Virtana’s IPM platform does exactly that. This straightforward approach speeds up response times and keeps your systems running smoothly, enabling you to resolve IT infrastructure issues 5X faster and reducing problem-resolution time by 70%.

2. Stay Ahead of the Game: The Power of Predictive Analytics

IT professionals often face costly downtime and have to wait for problems to appear before they can fix them. But what if an IPM solution with predictive analytics could help you spot potential issues before they get out of hand?

That’s where a platform like Virtana comes in. Its advanced analytics identify trends and patterns, allowing you to address concerns proactively and keep your infrastructure running at peak performance.

3. Smarter Problem-Solving: AI to the Rescue

As IT infrastructures get more complex, solving problems quickly and effectively can feel like finding your way through a maze. That’s where AI assistance comes in, providing a faster, more efficient way to tackle challenges.

Imagine an IPM platform that uses artificial intelligence to make sense of the massive amounts of data your infrastructure generates. By spotting patterns and connections that might be missed by manual analysis, AI-driven solutions save time and minimize the impact on your operations.

4. Boost Your IT Team: Working Together for Better Results

Advanced IPM solutions not only make life easier for IT professionals but also encourage teams to work more efficiently and cooperatively. With a clear view of your infrastructure, team members can easily share information and insights, improving communication and decision-making.

Virtana’s IPM platform is built with collaboration in mind, promoting a proactive and efficient work environment. Its predictive analysis and AI assistance free up IT professionals to focus on strategic tasks and initiatives, rather than constantly putting out fires. To demonstrate its effectiveness, one Virtana IPM client went from 40M users to 295M users with only 3X infrastructure investment.

Ready to Dive In? Discover Virtana IPM Today!

Experience firsthand the benefits that Virtana’s IPM platform can bring to your organization. Choose one of two easy ways to get started:

1. Take a hassle-free, guided tour of Virtana IPM without any forms to fill out. Start here
2. Request a 30-day trial and see for yourself how Virtana IPM can transform your infrastructure management: Request a trial

Don’t wait – unlock your IT infrastructure’s true potential today!

The post The Future of Infrastructure Monitoring: Cutting-Edge Technologies IT Leaders Can’t Ignore appeared first on Virtana.

The point is not to simplify your infrastructure. Enterprises are complex and need sophisticated environments to support their mission-critical strategies and varied functional operations. For example, you should be running workloads on premises and in multiple private and public clouds to support differing business requirements. And you should treat different workloads differently, depending on a variety of factors. However, you do need to simplify the way you manage this complex infrastructure. To do that, you need to break it down into the key pillars, understand the goals and challenges of each pillar, and identify the best way to address them, including which tools to use. Think of these pillars as the critical foundation that creates a strong hybrid/multi-cloud infrastructure “house” for your enterprise. The four key pillars are:

• Health
• Capacity
• Cost
• Migration

Pillar #1: Health

Primary focus

The infrastructure health pillar focuses on ensuring that your applications are available and performing at expected speeds on an ongoing basis. It means that you have real-time visibility into the overall health of your entire IT ecosystem so you can:

• Monitor performance and availability
• Identify potential risks to performance and availability so you can address them before they impact users
• Speed troubleshooting when problems do occur to minimize downtime

Key considerations

An enterprise infrastructure comprises many varied systems, services, and other components that operate across different layers—compute, network, storage, etc. Each piece must work for the whole interconnected ecosystem to function, so you need tools to help you manage the states of those individual components. But that’s not enough—because of the complex interdependencies, you need to understand how everything works together. An issue that might not be flagged by a component-specific tool could adversely affect performance. Likewise, a performance problem or outage you’re trying to troubleshoot could stem from a non-obvious source buried deep in a chain of interdependencies.

Important capabilities

An infrastructure performance management (IPM) tool will enable you to monitor and manage the health of your hybrid/multi-cloud infrastructure. It collects and correlates data from systems and services across the infrastructure and uses advanced analytics, AIOps, and machine learning to help you keep the environment running optimally. When evaluating IPM solutions, look for the following key capabilities:

• Breadth and depth of wire, machine, and ecosystem data ingest to provide you with full-stack visibility
• Infrastructure and application topology discovery and service mapping
• Visualization of application performance
• Workload- and application-centric (i.e., not system-centric) analytics
• AI/ML-powered recommendations
• Integration with ITSM governance for downstream execution

Pillar #2: Capacity

Primary focus

The only constant in life and in enterprise infrastructures is change. You make investments based on your needs, but those needs change over time—and planning for adequate capacity is both an art and a science. The infrastructure capacity pillar focuses on ensuring that your environment can handle current and anticipated resource demands and workload volumes. Data-informed capacity planning requires you to be able to:

• Forecast future demand based on usage patterns and risk exposure
• Anticipate business requirements based on planned growth or changes
• Identify potential availability issues before they occur

Key considerations

Managing the capacity of your hybrid/multi-cloud infrastructure requires a balance. Running out of capacity can severely impact business performance. But erring on the side of excess capacity as a strategy to protect against that risk, however, can be an irresponsible use of budget when taken too far. You want to see potential problems—for example, that you’ll run out of storage in six months if your current growth rate continues—so you can plan for them.

Important capabilities

A capacity planning tool will enable you to make smart capacity decisions to ensure performance and stability while managing risk and maintaining budgetary control. Bringing resource efficiency and better purchase and expansion planning to both on-premises and cloud infrastructure requires access to real-time data for highly accurate and reliable forecasts. When evaluating capacity planning solutions, look for the following key capabilities:

• Historical consumption analysis
• Scenario-based capacity projections
• AI-powered insights and predictions
• Integration of upcoming projects
• Ability to configure proactive notifications based on preferences

Pillar #3: Cost

Primary focus

The cloud is a highly dynamic environment—as is your business. The usage-based model of the cloud means that changes in utilization and fast-moving development create cost variability. The infrastructure cost pillar focuses on managing your cloud spend. This requires you to:

• Understand your costs, including whether usage is driving desired business outcomes
• Identify and eliminate wasted spend
• Cultivate accountability for cloud costs

Key considerations

Because you pay for what you use, unexpected changes could result in an end-of-month billing surprise. Unfortunately, most cloud bills aren’t easy to parse, making it difficult to understand precisely where your cloud dollars are going. This challenge is compounded if you operate a multi-cloud environment—which is the vast majority of enterprises.

Important capabilities

A cloud cost management tool with powerful analytics and recommendation tools enables you to easily and confidently cost-optimize your cloud resources. When evaluating cloud cost management solutions, look for the following key capabilities:

• Multi-cloud support
• Ability to easily slice and dice the data and to match specific business needs
• Identification of unused or abandoned compute instances and resources that could be eliminated
• Rightsizing recommendations
• Ability to tune sizing based on individual risk tolerances
• What-if analysis that includes CPU, memory, I/O, and ingress and egress charges
• Cost structure optimization based on changes in CSP offerings
• Ability to track the amortized value of reservation discount usage at the instance level

Pillar #4: Migration

Primary focus

Moving workloads—whether it’s a first-time migration from on premises to a public cloud, a transfer between different clouds, or even repatriation from the cloud back on premises—isn’t a one-time event but an ongoing process. And the decisions you make can impact cost, performance, and risk. The migration pillar focuses on any-to-any workload placement so you can:

• Understand how workloads impact costs
• Evaluate which configurations drive optimal performance across your entire infrastructure
• Identify application dependencies and test what-if scenarios

Key considerations

As your business evolves, you need to be able to migrate workloads, and these transitions can’t disrupt your infrastructure or your business functions. Workload placement must simply become part of how you operate in a hybrid/multi-cloud environment. Better planning enables migration to become an efficient, smooth procedure.

Important capabilities

A workload placement tool will enable you to plan smarter any-to-any migrations with better decisions about workload priorities, groups, and deployments. When evaluating workload placement solutions, look for the following key capabilities:

• Assessment of which workloads to move to the cloud and which should stay in a private cloud/on premises
• Workload placement optimization across your entire environment, including edge, private cloud, public cloud, and on-premises applications
• Evaluation of performance and sizing data to compare costs across multiple public clouds
• Best-fit selection of public or private cloud provider based on specific needs
• Data science algorithms to identify application dependencies and separate business applications from shared services
• Discovery of suggested “move groups” for more efficient migration
• Ability to test what-if scenarios before migration events

Strengthen your infrastructure pillars with Virtana Platform

Virtana Platform delivers a single source of multi-cloud truth to manage your infrastructure performance, cost, and capacity and enables you to take action based on full-spectrum insights. Virtana Platform offers Infrastructure Performance Management, Capacity Planning, Cloud Cost Management, and Workload Placement to manage your entire IT infrastructure more effectively across on-premises and cloud deployments.

Try Virtana Platform for free

The post 4 Pillars of Modern Multi-Cloud Infrastructure Management appeared first on Virtana.

Supply chain problems unequivocally hit the storage sphere

Only 1% of respondents said they felt no effect, and only 8% said the impact was minimal. For nearly half (49%), the pain was substantial.

Storage is not optional—organizations had to find a way to deal with these problems

The top action taken, cited by 67% of respondents, was spending more time on procurement and supply chain management. You can imagine the hours consumed making calls and scouring websites in search of needed gear, all taking time away from other pressing tasks on teams that are perennially overworked and understaffed. That’s a lot of lost productivity. In second place, nearly tied at 65%, is optimizing and extending the life of existing resources. No surprise here—when you can’t replace, you’re forced to work with what you’ve got. There is a limit, however, to how much you can limp along with existing resources. That’s probably why nearly half of respondents ended up incurring skyrocketing costs to get needed equipment in as quickly as possible, and almost as many had to cobble together a temporary strategy to meet immediate needs. The one thing most businesses were not willing to do is tell the business “no,” or at least “not now.”

We dug a little deeper into the numbers to see if the responses depend on the severity of the impact. In general, the bigger the impact, the more likely businesses were to take each action, with two exceptions. Those that experienced minimal impact were slightly more likely than moderates to optimize and extend the life of existing resources (63% vs. 60%). The more interesting exception is that the bigger the impact, the less likely respondents were to migrate more storage to the cloud than initially planned.

Supply chain problems are out of your control, but you can mitigate the risk with Virtana

Of all the strategies noted above, the best is to get more out of your existing storage gear so you can be less reliant on the vagaries of external market forces. Even if, like most organizations, you are already doing this, you want to optimize to the fullest possible potential. This requires deep visibility across your entire hybrid infrastructure, delivered with a strong focus on storage. From our heritage monitoring big-iron SAN infrastructures through our evolution into infrastructure performance monitoring and hybrid cloud performance, cost, and capacity management, Virtana brings unmatched storage expertise to all our Virtana Platform products, giving you the data not just to make smarter storage optimization decisions but to effectively manage your entire IT infrastructure across on-premises and cloud deployments. Try Virtana for yourself

Get the survey report: The State of Hybrid Cloud Storage

Optimize storage across your hybrid infrastructure: Try Virtana Platform for free

The post The Storage Supply Chain and Its Effect on Infrastructure Teams appeared first on Virtana.

But how are they deciding what storage goes where? Is there such a thing as a wrong—or even just sub-optimal—storage placement decision? We dug into the data to answer these questions.

Hybrid is the storage approach of choice

Philosophically speaking, most organizations want storage both in the cloud and on premises. Over half (55%) favor the cloud but will keep storage on premises when there is a cost and/or performance advantage in doing so. Only 32% of respondents insist on one environment exclusively, but of that cohort, 91% (29% of the overall group) said they want all their storage in the cloud.

Of course, desire doesn’t always match reality. While 3% of respondents said they want all their storage to be on premises, zero reported this being the case. In fact, only 1% said they have more than 90% of their storage on premises. The difference is even starker for those with a cloud-only storage mindset. While that group represents 29% of all respondents, only 0.3% said that 100% of their storage is in the cloud, and a mere 1% reported that more than 90% of their storage is in the cloud.

The lesson here is that storage placement is an ongoing concern, even for companies that have “pre-decided” that storage should ideally be placed in a particular environment.

How to make smarter hybrid cloud storage decisions

There’s no prevailing approach organizations use to make storage placement decisions. The good news is that only 3% of respondents have to resort to simply making a best guess. The remaining 97% are pretty evenly split between relying on their team’s knowledge and expertise (33%), using automated third-party tools (33%), and taking recommendations from their CSP (31%).

What are the implications of the various methods for making storage placement decisions? Cost is only one dimension in the equation, but given the size of cloud storage spend, it is an important one. It turns out that respondents who rely primarily on their CSP for storage placement decisions are more likely to see their storage costs grow at a faster rate—63% vs. 45–54% of those using other approaches. And while very few organizations have storage costs that are matching the rate of increase of their overall cloud spend (only 5% of the total respondent pool), they are more likely to use automated third-party tools than the other methods.

This data raises some questions. First, how can we account for the fact that, while expertise and knowledge have allowed a small number of respondents to keep their storage costs in check—growing at a slower rate or even shrinking—the best-guessers seem to be doing a little better at keeping storage cost growth at the same rate as other cloud costs (55% vs. 45%). Is it possible that some in the “knowledge and expertise” group are overstating their know-how and others in the “best guess” group are understating it? Second, and most strikingly, why are companies making CSP-driven storage placement decisions far more likely to see their storage costs grow faster than other cloud costs? CSPs do have a stake in those decisions, but we’re not suggesting anything nefarious is going on with those recommendations. While they will help direct you to the best options within those environments, there may still be better choices when you look across the entire hybrid infrastructure. We can’t fault the CSPs for their provider-centric view—it would be unrealistic to expect otherwise. And this doesn’t mean that you can’t use those recommendations, rather that CSP recommendations shouldn’t be your only decision inputs.

Having a knowledgeable and experienced team is always valuable and can help you make informed cross-environment decisions, but it may not be possible to have all the expertise you need consistently on staff. Automated third-party recommendation tools fill the gap, providing a hybrid-infrastructure-wide view and what-if scenarios so your teams, no matter their size and makeup, can always identify and evaluate best-fit storage placement options.

Virtana knows hybrid infrastructures—and storage

From our heritage monitoring big-iron SAN infrastructures through our evolution into infrastructure performance monitoring and hybrid cloud performance, cost, and capacity management, Virtana brings unmatched storage expertise to all our Virtana Platform products, giving you the data not just to make smarter storage placement decisions but to effectively manage your entire IT infrastructure across on-premises and cloud deployments. Try Virtana for yourself

Get the survey report: The State of Hybrid Cloud Storage

Manage performance, cost, and capacity and take action based on full-spectrum insights: Try Virtana Platform for free

The post How Are You Making Storage Placement Decisions—and Does It Matter? appeared first on Virtana.