Virtana has been recognized in the below Gartner® reports:  

We believe being recognized in Gartner reports is a testament to our leadership in the industry. This is the first time Virtana has been recognized in so many different areas of IT infrastructure management, including six Gartner Hype Cycle² reports, a Gartner Cool Vendor³ report, and a Market Guide. Here is a brief overview of each of the publications where Gartner recognized Virtana:  

Cool Vendors in Monitoring and Observability:  

OpsCruise (now a part of Virtana) was named a Cool Vendor in the 2023 Gartner Cool Vendors in Monitoring and Observability. One reason for the inclusion is because OpsCruise gives IT operations and SRE teams invaluable visibility into Kubernetes and serverless environments by harnessing open telemetry standards and agentless data collection. Adaptive machine learning detects changes in workload behavior and characterizes normal performance patterns. When anomalies occur, OpsCruise prescribes targeted resolution actions to efficiently troubleshoot and restore service. This combination of profiling, intelligent analysis, and actionable recommendations allows even small teams to effectively manage massive scale and complexity. Virtana acquired OpsCruise in May of 2023, and Gartner mentioned Virtana and OpsCruise together in this year’s report, linked here: 

Gartner, Cool Vendors in Monitoring and Observability, 25 September, 2023 (For Gartner subscribers only) 

Market Guide for Infrastructure Monitoring Tools: 

According to the 2023 Gartner Market Guide for Infrastructure Monitoring Tools “Infrastructure monitoring tools capture data that identify outages, improve speed of diagnosis and aid troubleshooting of on-premises and cloud-based IT systems.” From our perspective, we see that I&O leaders get the most out of their monitoring and observability platforms when those platforms provide flexible configurations, are adaptable to various enterprise environments, and provide robust infrastructure forecasting and capacity planning capabilities. 

Virtana was named a Representative Vendor for Infrastructure Monitoring Tools in the 2023 Gartner Market Guide for Infrastructure Monitoring Tools. Find a link to the report here: 

Gartner, Market Guide for Infrastructure Monitoring Tools, 22 March, 2023 (For Gartner subscribers only) 

Hype Cycle for Data Center Infrastructure Technologies 

This Hype Cycle⁴ references Digital Platform Conductor Tools in this report because they enable IT leaders to visualize “digital platform performance across all life cycle stages — planning, implementing, operating and monitoring.” Gartner recognized Virtana as a Sample Vendor for Digital Platform Conductor Tools in the Gartner Hype Cycle for Data Center Infrastructure Technologies, 2023.  

 “By 2027, 75% of organizations will respond to stakeholder pressures by implementing a data center infrastructure sustainability program driven by cost optimization, which is a major increase from less than 5% in 2022.” Find a link to the report here:  

Gartner, Hype Cycle for Data Center Infrastructure, 13 July, 2023 (For Gartner subscribers only) 

Hype Cycle for I&O Automation 

Advancements in AI are accelerating the development of automation tools that can handle enterprise workloads. According to Gartner, “By 2025, 70% of organizations will implement structured infrastructure automation to deliver flexibility and efficiency, which is a significant increase from 20% in 2021.” This shift in the market has led to the emergence of a new industry term some are calling Digital Platform Conductor Tools, which focuses on hybrid digital infrastructure management (HDIM). Gartner recognized Virtana as a Sample Vendor for Digital Platform Conductor Tools in the Gartner Hype Cycle for I&O Automation,2023. Here’s the link to the report: 

Gartner, Hype Cycle for I&O Automation, 14 July, 2023 (For Gartner subscribers only) 

Hype Cycle for Monitoring and Observability 

The tools and resources organizations use to build their infrastructure platform, and application environments introduce greater complexity, increasing the focus from IT leaders on intuitive and comprehensive observability. According to Gartner “Observability is becoming central to how modern businesses understand customer and employee experience. New technologies are emerging to deal with the complexity presented by operational telemetry.” Virtana recognized in the Gartner Hype Cycle for Monitoring and Observability, 2023 as a Sample Vendor for Digital Platform Conductor Tools.  We believe Virtana’s Infrastructure Monitoring and Application Monitoring provide organizations with the visibility necessary to manage their IT environments. Find the link to the report here: 

Gartner, Hype Cycle for Monitoring and Observability, 10 July, 2023 (For Gartner subscribers only) 

Hype Cycle for I&O Digital Workplace Transformation 

Gartner says, “As work continues to evolve toward greater efficiency and dependence on technology, the intersection of labor constraints and emerging generative and autonomous technologies is transforming resourcing strategies.” This Hype Cycle explores how organizations see Digital Employee Experience (DEX) tools as platforms to improve DEX capabilities that align with their workplace leaders’ expectations. Virtana recognized as a Sample Vendor for Digital Platform Conductor Tools in the Hype Cycle for I&O Digital Workplace Transformation, 2023. You can find the link to the report here: 

Hype Cycle for I&O Digital Workplace Transformation, 2023 (For Gartner subscribers only) 

Hype Cycle for Infrastructure Platforms 

According to Gartner “Infrastructure platforms support the combining of agility and speed with the safety and soundness needed for enabling digital business strategies,” says Gartner in this Hype Cycle. Gartner went on to say that “more than 75% of global enterprises will have formal infrastructure platform organizations, up from less than 20% in 2023.” These organizations are looking for platforms that provide a unified view of their global estates, from bare metal to the application layer to the Kubernetes cluster. Virtana was named as a Sample Vendor for Hype Cycle for Infrastructure Platforms in the Gartner Hype Cycle for Infrastructure Platforms, 2023. Here’s the link to the report: 

Gartner, Hype Cycle for Infrastructure Platforms, 12 July, 2023 (for Gartner subscribers only) 

Hype Cycle for ITSM 

Gartner states that “Traditional approaches to IT service management aren’t suited to modern hybrid cloud environments and faster service delivery times.” We believe a key reason for this is these traditional approaches do not factor in the increasing complexity of hybrid infrastructure environments. “I&O leaders must understand the hype around new technologies, such as generative AI and process automation, and how they affect ITSM strategies and business value,” Gartner concluded. Virtana’s full-stack observability platform uses RCA and generative AI to accelerate business outcomes and increase performance. Gartner mentions Virtana as a Sample Vendor for Digital Platform Conductor Tools in the Gartner Cycle for ITSM, 2023. 

Gartner, Hype Cycle for ITSM, 14 July 2023 (for Gartner subscribers only) 

Virtana Leading the Way 

Virtana is committed to helping organizations solve their most complex IT infrastructure challenges. Our AI-powered platform provides a holistic view of hybrid IT environments and proactively identifies and resolves issues before they impact users. Contact us today to discuss your objectives and how the Virtana Platform can help you get there faster. In the meantime, we invite you to see the platform for yourself or click read some of our recent customer stories. 

Gartner Disclaimer 

1 Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in our research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. 

2 GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally, and HYPE CYCLE is a registered trademark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates and are used herein with permission. All rights reserved. 

3 GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally, and COOL VENDOR is a registered trademark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates and are used herein with permission. All rights reserved. 

4 Gartner Hype Cycle-Interpreting technology hype (link to https://www.gartner.com/en/research/methodologies/gartner-hype-cycle) (For Gartner subscribers only) 

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That’s great news—your business is growing, and opportunities abound. It also means you will have to align the acquired company’s IT infrastructure with your own. What this looks like will vary depending on the specifics of any given merger. In some cases, where the acquired entity will continue to operate independently, you may simply look for opportunities to optimize and create economies of scale. At the other end of the spectrum, you will be responsible for fully integrating the new company into your existing infrastructure. And, of course, there are infinite variations within that range. Even if you are asked to perform due diligence before the acquisition, you will have to identify the potential challenges, risks, and system optimization opportunities.

In all cases, you need to understand the rhythm of their data center—which will be different than yours. Then you need to figure out what changes need to be made to meet strategic objectives and maximize efficiency. And finally, you must execute with minimal disruption and surprises. Given the complexity of enterprise IT infrastructures, this process is exceedingly difficult. It’s also expensive. According to PWC, 78% of successful M&A organizations spent 6% or more of deal value on integration. By comparison, only 56% of other respondents (i.e., those that didn’t rise to a level deemed “successful”) spent at that rate.

What if your company is prepping to be acquired?

It’s not just the acquiring entities that benefit from investing in understanding the integration implications of their infrastructures. If your company is looking to be acquired, doing this work can be a valuable part of the “courting” process. First, it enables you to optimize your data center, increasing efficiencies and reducing costs—both of which help increase the attractiveness of your business overall as an acquisition target. According to Accenture, technology can directly or indirectly drive up to 40% of overall merger synergies, and viewing technology as a value lever is crucial to deal success. Therefore, having a clear picture of your IT infrastructure will help you identify and articulate potential synergies. And finally, you can enable a potential acquirer to confidently evaluate integration implications in a fact-based manner.

#KnowBeforeYouGo for M&A IT infrastructure integration success

Whichever side of the M&A process you’re on, you can set your pre-acquisition due diligence and post-acquisition integration up for success with a Virtana #KnowBeforeYouGo engagement. Whatever environments your infrastructure runs—virtual machines, physical servers, or Kubernetes—this turnkey solution, which leverages Virtana’s Infrastructure Performance Management and Workload Placement technologies, will quickly provide you with data science-backed and data-driven information to inform your integration strategies and project plans.

The first step is discovery, which uncovers the state and rhythm of your data center. You get an inventory; a health, utilization, and performance baseline assessment; data cleansing; and application discovery leveraging lexical proximity and port signature recognition.

Then, once we know what you have, we build a picture of how it all works with application dependency mapping and move groups. You get a detailed application dependency map, as well as move group suggestions based on shared services and community detection. This information is crucial to identify platforms or applications that perform the same business function or shared services.

For workloads that you’ve targeted for cloud migration, we then perform cloud costing, where we identify cloud configuration and cost. You get a fit/unfit scorecard, time-series based rightsized configurations, and rightsized cloud costs for compute, storage disks, and egress traffic—and the results are grouped by “as-is,” “peak values,” and 99^th and 95^th percentiles. Optionally, we can also perform playback to test it all before you make any commitments, giving you a validated fit/unfit scorecard, validated cloud configurations, and validated cloud costs.

Are you ready to #KnowBeforeYouGo?

If your company is embarking on an M&A journey and you need to get smarter about IT infrastructure integration, contact us.

The post Get smarter about M&A IT infrastructure integration appeared first on Virtana.

• Visibility and insights: Data about your infrastructure is at the heart of effective IPM. Without accurate and actionable information, none of the rest is possible.
• Dashboards and reporting: This is how humans—i.e., all of your stakeholders—consume the data about your infrastructure in a meaningful way.
• Metrics and monitoring: Just because you can measure something doesn’t mean you need to. It’s critical to understand the KPIs that matter and then track them on an ongoing basis.
• Alerting and troubleshooting: Of course, you’re not monitoring just for the sake of monitoring—you want the appropriate people to be notified when things go wrong and then help them fix the problem as quickly as possible.
• Optimization and testing: There is always room for improvement, whether that’s better performance, increased utilization, lower costs, or reduced risk, and you want to take advantage of every opportunity available to you.
• Capacity planning: Capacity has a direct impact on availability and performance—and also on your budget. You need to get that balance right.
• Workflow and controls integration: Managing your infrastructure performance requires you to take actions and make changes. You want these efforts to be easy for your team to implement within any governance or regulatory framework applicable to your business.

Here is a checklist of capabilities and best practices—categorized into the seven key areas—to help you maximize IPM effectiveness for your organization.

Visibility and insights

• Maximize the breadth of data by natively integrating with hosts, switches, and storage arrays.
• Maximize the depth of data by collecting high-fidelity data (not data that is averaged or sampled) across compute, storage, and network.
• Create a comprehensive topology view of your infrastructure that allows you to see all resources supporting an application with an easy way to understand resource health and utilization at a glance.
• Create a view of your infrastructure that allows you to filter and drill down in various ways, e.g., set of applications, event status level, region, etc. This includes getting an event-level view—across all your data centers, across all regions—at a glance, with the ability to drill down from a region to a data center to individual applications within the data center.
• Leverage infrastructure analytics that are application-centric; that is, they understand how workloads are combined into a service and how multiple services are combined to operate as an application.

Dashboards and reporting

• Leverage highly customizable dashboards that contextualize infrastructure health and performance insights. Look for these key capabilities:
  • Group applications by tier based on criticality.
  • Create dashboards for individual applications or components.
  • Create at-a-glance views (e.g., via color coding) to quickly see current vs. benchmarked performance.
  • Send dashboard details in various formats (email, image, etc.).
• Create, schedule, and email reports that deliver the details critical for different stakeholder teams.
• Present data sets from multiple sources on the same report or dashboard that are time-aligned and synchronized to enable quick correlation of workload changes and impacts, anomalies and their downstream effects, and historical data reviews. 

Metrics and monitoring

• Establish a performance baseline for your infrastructure to understand what constitutes normal performance.
• Monitor all critical infrastructure components, including servers, storage systems, network devices, and applications.
• Measure essential performance, utilization, capacity, and health metrics across your entire infrastructure.
• Create a heat map that shows how all compute nodes are performing in all your infrastructure environments (on premises, public cloud, private cloud, etc.).
• Monitor traffic to identify the busy networks in terms of resource usage that may need to be rebalanced.
• Understand how storage for critical applications is performing on the back end, including read-completion times for applications.
• Use advanced analytics and AI/ML to correlate and identify patterns in performance data to predict potential issues before they occur.
• Automate monitoring and analysis to reduce the burden on your IT team.
• Automatically generate cases with recommended solutions in response to detected anomalies.

Alerting and troubleshooting

• Set up alerts for real-time notification of events. These could include:
  • Critical events such as when a server goes down or when the response time of an application exceeds a certain threshold.
  • Variances from defined conditions that could indicate the infrastructure is not operating at peak efficiency.
• Configure alerts to provide important information such as how often the event has happened and how far conditions went outside standard performance.
• Create workflows to automatically open a case once an alarm is triggered and include recommended steps to resolve it.
• Consolidate related alerts into a single case to simplify and speed response.
• Leverage AI-powered recommendations to speed the resolution process, including:
  • Get specific recommended actions based on current performance.
  • Get auto-generated scripts that can be linked within your ITSM tool to help perform the recommended actions.
  • See the predicted outcome of the recommendation before executing the action.

Optimization and testing

• Identify workloads to rebalance to improve resource utilization based on SLA requirements.
• Identify opportunities to consolidate servers or upgrade hardware to improve performance.
• Optimize how applications utilize resources on the back end—hardware, VMs, etc.—to gain capex efficiencies.
• Detect hotspots that could lead to performance issues or high resource consumption.
• Get recommendations for storage optimization, such as balancing across storage arrays.

Capacity planning

• Practice predictive capacity management:
  • Understand how much data is being stored and how efficiently it’s stored.
  • Identify under- or over-allocated capacity throughout the infrastructure.
  • Forecast when to order additional capacity based on anticipated growth rates.
• Purchase only the capacity you need when you need it.
• Avoid premature hardware refreshes to minimize unnecessary capex spend:
  • Make replacement decisions based on actual health to extend life beyond standard refresh cycles.
  • Eliminate expensive blanket refreshes without compromising application and workload performance.

Workflow and controls integration

• Create a unified, collaborative workflow across all your infrastructure services.
• Integrate with ITSM governance for downstream execution.
• Keep infrastructure elements up to date by aligning IPM with your CMDB.
• Ensure compliance with all industry regulations and internal policies.

Check all the IPM boxes with Virtana

Following this IPM checklist will help ensure that your IT infrastructure is always performing at peak levels—enabling your business to operate more efficiently and avoid costly downtime. Virtana Infrastructure Performance Management helps you check all the boxes. It’s the only solution that combines massive ingest of wire, machine, and ecosystem data with AIOps, ML, and data-driven analytics to give you observability into the performance and availability of your hybrid cloud infrastructure. The fully integrated performance and availability management platform delivers deep visibility, real-time data correlation, and actionable insights. Request a trial

The post The Ultimate IPM Checklist appeared first on Virtana.

Every data center has a rhythm. When you think about a single application—SAP, for example—it has certain “beats.” First thing Monday morning, you see a steady and fast cadence, while over the weekend, it slows to a light tap. And there may be seasonality that rises to a crescendo. Now, add all this to the tempo of your hundreds or thousands of other applications, and you’ve got a complex cacophony with drum beats, bass lines, melodies, and vocals all coming together into a “song” with verses, choruses, bridges, and codas. This music, which may be a simple pop ditty, a syncopated jazz song, or an orchestral symphony, is unique to your data center.

You can’t, however, just listen to the rhythm of your data center and instantly determine if it’s playing Sinatra’s “My Way,” Mozart’s “Jupiter Symphony,” or the latest Taylor Swift hit. Fortunately, this is something that Virtana Infrastructure Performance Management excels at.

What the rhythm of your data center tells you about performance and availability

Let’s go back to the SAP example. Virtana IPM will reveal the notes of your SAP application and how that fits into your overall data center song. For instance, it will show you that SAP usage is primarily between 8 a.m. and 5 p.m. during the work week and that during those times, the utilization of servers is 60%, storage virtualization is 40%, there’s no CPU contention on VMs, and there are no memory pressures—and that the backup occurs on the weekend. Furthermore, it will show you the business cycle over time, e.g., certain times of the year when utilization spikes, as well as application dependencies, what application changes are happening, etc.

Now that you know all of this, you can configure the system to notify you when the application starts singing a different tune. For example, if the backup is spilling over into Monday morning, or if utilization suddenly goes to 80%, or if there are a bunch of runaway processes that start showing up, or if there’s a slow-drain device somewhere in the infrastructure that will affect SAP’s performance. Because SAP is a mission-critical application for your business, you want to know these things, including details and recommendations that will speed troubleshooting and remediation, so you can get ahead of them—before they lead to user complaints. In other words, you want to quickly get all the various components back to playing the song they’re supposed to be playing.

What the rhythm of your data center tells you about capacity optimization

In addition to managing application/workload performance and availability, understanding the rhythm of your data center is also critical for optimizing your infrastructure. With the help of Virtana IPM as well as Virtana Capacity Planning, you can see where there is existing capacity to take advantage of, helping to save money. And when you do need to invest in new equipment, you have data-driven business justification for the new spend.

Get the rhythm of your data center with Virtana IPM

Virtana IPM is a fully integrated performance and availability management platform with deep visibility, real-time data correlation, and actionable insights. Virtana IPM:

• Gathers data across compute, storage, and network with unmatched breadth and depth and translates that data into actionable insights.
• Identifies anomalies that are causing or will cause performance issues or outages and then provides AI-powered recommendations on how to resolve those issues.
• Provides a single pane of glass to detect hotspots before they impact application performance, balance the workload across your entire infrastructure, and more accurately plan for migrations and future capacity requirements.

In other words, with Virtana IPM, you’ll understand the rhythm of your data center, identify ​anything that’s going off beat or out of tune, and get information to help you fix it. Request a trial

The post The Rhythm (Of Your Data Center) Is Gonna Get You 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.

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.

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

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