Virtana AI: A Game Changer in Troubleshooting

Virtana AI stands at the forefront of this release, transforming how businesses handle application and infrastructure issues. This tool brings the expertise of specialized SMEs directly to your fingertips by combining generative AI with a customer-supplied Knowledge Base. Key features include:

Automatic Root-Cause Analysis: Quickly pinpoint issues without manual intervention.

Custom RCA Knowledge Base: Tailor the AI’s learning to your unique environment.

Generative AI Integration: Harness the power of AI for unparalleled problem-solving.

Anomaly Detection: Stay ahead of issues with proactive alerts.

Event Policy as Code: Enhanced Alert Management

The introduction of ‘Event Policy as Code’ revolutionizes alert management. This feature allows for:

Actionable Insights: Understand the impact, severity, and context of each alert.

Custom Policy Creation: Tailor alert policies to your specific needs, reducing noise and improving focus.

UI Enhancements: A Seamless Experience

We’ve revamped our user interface for a more intuitive, consistent experience across the Virtana Platform:

Redesigned Navigation: Easier access to vital modules and information.

Consistent Design Language: Standard color palettes, typography, and iconography enhance usability.

Alerts Listing and Details: Swift Issue Resolution

Our enhanced alerts system provides comprehensive insights at a glance:

Consolidated Alerts: View all critical information on a single page.

Root Cause Analysis: Immediate insights into the probable causes of alerts.

Customizable Alert Management: Add notes and tags for effective team collaboration.

Infrastructure Monitoring: Dell VPLEX Integration

Virtana’s integration with Dell VPLEX brings a new level of monitoring capacity:

Cross-Domain Visibility: Monitor health, utilization, performance, and capacity.

Advanced Analytics: Turn data into actionable insights for workload balancing and resource prediction.

Cloud Cost Management (CCM): Streamlined Management and Governance

FinOps teams get expanded insights into spend, policy violations, and AI-based optimization actions across AWS, Azure, and GCP:

Cost Overview Dashboard: View AWS, Azure, and GCP costs in one consolidated dashboard.

AWS and Azure Cloud Governance: Implement custom policies for resource optimization.

Azure Reseller Billing: Simplify and automate billing processes for Azure CSPs.

Application Monitoring: Enhanced Clarity and Control

Enriched topology mapping and Kubernetes support delivers simplified visualization for faster troubleshooting:

App Map Enhancements: Improved response times and simplified Kubernetes visualization with entity aggregation, standard Kubernetes icons, and connectivity view on every Kubernetes workload.

Alert Handling Rules (AHR) – Quiet Time: Manage alert activity effectively during maintenance or upgrade periods.

Azure Events with Alerts: Extended support for Azure entities, including Azure SQL, Load balancers, Redis caches, Azure VMs, and more.

Additional Kubernetes Control Plane Metrics: Deeper insights into Kubernetes monitoring with more Control Plane metrics for API server, scheduler, etcd, and controllers to help visualize overall cluster health and performance.

Each of these enhancements is designed to empower our customers with more intelligence, speed, and simplicity in managing their IT environments. Virtana’s latest release is a testament to our commitment to innovation, ensuring that our customers are always one step ahead in the dynamic world of IT infrastructure and application monitoring. Learn more about these new features by visiting our Virtana Community. Stay tuned for more updates as we continue to advance and refine our solutions to meet your evolving needs.

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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. 

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Companies built to last navigate trends and economic challenges such as COVID-19 and take advantage of the window to re-invent themselves, while keeping sights on the long-term – and ultimately come out stronger. That is exactly what we did last year. We accelerated the company’s transformation by expanding more aggressively into the hybrid cloud market.

COVID-19 fast-tracked the future of advanced digital technologies, making companies more human, and organizations will change forever and for the better. Vaccines will bring an end to lockdowns, consumer savings have risen, debt has lowered, and more stimulus is on the way. If you connect these dots, I am optimistic that America is best positioned for much stronger economic growth in the second half of 2021 than we have experienced in decades.

Virtana is well-positioned to help companies accelerate their digital transformation and drive human progress. We are on track for three quarters in a row growth – with new executive leadership, an active strategy to expand in the cloud market, and our new SaaS Platform having earned a flurry of recent industry recognitions. However, we are just getting started; the best days of the company are still ahead of us.

To prepare us for the future, I have spent a lot of time in the last several months listening, asking a lot of questions, and learning—and then working with the executive leadership team to crystallize the vision, purpose, and core behaviors for our company.

The Virtana vision and purpose

Our vision is to provide a simple software platform that leverages high-definition precision data insights to manage, monitor, and secure any workload on any cloud for hybrid IT customers.

Why do we do it?

Our purpose or mission is to simplify enterprise cloud complexity and accelerate digital transformation to drive human progress. It sounds lofty, but it is true. In fact, it is something the company has been doing for years. For instance, one vertical we are particularly strong in is healthcare. We are proud that we were able to help our customer AstraZeneca manage their hybrid cloud complexity last year to enable agility and cost savings so they could focus on developing a critical vaccine during the pandemic—and that is just one example. So, while Virtana may not directly save lives or otherwise drive human progress, we enable those who do.

But it is not enough to define just the what and the why. If we don’t also clearly articulate how we are going to accomplish the vision and purpose, those statements will never be more than motivational posters on a wall. How you make them real is through actions which, as they say, speak louder than words.

This is where core culture behaviors come in.

Why should anyone outside of Virtana care about our culture?

I believe that it is equally important for companies to address talent and culture as much as they address customer churn or competitive advantage. As Peter Drucker so eloquently put it, culture eats strategy for breakfast. In other words, Virtana’s culture directly influences our ability to fulfill our vision with our platform, so our customers can accelerate digital transformation of their own vision and purpose to drive human progress.

Our core culture behaviors are our promise to you and your company’s mission

We undertook a robust, months-long process that resulted in five core culture behaviors. I use the word “behaviors” not “values” as they relate to culture, and this is deliberate. Values are passive—they are simply qualities. They signal how you should be, but do not help you achieve that state. Behaviors, on the other hand, are concrete. They are expressed as actions, which provide a roadmap for how to get from here to there.

Core culture behaviors define what we expect and encourage every person in the company to do. It is how we work, treat customers, and treat each other. It also provides a way for everyone to know what to prioritize and how to make decisions, even in the absence of specific instructions. When practiced effectively, core culture behaviors create an exciting workplace and, more importantly, a sustained competitive advantage.

By promoting and rewarding these behaviors in our own company, we are enabling everyone here at Virtana to do the work you need us to do so you can fulfill your own company’s mission.

1. Embody people-first servant leadership
2. Foster customer obsession and innovation
3. Promote diversity and inclusion
4. Measure what matters (OKRs)
5. Help each other

We embody people-first servant leadership

I am very passionate about servant leadership and talk about if frequently (see here and here) but more importantly, I encourage everyone, no matter their level of seniority, to practice servant leadership. We expect our leaders to treat leadership as a service, to the team members and to our customers.  Servant leadership means that leaders exist to support their employees, not the other way around.

Servant leaders focus on the needs of others before considering their own.  At the core of this belief is that a leader exists to serve their people; the leader acts as a guide and mentor to encourage team members to fulfill their highest potential by providing coaching, opportunities to shine, and motivation. Those served should ideally become freer, wiser, more autonomous, and more capable of becoming servant leaders themselves or reaching what they aspire to do and arrive wherever they want to go. Leaders at Virtana exist to serve our customers. The job to be done by the leader is to help our teams realize their full potential and to help our customers achieve their objectives. At Virtana, humility, approachability, and being grounded in hands-on reality are defining characteristics of a successful leader. ​

“People-first” reflects the fact that we are in the business of hiring and developing talent. It is our most important asset and one that deserves continuous learning and development at all levels. We are serious about developing people in their current roles and for future roles at all levels. Business is dynamic and technology is constantly changing.  Developing new knowledge and skills keeps us all enjoying our work, while keeping the company relevant. Talent is one of the areas where we would like to create competitive advantage. 

​

We foster customer obsession and innovation

Virtana has always been customer-focused, as evidenced by our incredible customer base, some of whom have been with us for many years. Additional recognition of our customer-first approach can be seen through our all five-star customer ratings on Gartner’s Peer Insights and an award from Gartner recognizing Virtana as a ‘Customer-First’ company.

Clayton Christensen, a Harvard Professor developed the theory of “disruptive innovation” and “jobs to be done,” and the book The Innovator’s Dilemma said, “People don’t just buy products or just want to use a certain service. They ‘hire’ them to do a job.”

At Virtana, we are obsessed with empathetically understanding the ‘job’ customers want to hire a product or service to do. What is the outcome they want to achieve?  

With a focus on outcomes, we jump-start innovation to create products. This outcome-driven innovation (ODI) fulfills our customer needs for the jobs to be done (JTBD).  

True innovation requires risk, and we will take risks in the service of our customers to solve their problems, not just for the sake of innovation. When we experiment with a focused goal in mind, failing fast and learning fast, we build success for our customers, our teams, and our company.

We promote diversity and inclusion

Part of what helps us innovate and better solve customer problems is having more ideas. Diversity creates a competitive advantage. It is not about whose idea it is, but about getting better ideas to address the challenge at hand. When we listen to be inclusive and incorporate diverse points of view, the best idea can win.

We accept each team member for who they are and encourage them to bring their whole self to the company. By respecting both similarities and differences in others, you open the door to opportunity. 

We believe diversity and inclusion generate a better strategy, better debates, and better outcomes. 

We measure what matters

Metrics drive behaviors so if we want the correct behaviors we need to manage the right expectations and priorities and measure accordingly. This means focusing not on activities but on outcomes that deliver results. By aligning on objectives and key results (OKRs), we can focus on what matters and hold ourselves accountable to do what we say we will do.

Andrew Grove, former CEO of Intel and author of the book “High Output Management” said, “Create an environment that values and emphasizes output.” Peter Drucker, the founder of modern management, created the term “activity trap.”  We love what Andy Grove said and we avoid focusing on activity traps.

We help each other

This is another area where the team excels across the board—and we will continue to help each other, to collaborate, and to solve difficult issues together.

We are one team with one dream, which is to work on the Virtana vision and fulfill our purpose.

This is how we run the company and how we engage

This is an exciting time for Virtana and for our customers. We are growing and are expanding our product portfolio with the Virtana Platform to help customers solve their most pressing hybrid cloud migration, cost control, performance optimization, and monitoring challenges.

Formalizing these core cultural behaviors is a vital part of being the organization our customers need us to be.

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The Virtana team is thrilled to have been awarded ‘Customer First’ status by Gartner and we are proud to state that in the past 12 months we have received all 5 out of 5 Star reviews by customers across all products and services.

To our customers who submitted reviews, thank you! These honest reviews mold our products and our customer journey, and we always welcome both positive and critical feedback. Read our Global 2000 Customer Reviews.

Virtana have pledged to be a Customer First vendor in the ITOM (IT Operations Management) market for our product(s): VirtualWisdom, CloudWisdom, Virtana Platform, Virtana Migrate (Cloud Migration Readiness). Our team takes great pride in this program commitment, as customer feedback continues to be a critical priority, and shapes our products and services. 

Everyone at Virtana is deeply proud to be part of the Customer First program. To learn more about the program, or to read the reviews written about our products by the IT professionals who use them, please see our reviews on Gartner Peer Insights.  

If you have a Virtana story to share, we encourage you to join the Gartner Peer Insights crowd and weigh in here.  

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