rapid rise in infrastructure performance management

THE VIRTUAL INSTRUMENTS IPM solution has seen a similar level of growth as forecast by the information technology research and advisory firm four years ago: today it is used across continents and by some  of the world’s leading companies, including 38 enterprises within the Fortune100.
So, what has driven growth in the adoption of infrastructure performance management tools?

Virtualisation and the emergence of the cloud are the primary driving forces behind the death of device centric monitoring in enterprise IT. This relatively nascent trend, combined with a demand to provide real-time analytics, speedy data retrieval and adequate storage; often on comparatively tighter budgets in a post-recessionary environment; places a great deal of weight on the shoulders of today’s IT decision-maker. These challenges are impossible to overcome with the out-dated tools that are still widely used today, which only serve to provide a limited and asymmetric understanding of the infrastructure.

As IT infrastructures have migrated to “open systems” to benefit from new technologies, the typical enterprise user has been forced to choose between what are often divergent physical elements when developing their infrastructure. Therefore systems today tend to include components of differing designs and from multiple vendors, which culminates in highly complicated infrastructure environments, each with a unique set of shifting variables. This renders efficient performance extremely difficult, as IT administrators are only able to optimise the subsystem components, rather than the performance of the system as a whole.
While transitions to virtualised and cloud environments help improve agility and reduce CAPEX growth in physical hardware, they don’t address the increasing complexity and interdependence driving increased CAPEX and OPEX in software and staff. In fact, there’s often a ‘knock-on’ risk of revenue impact from unacceptable performance or even downtime. The unintended consequence of aggressive consolidation, migration, and new technology adoption is increased risk without demonstrable improvements in cost or cycle time.
Performance teams must manage perpetual complexity in their heterogeneous IT infrastructures. The larger the shared server, SAN and NAS infrastructures, the greater the risk is of performance degradation and downtime. To cope with these higher levels of risk, a powerful set of capabilities is required to diagnose, stop and prevent unnecessary lulls in application performance. What has changed over the past four years is that administrators now need a much more intuitive, accurate and relevant presentation of how increasingly complex infrastructures are actually performing than what was provided by the solutions that were available to them previously, which were only monitoring performance within the stack.
The ultimate infrastructure performance management tool
Infrastructure performance management is a new and vital component in mission-critical IT. As discussed above, the adoption of virtualisation, cloud and now, software-defined technologies, along with the relentless growth of data, all contribute to the importance of having an end-to-end view of an infrastructure. IPM is the ideal solution as it gives cross-domain IT teams the ability to continuously capture, correlate and analyse system-wide performance, utilisation and health, in real-time.
An entity-centric approach
Entities are logical and intuitive groupings of system-wide devices and workloads that provide a highly accurate understanding of health, utilisation and performance; based on function, correlation and interdependency. Entity-centric performance management enables a team to manage in the way that makes the most sense based on role, responsibility or concern.

Whether the focus is storage, switches, servers, or applications, by line of business, or different and unique combinations, an entity-centric approach provides complete understanding of how the end- to-end system supports any and all mission critical workloads and applications.
IPM in the modern infrastructure
Data is, for most businesses, more valuable and integral to success than ever before. In today’s highly virtualised and cloud based environments, delivering infrastructure as a service is therefore about more than just availability; it’s about guaranteeing performance.

It is even more important to be able to definitively measure and report on the specific performance being delivered, based on the application, line of business or tier of service. The visibility required to develop and deliver performance-based SLAs cannot be provided by individual device-specific data or polling based “averages of averages”; it must be based on a comprehensive view of the end-to-end system and granular measurement of actual infrastructure response times.
IPM is a unique tool that delivers a system-wide examination and insight of everything within the organisation’s IT systems, from the underlying physical infrastructure layer, all the way to the hybrid or private-cloud-based estate - something executives are hungry for. It is this differing shift towards the big-picture view, which has revolutionised IPM positioning as a game changer in the relationship between IT and the business as a whole.
VirtualWisdom from Virtual Instruments
Leveraging a unique combination of management software and hardware probes, and a dedicated Appliance the VirtualWisdom platform persists, correlates and analyses a breadth and depth of data never before possible, which is collected throughout, from the end-to-end of the infrastructure. This highly accurate and comprehensive solution enables customers to stop reactive troubleshooting, start managing performance and achieve cost optimisation.
VirtualWisdom is the only IPM platform that provides precise data on system-wide performance by measuring every transaction, in real time, on the wire. This enables IT administrators to establish accurate baselines and measure changes over time, based on the actual workload and associated response times. With VirtualWisdom IT decision-makers can actually deliver and report on true performance SLAs that provide visibility and accountability at all levels of the organisation.