Heroix,
developer of application performance and network monitoring software, today
announced that its Longitude VMware
virtualization solution has added an innovative capacity planner along with
new reporting capabilities to create a faster, easier, and more affordable
method to monitor and manage virtual environments.
With the V7.2 release, Longitude can help enterprises solve the multiple
challenges of VM sprawl, overprovisioning, and excess use of resources,
practices that drive up IT budgets unnecessarily. The software, which now
provides easy-to-use capacity planning along with expanded reporting, was
designed specifically as a powerful tool to aid VMware users in making better
decisions about deploying or retiring VMs, or moving them quickly to different
hosts to maintain high service levels.
Longitude now has a novel, easy-to-use drag and drop facility that helps
virtualization or system administrators make instant decisions about optimal
deployment of virtual machine (VM) resources. Other monitoring or planning
software typically requires multiple, manual steps that use valuable IT staff
time or require several different software modules to perform a single
assessment of the virtual environment.
A key addition to Longitude is capacity planning, where users can perform “what
if” analyses to determine where and how potential changes would affect
operations. Through this analysis, users can change any number of factors – CPU
capacity, memory, disk, hosts, workloads moving to different hosts, and more –
and see the results in easy-to-read graphs well before any changes occur.
Longitude lets administrators dynamically understand the effects of change and
make decisions to continue high levels of service. The drag and drop facility
significantly increases the speed at which different scenarios can be examined.
“Our goal was to make an even better monitoring, reporting, and management
option for the valuable data that Longitude provides. Now, users can understand
their virtual environment much quicker and make changes in their resources
faster. There is no need for a painstaking method of navigating to different
pages in the monitoring tool or using multiple pop-up menus to get to the final
information. These new capabilities give Heroix customers the ability to make
effective virtual resource decisions quickly and confidently. Now, users can
monitor their environment and change it when they see the results of the “What
if” analysis. Longitude lets them do this easily and quickly with just a few
mouse clicks,” explained *** Levin, Heroix VP of Development.
If a potential problem is flagged during monitoring, the user can quickly run
a report showing current conditions, and then, just as fast, perform a “What if”
scenario to see how service could be improved.
Color graphics in Longitude reports make it very easy to see individual VM
resource use, and which individuals or groups have a need for the most
resources. This allows faster decisions on actions that may be required to add
new resources, change the combination of VMs using a single host, or moving
certain VMs to a new host. These decisions, when made in a timely way, can
reduce spikes in usage on a host that could affect performance.
Longitude makes “point in time” and historical information available to
assess current conditions and issues that have arisen in the past. Longitude’s
historical reports can help in situations where, for example, there might be a
problem every night with resource saturation, but when a daily report is run,
the resource appears normal. The historical report will show exactly when and
where the problem occurred.
The new reporting format lets users see, in a single colorful graph or table,
exactly how much resource is being used cumulatively by a resource pool, host,
VM, or datastore. Software options from other vendors may show only individual
resource use, require the user to view multiple screens or pages, and perform
computations or make estimates to determine exactly how much of the total
resource is in use. With the new Longitude, all relevant information is
available instantly via a single dashboard.
The advanced reporting capability provides immediate visibility into the
virtual environment, helping users monitor, detect, and resolve performance
issues as well as capacity bottlenecks.
“We believe Longitude’s very graphical presentation is unique and helpful to
people trying to assess a situation quickly and thoroughly. It is a very
straightforward format that users can begin using almost instantly,” noted D.
Levin, VP of Development, Heroix.
Longitude monitors VMware through a vCenter Server, collecting and monitoring
CPU, memory, disk, network, hosts, VM’s, resource pools, and datastores. Reports
can be analyzed using hourly averages, across multiple days, and for different
VMs. Users can select the time and date ranges for regular analysis to determine
usage trends, or to view special incidents or times.
Pricing and Availability Longitude V7.2 for VMware is available now.
Pricing starts at $199 for VMware monitoring.