
Welcome to
Virtualization and Beyond
Contributed by Michael Thompson, Director, Systems Management Product Marketing, SolarWinds
App-Centric and Admin-Centric—Too Much to Ask?
With all the technology trends thrown around this
time of year, there is a pleasant consistency that applications or application-centric
capabilities that meet real end user needs are critical. Whether
it's the cloud, hyper-convergence or mobility, it's all about providing an
application service in a better way.
This application-centric focus is especially evident
in the IT management space, where there are a lot of vendors thriving because they
are providing insight into application performance in a better way than their
predecessors did. For example, Splunk has taken log management into new
territory, New Relic has taken byte code instrumentation to new environments
and use cases, and we at SolarWinds provide industrial strength infrastructure
and application
monitoring solutions with an entirely new cost and usability level versus prior
solutions.
However, most vendors still haven't been
successful at providing an application management solution that is truly admin-centric.
A solution that is both app-centric and
admin-centric would be one that brings together multiple perspectives of an
application problem that mirrors the way an administrator would operate when
trying to solve the problem. For example, an administrator might find a problem
while using a transaction monitoring tool or when an application monitoring
alert is triggered. Their next step might be to go to their application
monitoring tool to get initial information. Next, they might look at all the
infrastructure under that application. If through this process they can narrow
down the problem to a specific area or component, they will then need to pull
correlated logs potentially related to the event.
That's just one example out of a pretty long list
of technical approaches that each provide a different perspective on
application performance. In addition to application and infrastructure
monitoring, log and event correlation and byte code instrumentation, there is
also real and synthetic transaction monitoring. These technologies provide the
foundation for rapid root cause analysis and improved mean time to repair, but
to go the next step it needs to include the correlation between the
technologies. As an added bonus, wouldn't it be nice to have something like a
collaboration tool that allow work to be shared between people, too?
While the tools available today to do each of
these tasks have gotten substantially easier to use, there is still much room
for improvement in bringing all the information together from the various
sources.
Today, many vendors have brought together two or
three different application management or troubleshooting tools in context of
the application, but given the pressure on IT to improve performance with less,
the race is on to pull multiple data streams together to get a holistic view of
application performance for optimization and troubleshooting.
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About the Author
Michael Thompson, Director, Systems Management Product Marketing, SolarWinds.
Michael has worked in the IT management
industry for more than 13 years, including leading product management teams and
portfolios in the storage and virtualization/cloud spaces for IBM. He holds a
master of business administration and a bachelor's degree in chemical
engineering.