Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2018.  Read them in this 10th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.

Contributed by Josh Williams, product manager, Blue Medora

VMware Enables the Enterprise to Finally Embrace Real-Time Data

At VMworld Europe in September we (Blue Medora) were excited to announce the Blue Medora True Visibility Suite for VMware's Wavefront. The suite extends real-time analytical capabilities across the enterprise IT stack, offering insight into applications, data tier, infrastructure and even hardware. It follows VMware's acquisition of Wavefront earlier in the year.

It's an exciting development for VMware too - combining its enterprise-ready vRealize Operations with what is often described as the ultimate in streaming metrics monitoring (the Wavefront platform) to digital enterprises. It's an important step for delivering industry-leading multi-cloud management products. As microservices become the norm, the need to process real-time data becomes paramount.

So obviously the next step is VMware offering new integrations for Wavefront that can complement application-oriented analysis with signals from database and infrastructure origins.

Enterprise IT meets DevOps

As enterprises transform their digital platforms to support faster innovation through DevOps approaches, accessing and analyzing IT system data becomes more important than ever. Metrics monitoring at web scale identifies performance and reliability anomalies that impact customer experience, but can only deliver on this promise when the source data is from the entire IT stack.

So my prediction is that the integration of vRealize Operations and Wavefront has the potential to allow Operations teams to quickly and easily consume infrastructure operations metrics and telemetry from across their systems whether on premises or in the cloud, without requiring agent-based instrumentation. Collected data then can be analyzed within Wavefront by VMware to isolate performance anomalies and correlate root cause based on end user impact. So how easy is this going to be?

Yin Meets Yang

VMware vRealize Operations offers a user friendly interface and dashboards to clearly monitor key performance metrics - not surprising for enterprise infrastructure technology. It typically collects data every five minutes - every one minute as most - which is often sufficient.

In contrast, Wavefront comes with much more of a DevOps focus, showing a steady stream of metrics coming in by the millisecond. It is then left to the DevOps person to manipulate this data themselves, relying on strong mathematics and analytics skills. Wavefront is instantaneous, rapid metric collection with users expected to use complex mathematical equations. Sophisticated analytics are effectively built into the platform to enable anomaly detection.

Take, for example, a database on the backend of a web application. Maybe that web application only experiences large amounts of traffic on the weekend. So if you're using traditional anomaly detection, the sudden spike in traffic during the weekend would seem abnormal. But by using things like IQR, you can take an entire timeframe into account when calculating abnormalities. By doing this, the sudden spike every weekend is not viewed as abnormal. Instead, it would be more abnormal for little to no traffic to occur.

As Wavefront requires a strong mathematics and analytics background to manipulate, I've been thinking about how VMware will make it more user friendly, making DevOps capabilities more accessible to other departments. The obvious step would be for the two technologies to be integrated into one platform.

With the growth in SaaS-based platforms like Wavefront, Datadog, Signal FX, AppDynamics etc. clearly VMware must keep current and adapt to the mass movement to the cloud. It's hard to be an on premise solution at this point. Cloud-scale companies require radically new metrics monitoring to help improve the performance, availability and customer experience of their digital services.

But they represent two very different architectures. Collecting metrics from Wavefront is quite complicated as it views everything as raw metrics, leaving customers to manipulate and monitor. In contrast vRealize Operations provides a full view of all areas in the infrastructure with user friendly dashboard and interfaces. Conversely, this means it's actually challenging to fine-tune vRealize Operations to the degree Wavefront can be fine-tuned.

Conclusion

With Wavefront, VMware has the opportunity to offer the most comprehensive suite of enterprise-class IT system operations data, closing the analytics gaps for leading data center, cloud and database technologies with real-time monitoring analytics. It's monitoring, troubleshooting and capacity planning across virtual environments, giving customers a holistic representation of their network, infrastructure and application environments.

So I'm excited to see how VMware helps in productizing and integrating Wavefront, making it more user friendly beyond hard core DevOps teams. Only then can it gain widespread popularity across enterprise IT.

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