Overview

At Veryx we are excited that we have just released Cloudmon ITIM – an IT Infrastructure Monitoring tool for the next generation of IT infrastructure. But with so many ITIM tools in the market, the reaction is often – “Another ITM tool? Why bother with another ITIM tool now?”

Increased demand for IT infrastructure monitoring

As a result of massive digital transformation underway and the impact of Covid-19, more and more organizations are rapidly adopting advanced technologies within their IT infrastructure. IT departments are upgrading existing systems to make them capable of adopting hardware changes, support machine virtualization, and run applications across disparate data centers. Managing hybrid IT infrastructure continues becoming more complex, larger, and more distributed. As a consequence, IT teams often experience blind-spots and skill-gaps in trying to monitor their IT infrastructure and troubleshoot issues. According to Persistence Market Research (PMR)[1] “IT Infrastructure Monitoring Market would cross US$ 43 Bn Valuation in 2030, amidst the need for smooth operations while working remotely during COVID-19 pandemic created more demands.” This projection also includes related services segment as a large component, implying that businesses would increasingly rely on managed service providers (MSPs). According to Markets and Markets[2] , “Infrastructure Monitoring Market is expected to grow at a CAGR of 17.65% from 2020 to 2027.“ While the demand for IT Infrastructure Monitoring tools and services is a given, the key point to keep in mind is that IT Infrastructure Monitoring now requires a new class of tools and capabilities, that can help IT teams monitor their diverse environments and at the same time be proactive and remediate incidents quickly. According to Gartner[3], “Due to the inherent resiliency in IT architecture, the need for real-time capturing of uptime data is no longer considered crucial. This is especially true for an enterprise that has adopted architectures with cloud-native characteristics. I&O can now focus primarily on performance insights.” According to PMR, these new class of IT Infrastructure monitoring tools provide immediate visibility into system performance, enabling users to quickly detect problems and identify trends. These tools enable faster, easier, and more affordable way for system administrators and site engineers to identify and correct infrastructure problems.

Key shortcomings in the current generation of tools

Gartner reports that traditional IT infrastructure monitoring (ITIM) tools capture the health and resource utilization of IT infrastructure components that reside in a data center, the edge, infrastructure as a service (IaaS) or platform as a service (PaaS) in the cloud. This enables infrastructure and operations (I&O) leaders to monitor and collate the availability and resource utilization metrics of physical and virtual entities, including servers, containers, networks, database instances, hypervisors and storage. However, IT teams today experience key shortcomings in these tools such as:

• Lack of ability to proactively respond to failure and deterioration occurring in the infrastructure
• Lack of ability to effectively “pull” data from various vendor-based IT infrastructure, including new approaches such as cloud-native architectures, multi-cloud, dynamic infrastructure
• In-sufficient granularity of measurement, since more polling approaches use large timing intervals (typically 5 minutes)
• Lack of ability to measure real-time impact to the end-users and customers
• Lack of ability to support adoption of DevOps and site reliability engineering (SRE) practices to leverage the fault-tolerant attributes and the agility offered by new architectures.

Enter Veryx Cloudmon ITIM

Veryx Cloudmon ITIM delivers the following key capabilities which are critical to monitoring in the current and emerging IT environments:

• Consolidation of IT monitoring tools leading to lower total cost of ownership (TCO),
• Ability to proactively and quickly respond to failure and deterioration occurring in the infrastructure,
• Lower IT support effort and mean-time-taken-to-repair,
• Being agnostic to vendor toolsets and technologies,
• Providing high visibility across servers, networks and hosts,
• Ability to measure real-time experience by remote users,
• High accuracy at low monitoring intervals (as low as 1 sec), and
• Automation capabilities to support DevOps and SRE practices

Let’s now delve into more detail on each of the above capabilities.

1. Consolidation of IT monitoring tools leading to lower total cost of ownership (TCO)

Veryx Cloudmon ITIM performs the function of several tools rolled into one:

• Performance Monitoring of legacy servers and virtualized servers,
• Performance Monitoring of Cloud platforms and SaaS applications,
• Performance Monitoring of network devices,
• Performance Monitoring of WAN, and
• Performance Monitoring of remote end point devices

Thus, rather than causing operational silos resulting in increases in root cause identification times, handoffs between teams and resulting in increased operational costs, Cloudmon ITIM provides the opportunity to significantly reduce IT operation costs from both an efficiency of time and software licensing perspective, leading to lower TCO.

2. Ability to proactively respond to failure and deterioration occurring in the infrastructure

Cloudmon ITIM is able to generate alarms based on intelligent alert notifications that give warnings for potential disruptions before they occur. This helps IT teams to potentially fix issues before users are even aware of them.

3. Lower IT support effort and mean-time-taken-to-repair (MTTR)

Veryx Cloudmon ITIM provides intelligent alert notifications and higher visibility, enabling IT teams to be fully aware of their environment status. This results in significantly reducing IT team’s trouble-shooting efforts and MTTR.

4. Being agnostic to vendor toolsets and technologies

Most business today have a hybrid-cloud environment, with IT resources being distributed across on-premise and cloud. These consist of multiple vendor technologies in each of the them – ranging from operating systems (Linux, Windows), vendor-specific distributions and versions, virtual environments (VMware, RedHat, Xen etc.), public cloud (AWS, Azure, GCP etc.) with their offerings of virtual environments and cloud-native architectures. While traditional tools mainly use integration with vendor-based proprietary toolsets, this approach not only tends to create inconsistencies of feature support across vendors, but also increases the cost of monitoring, since monitoring features often come at additional cost. Veryx Cloudmon ITIM uses probe, agent and SNMP-based approaches, which inherently are open and standards based.

5. Providing high visibility across servers, networks and hosts

Veryx Cloudmon ITIM uses a comprehensive approach to monitor servers, networks and hosts, using a combination of the following methods, resulting in high visibility:

• Cloudmon ITIM Agent is a lightweight software that resides on servers and host (on-premise and remote computers) for collection of system KPIs and health parameters.
• Cloudmon ITIM Probe collects accurate network QoS measurements across the environment as well as availability metrics on agent-less servers and hosts.
• Servers, routers and switches which support SNMP may also be monitored using SNMP, though the metrics reported using Cloudmon ITIM Agent would be far superior.

6. Ability to measure real-time experience by remote users

Post-Covid mandatory work from home (WFH) requirements have resulted in the need for all organizations to ensure that remote workers are able to work with the same level of productivity as they would have if they worked from their offices. IT teams would be ineffective unless they are able to ensure that remote workers devices are able to function well. Cloudmon ITIM agents installed in remote host devices, enable IT teams to monitor remote devices proactively for health, performance, usage pattern etc. They can also perform troubleshooting more effectively based on measurements from remote devices.

7. High accuracy with low monitoring intervals

Cloudmon ITIM is capable of handling monitoring intervals as low as 1 second. This means that IT teams are able to capture and understand telemetry at a magnitude of scale higher, as compared with current tools that can only handle 5-minute intervals. This becomes essential for monitoring business critical servers and workloads, SaaS endpoints, critical devices and networks. While this capability results in higher volumes of telemetry data, Cloudmon ITIM is able to provide higher monitoring granularity only where needed and optimizes the data so collected.

8. Automation to support DevOps and SRE practices

Cloudmon ITIM supports automation capabilities that enable IT teams to leverage fault-tolerant attributes and the agility offered by newer architectures and third-party tools for IT services management (ITSM) and AIOps.

Summary

Veryx Cloudmon ITIM delivers several key capabilities which are critical to the observability of current and emerging IT infrastructure technologies. It supports open standards-based approaches and provides much needed versatility, flexibility and scalability for business of all sizes, with reduction in TCO. More information about Veryx Cloudmon ITIM is available here.

References

1.IT Infrastructure Monitoring Market to Cross US$ 43 Bn Valuation in 2030; Need for Smooth Operations While Working Remotely during COVID-19 Pandemic Surging Demand. Persistence Market Research. News release July 23, 2020, 2.Infrastructure Monitoring Market, by Markets and Markets, January 2018. 3.Market Guide for IT Infrastructure Monitoring Tools, Gartner, 17 December 2019

About the Author

David Charlu is the CEO and co-founder of Veryx Technologies. He oversees strategy, development and commercialization of the company’s capabilities.

About Veryx Technologies

Veryx is an innovative provider of visibility, security, monitoring and testing solutions for enterprises, cloud providers, data centers and telcos, to efficiently manage their networks and infrastructure. Building on two decades of experience in telco and equipment vendor markets, Veryx is constantly innovating to provide highly automated and flexible solutions, thereby customers can focus on what they do best – grow their business. Veryx has technology and marketing partnerships with global players in the communications networking industry.