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Tag: IT management

HPE Extends IT Management Reach with OneSphere

Hewlett-Packard Enterprise (HPE) today extended OneSphere, the software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform for IT management, to include support for Microsoft Azure public clouds and the Kernel-based virtual machine (KVM) that serve as the foundation for OpenStack.

At the same time, HPE announced an update to HPE OneView, a platform for managing IT that can be deployed on-premises or in a public cloud, which makes it easier to manage farms of virtual machines. In addition, version 4.1 of HPE OneView adds support for Microsoft Azure Log Analytics and VMware vRealize Orchestrator, as well as reference configurations for Chef automation software and architecture for Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform deployed on top of HPE Synergy, a software-defined infrastructure (SDI) platform.

HPE today also revealed it has sold its one-millionth license for HPE OneView, which it launched four years ago. HPE OneSphere was launched as a suite of SaaS applications earlier this year.

Paul Miller, vice president of marketing for the Software-Defined Cloud Group at HPE, said the bulk for the HPE OneView licenses HPE sold occurred in the last 12 months as organizations realize they need to modernize how IT is managed as they build, deploy and manage their own private clouds. A big reason for increased adoption of HPE OneView is preference for an open platform that is extensible using application programming interfaces (APIs), he said.

Miller said HPE is a bifurcated approach to IT management to give IT organizations the ability to modernize IT in keeping with best DevOps practices, either by continuing to deploy an IT management platform themselves or shift to a cloud service.

In general, Miller said increased diversity in IT environments requires a different approach to managing enterprise IT, which now spans multiple public clouds and on-premises IT environments consisting of both virtual machines and physical servers. There’s a lot more focus on creating a consistent approach to managing IT in way that is seamless across people and processes, said Miller.

Making things even more challenging is the rise of containers, which today run primarily run on virtual machines but increasingly will show up on physical servers as well, once IT organizations master the skillsets needed to manage containers wherever they wind up being deployed, Miller said.

Miller also noted that organizations are finding that complying with a wide variety of regulations, such as the General Data Protection Rule (GDPR), are also forcing organizations to revisit how IT is managed.

Many IT organizations are at a crossroads when it comes to IT management. Taking advantage of SaaS applications is often an attractive option because the whole process of updating IT management frameworks is eliminated, along with the need to provision the hardware an IT management application requires. But many organizations still prefer to be able to customize their IT management frameworks in addition to contending with compliance rules that require them to deploy management software in a way they control directly.

HPE clearly wants to remain relevant to IT organizations regardless of the IT management path chosen. The challenge facing those organizations now is making a decision that is likely to dictate how enterprise IT will be managed well into the next decade.

— Mike Vizard

June 4, 2018
From One-Size-Fits-All to Custom-Fit for IT Ops

The downfall of the all-in-one IT management suite and the rise of the customized IT Ops toolchain

Here is how enterprise IT Ops used to work: you would make your choice among the Big Four vendors and buy in (quite literally!) to their strategy. This meant a suite of products that came preintegrated (more or less) out of the box, and—at least on the sales proposal—covered all of an IT organization’s needs across a huge spectrum of activities.

Photo by Barn Images on Unsplash

Broadly speaking, each of the Big Four’s suites included some flavor of the following: monitoring, ticketing, configuration management and asset tracking and automation and orchestration. Some vendors were stronger in one area than in another, but unless you had pretty specific needs, each vendor could be your one-stop shop.

Development and improvement inside these suites was mainly incremental and occurred at a fairly leisurely pace. Meanwhile, startups with bright ideas would come along occasionally and challenge the incumbents in specific areas, only to be bought by one of the mega-vendors if they showed enough promise.

There was a symbiotic relationship between vendor and IT buyer, as IT professionals built decades-long careers as experts in this or that vendor’s technology stack, with the wall of framed certifications to prove it. CIOs were reassured by the fact that there was a readily available pool of experts to hire, and continued reinvesting in the next iteration of their chosen vendor’s stack.

The Old Model No Longer Fits Modern IT

In the last decade or so, this comfortable status quo has broken down. The cracks were already showing before then, but only the most agile and forward-thinking organizations were moving fast enough to trip over them. As more and more businesses began to expect greater and greater responsiveness and speed from their IT departments, the huge sprawling suites of the mega-vendors were no longer able to keep up with the required rate of change. Leisurely 18-month release cycles no longer cut it in an agile world, where that time span may encompass several entire strategies.

In the old world, to call something “best of breed” was a sniffy dismissal of a one-trick pony, as opposed to the more supposedly versatile offerings of the Big Four. In the new world, it became obvious that aside from a handful of tentpole products that were genuinely good and fit for purpose, most of the individual components of the big suites was distinctly unexciting. Worse, the main value proposition of the suites—that they came preintegrated out of the box—started to break down as well. Many IT professionals were still fiercely loyal to individual products, but they became more willing to pick and choose, rather than buying into the whole vision.

In parallel, the rise of simple integrations—primarily REST APIs—made it easier than ever before to connect disparate solutions together into a single IT Ops toolchain. Worse (from the point of view of the incumbent vendors), sometimes it was easier to connect modern point solutions than their own component pieces, weighted down by the baggage of decades on the market.

How to Deliver the Flexibility and Agility the Business Expects?

These days, it is becoming commonly accepted even among the most staid and risk-averse organizations that the way to go is no longer to align to a single IT vendor and trust them to deliver on their vision, but rather to design custom-fit, multisolution toolchains, including home-grown, open source and commercial tools.

Photo by Max Bender on Unsplash

But what to do if you find yourself dealing with the consequences of this sort of IT monoculture?

Look Back At How You Got Here

The first step is to re-evaluate past buying decisions and strategic alignment. It is very important to do this without assigning blame; it was a different time, and those choices may well have been the right ones for the prevailing environment at the time, when integration between tools from different vendors was legitimately difficult.

Don’t Just Throw Everything Out

In many environments, too, the correct solution may well not be a clean sweep. One or more of those tentpole products that kept the overall suite looking good past its sell-by date may well still be perfectly fit for purpose and not worth the hassle of swapping out. However, other components are probably legitimately lagging behind the state of the art, in which case it is worth replacing them with something more fit for purpose.

Count Costs – All Costs

Include cost in these calculations, but remember to include all costs. Maybe you or a predecessor signed a big enterprise license agreement (ELA), so Product X is “free” in that context. But what does it cost to keep Product X running, in terms of ancillary licenses, hardware requirements and, last but not least, skill and effort on the part of the IT administrators? I don’t want to name specific products or vendors as examples, to avoid the discussion devolving into particulars, but it’s worth bearing in mind that many legacy products have shallow talent pools—not that many people are available on the market, and many of those people are coming to the ends of their careers, which makes them both expensive and reluctant to change employers. Instead, up-and-coming technologies often have much deeper and wider talent pools, with many more experienced specialists available at all salary and skill levels. If you don’t believe me, try hiring half a dozen COBOL programmers and half a dozen Node.js coders, and then we’ll talk …

Photo by Giu Vicente on Unsplash

Your IT Ops Toolchain, For Your IT Ops Needs

Moving from one of the big all-in-one suites to an assemblage of different tools, all flying in loose formation, is not easily done. Any technology transition of this sort is a Project with a capital P, and needs to be planned and managed with due care and attention. However, there is a large payoff at the end in terms of increased agility and flexibility within IT Ops. In turn, this affords IT the ability to offer their business counterparts the sort of responsive and even proactive IT support that moves IT from being a cost center, on a par with Facilities, to a strategic differentiator that enables new business initiatives.

Business as usual doesn’t cut it any more, and assumptions that used to be valid have fallen apart. Decisions based on those assumptions need to be re-evaluated. New, more flexible approaches will set up IT Ops for success in the newly flexible world we are already living in.

— Dominic Wellington

May 11, 2018
Red Hat Aims to Push IT Management to the Cloud

Red Hat at the Red Hat Summit 2018 conference this week showed a technology preview of an instance of Red Hat Insights, a predictive analytics IT management application capable of identifying operations issues before they become a problem, running as a software-as-a-service (SaaS) application.

The instance of Red Hat Insights will be extended to apply analytics to any infrastructure platform. Red Hat plans to eventually make the rest of its IT management portfolio available as a cloud service.

Joe Fitzgerald, vice president and general manager for management at Red Hat, said the goal is to enable management of virtual machines, container, infrastructure-as-a-service and physical servers all from a single pane of glass.

Cost analytics also will be embedded in those services, adds Fitzgerald. Cost is now a much bigger issue because cloud service providers bill customers based on actual consumption. Previously, a virtual machine left running on an on-premises server might result in someone being yelled at, but no additional cost, notes Fitzgerald. Now, however, if an IT organization doesn’t turn off those virtual machines, it will end up paying more.

Fitzgerald noted that management of IT operations is becoming increasingly automated. Red Hat is now adding integrations with the agentless Ansible framework it acquired in 2015 at rate of 50 a week. There already are 1,600 integrations with Ansible. He said the fact that Ansible presents IT operations teams with a declarative approach to automating IT using YAML files makes IT automation much more accessible. Other frameworks require IT operations teams to learn how to program, which becomes a significant barrier to adoption, but YAML files allow IT operations teams to make use of familiar shell scripts.

Many organizations now are moving up the IT management curve as applications become more distributed, Fitzgerald said. Every platform they have comes with its own management tools. But the need for a control plane through which multiple platforms can be centrally managed is now becoming more evident, he said, especially as IT organizations realize they will be running many different types of platforms for many years to come.

Other benefits to shifting IT management into the cloud is that the move eliminates the need to deploy a local server just to run IT management software and all updates to the IT management platform are provided by the applications provider.

Obviously, Red Hat is not the only IT vendor building a centralized, cloud-based approach to managing distributed computing environments. But as Ansible becomes more widely adopted, the opportunity arises for Red Hat to engage in a broader IT management conversation with IT organizations.

Most enterprise IT organizations are rapidly approaching something of an IT management crisis. Each platform adopted creates yet another silo that makes adopting integrated DevOps processes even more challenging. While most organizations are not likely to abandon the management tools from the vendors that built those platforms, IT organizations are demanding thet underlying infrastructure exposes an application programming interface (API). In fact, it’s the proliferation of all that software-defined infrastructure that now makes it feasible to centralize the management of IT in the cloud.

— Mike Vizard

May 10, 2018
BMC Software Advances Multi-Cloud Agenda

Long before anyone ever coined the term DevOps there were terms such as IT service management (ITSM) and IT infrastructure library (ITIL) that at one time epitomized the state of the art in help desk. Now, as IT organizations enter 2018, much of the focus in the new year will be integrating DevOps processes with legacy approaches to delivering IT as a service that still permeate the enterprise.

To achieve that goal, BMC Software has integrated BMC Remedy service desk software with the Jira project tracking software developed by Atlassian. In addition, the latest release of BMC Remedy provides support for Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure public clouds.

Nayaki Nayyar, president of digital service management at BMC Software, says the rise of both DevOps and cloud computing has clearly changed the way organizations need to manage IT. At the same time, however, traditional service desks still play a critical role in managing IT. Most enterprise IT organizations are looking to extend their investments in service desks by providing tighter integration with DevOps tools in addition to managing applications and IT infrastructure running on-premises and in a public cloud, she says.

Nayyar also notes that modern IT management tools need to be accessible to a much broader constituency. Not only do IT operations teams want to be able to manage distributed IT resources, but also developers, business leaders and others need the ability to drill down into IT processes that affect specific applications.

While there is widespread recognition of that requirement, Nayyar notes progress has been at best uneven. A recent survey of IT professionals published by BMC Software finds 80 percent of the respondents said new management approaches and tools are required for effective multi-cloud management. At the same time, however, 40 percent of the respondents readily admit their organization does not have a firm grasp on how much they are spending on cloud services.

Nayyar says it’s clear IT organizations will need to rely more on various types of cognitive and artificial intelligence technologies to manage IT at scale. To provide those capabilities, BMC Software previously outlined a strategy for infusing cognitive and AI technologies across its entire portfolio. The latest release of BMC Remedy adds support for virtual agents and chatbots, in addition the ability to automatically classify and route IT events and incidents.

Less clear is how long it will take for traditional IT organizations to modernize their environments. Large web-scale companies have already taken advantage of modern DevOps processes to transform the way IT is managed. More traditional enterprise IT organizations are still evolving, clearly borrowing many of the concepts pioneered by DevOps practitioners. But most of them don’t have the software engineering skills required to build, deploy and maintain a modern DevOps environment built from scratch. Many of them are looking to providers of packaged IT management tools to provide them with a modern DevOps experience capable of spanning both modern and legacy application environments.

Most IT organizations will employ a raft of tools to accomplish that goal. But over time, it’s also clear most of them will eventually look to consolidate many of those tools to reduce as much of the friction inside their IT environments as possible.

— Mike Vizard

January 9, 2018
HashiCorp Terraform Enterprise Empowers IT Administrators

Most of what passes for management of IT infrastructure often amounts to little more than a Word document describing how a system is configured. HashiCorp developed Terraform to enable IT organizations to programmatically manage IT infrastructure. Now the company is taking that concept a step further with the release of Terraform Enterprise, a collaboration application that can be employed to programmatically manage IT infrastructure without requiring IT administrators to know how to program.

HashiCorp co-CTO Armon Dadgar says Terraform provides an application that makes its Sentinel policy management framework more accessible. Previously, use of Terraform and Sentinel were limited largely to developers looking for a common way to manage infrastructure as code. But Dadgar says customer requests made it clear there was also demand for a collaboration application that did not require any programming skills to employ.

Terraform Enterprise includes Workspaces, a set of modules that that can be delegated to separate teams. Dadgar says Workspaces are roughly equivalent to Git repositories that have access controls for each IT team, using a secure access markup language (SAML) that comes with built-in encryption.

In addition, Terraform Enterprise exposes an application programming interface (API) that can be invoked for integration with existing tooling or application delivery pipelines. Dadgar says with the rise of multiple clouds in an organization, it’s now only a matter of time before existing approaches to managing IT infrastructure simple become obsolete. Pressure from developers to increase the amount of time it takes to provision and update IT infrastructure is only going to increase, says Dadgar.

HashiCorp is effectively trying to smooth over one of the more contentious aspects of DevOps. In theory, developers want more control over IT infrastructure largely because they often view internal IT teams as being too slow. To enable IT organizations to be more responsive, various APIs have been exposed that can be invoked using IT automation framework. Many of those frameworks, however, require programming skills that most IT administrators don’t possess. Many organizations also don’t want developers to be managing IT infrastructure when they could be devoting that time to writing and test applications. Dadgar says Terraform Enterprise provides a graphical user interface (GUI) through which all the benefits of managing infrastructure as code can be attained without having to teach administrators how to program, or allowing programmers to invoke IT infrastructure resources without any adult supervision.

HashiCorp is not the only provider of IT management frameworks trying to solve this issue. There are rival declarative frameworks for automating IT and many providers of the latest generation of software-defined infrastructure are embedding modern IT management frameworks within pre-integrated systems. But HashiCorp is one of the few vendors providing organizations with a dual approach using the same core underlying set of APIs. Rather than continuing to be at odds with one another, developers and IT administrators now could find it easier to collaborate using whatever approach to infrastructure as a code they best see fit.

— Mike Vizard

December 21, 2017
4 Ways to Give DevOps Teams the Support They Need

If it weren’t hard enough for IT infrastructure teams to innovate and keep the lights on, a host of technologies designed to drive efficiencies are introducing new levels of complexity across the data center. Virtualization, cloud computing, software-defined storage and digital are making it much more difficult for the infrastructure team to control, manage and administer an organization’s IT.

Just when IT professionals think they’ve figured out the support model, DevOps steps in. As the number of apps continues to explode, more organizations are adopting a DevOps model to accelerate development efforts. A recent Coleman Parkes Research survey of 1,770 senior business and IT executives revealed 87 percent have adopted DevOps.

Unsurprisingly, the growing emphasis on DevOps is placing an added burden on infrastructure teams already struggling to cope with the digital transformation of their organizations. Traditional storage systems are often unable to match DevOps’ requirements for an enterprise infrastructure that is simple, flexible and automated. Some DevOps teams also work in silos, which produces an additional level of complexity and opportunities for failure.

Also, occasional tensions between development and IT operations can flare up over different approaches to infrastructure and competition for resources.

IT operations teams with traditional storage hardware backgrounds are normally focused on accelerated release cycles, availability, reliability and streamlined data management. Developers, on the other hand, spend little time thinking about what technology they need versus keeping test data up to date with production and having easy access to capacity when needed.

A Support Structure That Works

Set against this backdrop, choosing the right platform to underpin these growing changes within the enterprise cloud can play a big part in ensuring a DevOps model that works and makes life easier for the IT infrastructure team. Here are four ways to help make the enterprise cloud infrastructure fit a DevOps model:

Copy Data Management

Copy data management provides up-to-date, “virtual” copies of production data to the DevOps team, eliminating the need for physical data duplication. Copy data management helps remove the load on production storage and protects the performance of applications. With snapshots, cloning and replication, modern enterprise cloud systems can enable data copies. The same technologies make it possible to protect and manage the development side of the environment in case of failure or data corruption.

QoS and Performance Guarantees

Quality of service (QoS) and guaranteed performance is a significant concern when adopting DevOps. QoS enables IT to allocate different storage workloads to control performance. QoS can set levels of maximum and minimum input/output operations per second (IOPS) or bandwidth. IT can also configure QoS at the virtual machine (VM) or virtual disk (vDisk) level. With the power of all-flash, DevOps can be consolidated on the same platform as production. This makes it easier to access production data sets and reduce the storage footprint.

Monitoring and Troubleshooting

The ability to monitor the infrastructure and correct problems and misconfigurations rapidly is valuable when moving to a DevOps environment with continuous integration and continuous deployment. Ideally, the foundations of an enterprise cloud platform should provide basic and advanced monitoring capabilities, predictive analytics, integration with other monitoring tools and VM-level monitoring.

Automation

From an infrastructure point of view, it is also critical to provide the capability to provision and manage IT infrastructure programmatically. Automation enables organizations to create and break down environments as needed, incorporate advanced features such as snapshots and cloning as daily workflows, and eliminate the potential for error from manual or interactive configuration.

As organizations move relentlessly to a mixture of virtual and physical, on-premises and cloud-based IT, infrastructure teams have to manage, control and administer all those resources while matching them to a diverse range of business, development and user requirements. By implementing an enterprise cloud platform that can work across physical and virtual environments, infrastructure teams can help DevOps teams achieve their goals without constraints around performance, scalability, manageability, resilience or flexibility.

IT organizations are achieving this level of support by replicating the agility of public cloud within the data center to make it easier to manage enterprise and cloud-native applications. This approach can help support the DevOps model and ensure it is implemented with as little friction and disruption to the infrastructure as possible.

About the Author / Chuck Dubuque

Chuck Dubuque is the VP, Product Marketing at Tintri. Prior to Tintri, he was at Red Hat where, as director of product marketing for the virtualization business unit, he was responsible for Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV) and Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform (RHEL-OSP) market strategy. Before Red Hat, Chuck worked at a value-added reseller for VMware, NetApp and Cisco and also spent several years in biotechnology in marketing and business development. Follow him on Twitter.

July 31, 2017
‘Best’ is Relative, but Starts at the Top

Your aging mom needs a new car. You are picking it out for her because she quit paying attention to cars long ago. All you ever buy is Fords. You also always buy trucks. Do you pop off and buy your Mom an F350? Not unless she actually needs an F350 (highly unlikely, but aging moms are as varied as any other group of people, so maybe). Why? Simply because you are buying a vehicle to solve a problem: Your mother’s need for a new car.

Ford F350

Setting the parameters of decision-making is the CIO’s role. Or at least a part of it. IT has struggled with justification since its inception. Far too often we are justifying choices that are made before justification is carried out. Browser wars, OS wars, language fights … all have marred IT practically from the day that an IT staff became necessary.

The fact of the matter is that people have preferences, and organizations do, too. If you have 300 instances of Oracle database running, you have investment in staff, training, licenses, etc. that you can reuse if Oracle is a choice on the next project. Contrast this with “the next project” containing a purchased package that only works with SQL Server. The two are natural tensions that need to be figured out.

In far too many cases we zero in on what an individual thinks is best or “right,” and not on the needs of the organization across projects. On the development side, Agile has made this more of an issue than it has been in a long time, maybe ever. Simply put, the faster the better is the rule for Agile, but long-term ramifications of that approach can be large. If internally developed apps vary from NoSQL to SQL server to Hadoop to Oracle and you’re having to maintain all of the above, both in Ops and in Dev, you may have delivered quickly, but the accrued cost—call it the mortgaged technical debt—can be expensive over the long term.

And the way that we end up with multiple solutions to a given problem is by allowing champions to drive their point home in a vacuum. While it is great when an employee says, “I know a [needed library, tool, app] that will solve this and I can have it running in a day,” there is a larger picture that needs to be considered.

DevOps definitely gives us the opportunity to review these choices and put a stake in the ground. Sometimes the internal champion is right, and that’s the tool to use in this scenario. Sometimes they’re not, and an already implemented tool/library/app should be used. But the conversation needs to happen.

I wrote about some of this back when I worked for F5. It was amazing to me the number of customers who purchased F5’s very expensive gear, then set it up as a load balancer and went looking elsewhere for WAN optimization or security solutions, when the BIG-IP could do the job. That’s a good example of waste, but just the tip of the iceberg.

When implementing DevOps on the Ops side, take a look at what you have. If you’re writing the same script for three different targets, it is probably time to go find out why. The reasons might be perfectly acceptable, but they might not be. If purchased apps really only support one product for AAA, then that product is probably required, even if it means propagating logins across to the corporate standard AAA tool.

But the process to make certain these decisions are being made intelligently, with a focus on standardization but adaptability to handle exception cases, is driven from the top. Stressing that first choice is X, but Y and Z are acceptable alternatives for projects of priority three and above is important. Stressed from the top it says, “We have standards, and we all need to try to adhere to them to keep workloads down as much as possible, but we have a business to support, and will make exceptions where business value is added.”

It’s not always easy. Not politically, and not technologically. Sometimes the solution available internally isn’t a perfect fit for a given problem, but long-term, the work required to make it solve the problem is less than the expense (in duplicated expertise and licensing fees, let alone duplicated DevOps scripts) to drop an easier solution in. IT staff are smart folks and fully capable of making those decisions, but the direction to do so must come from the top. Without it, some will aim for standardization over speed of implementation, some the opposite. Inevitably, many will aim for what is easiest for them.

I have worked in two industries where data went from paper in filing cabinets to microfiche to mainframes to client/server to virtualization and/or cloud. Don’t assume what you’re doing only matters for now. Make the rules, ask the tough questions such as, “What do we have in-house that could fulfill this function?” and expect honest answers.

And if you’re going to do calculations such as TCO or ROI, make sure the team knows you want the numbers to lead to the solution, not the other way around. Because we all have seen the case where the solution changed how the numbers were calculated, and that just wastes everyone’s time.

So step up, Mr. CIO. Get Mom the Focus or a Honda—whatever will suit her needs. Not what you’ve always done, and not what is easiest for you to do. Set the rules so the team knows what decision criteria are, and make them clear so there is no miscommunication. And finally, give your DevOps team the room to make consolidation recommendations. If they’re seeing duplication of effort, let them call attention to it, and have a process to resolve their concerns. In the end, a simple, “No, that duplication is necessary because of X,” or “Yes, we should consolidate,” needs to come out of that process for each recommendation they make.

And if your Mom is that one that drives an F350, send me a picture of her by the truck. I’ll talk to the editors about getting it posted.

— Don Macvittie

November 1, 2016
Top 10 IT Management Tools

Staying up with the latest IT management tools is akin to keeping up on the latest Starbucks drink options. We simplify it here through a look at the most useful tools, from monitoring to DevOps orchestration and APM.

IT management tools have entered a new heyday, thanks to the advent of cloud, DevOps and mobile computing. With all of the new types of infrastructure, software and development methods, developers and IT managers need simple automation to get through the day. But with hundreds of IT management and DevOps tools on the marketplace today, both open source and commercial, it’s hard to know where to start.

The global DevOps tools market alone is expected to be worth $3 billion by 2019, according to Technavio. While there are many applications to choose from, we have compiled a list of our favorites below. Some of these are tried and true, while others are newfangled and still in their early days of experimentation.

Microsoft System Center Operations Manager (SCOM)

IT Operations Management and IT Service Management

Microsoft SCOM is a legacy enterprise infrastructure monitoring and management tool that delivers comprehensive coverage for the Microsoft ecosystem of assets and devices, whether they are installed on internal data centers or in the cloud. SCOM has evolved over the years to monitor network and storage along with Unix-based systems.

Cautions: Since SCOM is a deep monitoring tool that collects data from many different systems, it generates a large volume of data and alerts that can overwhelm systems administrators and IT managers.

Vistara

IT Operations Management and IT Service Management

Vistara is a comprehensive tool for monitoring heterogeneous multivendor assets and devices, whether installed on-premise or in the cloud. It covers a wide swath of Microsoft and Unix applications and systems, major enterprise vendors such as Oracle and Symantec, and top storage and networking technologies. Vistara also integrates well with other monitoring tools. A unique feature of Vistara is that it records all user sessions, which provides an audit trail for tracing system changes and other events.

Cautions: Vistara is a powerful, multifunctional tool and needs to be set up properly to derive the maximum benefits.

SolarWinds

Network Monitoring

SolarWinds is a leading tool for managing and monitoring performance of a multivendor distributed network environment. The tool delivers a lot of useful metrics, including performance, capacity and downtime. It is particularly useful in companies with many locations, such as a retail brand, or a national or multinational company with a large number of branch offices and locations.

Cautions: SolarWinds does not provide comprehensive monitoring for servers or storage systems.

(Editor’s Note: SolarWinds reached out to devopsy.kinsta.cloud to clarify that it does offer comprehensive monitoring for servers and storage systems through its Server & Application Monitor and Storage Resource Monitor tools.)

Nimsoft (CA)

Network Monitoring

Nimsoft is another excellent network monitoring tool, but is best-suited for an on-premise (internal data center) environment that has standardized on a few types of equipment and has a low rate of change. A company that is adding new technologies and devices frequently won’t find the tool to be flexible enough to adapt to evolving needs.

Cautions: This legacy tool is not ideal for diverse and fast-changing IT environments.

ServiceNow

IT Service Management

ServiceNow is well-known in the industry for comprehensive service management, including service level management, financial management, incident management, availability management, change and release management and more. ServiceNow has the broadest coverage for all ITIL activities, making it the de facto standard for service management and suitable for use in small companies up to the enterprise.

Cautions: Because this tool is so flexible, you can easily customize it to meet your organization’s specific needs. Beware that by doing so, you’ll need a full-time administrator to manage the customized system.

Chef/Puppet

DevOps Automation and Management

When it comes to tools for managing cloud application development and deployment, Chef and Puppet have near-cult status among developers. Companies occasionally use them both, but there is overlap between the tools. Chef is ideal for DevOps provisioning, orchestration and configuration management and is a more flexible platform overall, featuring auto rollback to previous versions. Chef also provides real-time visibility into metrics and messages. Puppet is best for DevOps automation and administration and is a highly prescriptive, process-driven platform that does not allow shortcuts, which should make IT Operations people happy.

Cautions: Chef and Puppet are used primarily by developers, not IT Ops, and therefore raise some level of caution if developers are spending too much time managing the tools vs. writing code.

Docker

DevOps/Containerization

Docker is the industry-leading tool for DevOps automation of application deployment inside software containers. It can be used for nearly any software project and infrastructure environment, and is especially helpful for managing dependencies and version inconsistencies. The application is a game-changer for simplifying the complexities of deployment. Docker containers wrap up a piece of software in a single, portable unit that contains everything it needs to run: code, runtime, system tools, system libraries and so on.

Cautions: Docker’s approach to security is still unproven, and some believe it is not up to enterprise security standards.

Apache Mesos/Google Kubernetes

DevOps/Clustering

Apache Mesos is best for cluster management and utilization for distributed applications in a DevOps world, while Google Kubernetes is ideal for automating deployment, scaling, and operations of application containers across clusters of hosts. Clustering tools sit on top of hardware and increase utilization through effective workload management and resource-sharing. They work in both public and private cloud infrastructure environments, across many different platforms, and allow IT organizations to run more workloads on the same hardware. While both of these tools are fairly new, Mesos has been around longer and is more appropriate for large environments with heavy management and scale needs.

Cautions: When looking at small clusters of say, fewer than a dozen nodes, Mesos may be an overly complex solution.

New Relic

Application Monitoring

New Relic is well-known for its real-time capabilities in monitoring and managing web and mobile applications within cloud, hybrid and on-premise infrastructure. For an APM tool, New Relic is strong at identifying server-based performance issues. It also allows for real user page performance tracking so you can see if certain classes of users (for instance, by region) are having worse performance than others.

Cautions: New Relic does not capture 100 percent of transactions, but does a sampling. This may or may not be important depending upon your business needs. It is also somewhat rigid, and may not be too flexible in an environment that has a lot of microservices.

Graphite/Grafana

Dashboards

Graphite and Grafana are two leading graph and dashboard builder for visualizing time series metrics. The tools are particularly useful for analyzing metrics and other types of data from on-premise systems, public cloud, private cloud and IoT systems.

Grafana is most commonly used for visualizing time series data for Internet infrastructure and application analytics but is also used in domains including industrial sensors, home automation, weather and process control.

Graphite is excellent at visualizing data and metrics.

Cautions: You will need a complex and elaborate configuration of databases to gather the data and a compute engine to generate the dashboard.

About the Author/Ravikumar Raghavenderrao

Ravi RRK, as he is known, is the Vice President – Service Delivery at NetEnrich. Ravi’s responsibilities include service delivery management, customer satisfaction, and new service introduction. Ravi’s team also has the responsibility to ensure and enforce quality and policy standards across the NetEnrich organization.

Ravi has over two decades of experience in the IT industry in the areas of remote infrastructure management, delivery and large account management. Prior to joining NetEnrich, Ravi spent over 20 years at Wipro Technologies in various positions. Ravi holds a Bachelor of Engineering (Mechanical) degree from Osmania University and a Master of Engineering (Mechanical) degree from the Indian Institute of Science.

April 27, 2016