How To Create A Cloud Monitoring Platform

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1 New Revenue Opportunities for Service Providers IN Public, Private or Hybrid Cloud Applications Next-Generation IT Monitoring provides a Business Intelligence Layer across Hybrid Environments Overview Service Providers are always looking for new service opportunities with high margins and low delivery costs. While IT and Cloud Monitoring is not new, Centerity s next-generation approach combined with a service-centric focus is. This service-centric approach is what is needed to promote the transition to the 3 rd Platform of IT Innovation described by IDC in a 2014 report. Legacy monitoring tools were typically created with one of the following two approaches in mind. The first approach was technology domain-centric meaning that these tools focused only a single technology domain. This silo-ed approach focuses on only one technology and can t understand its impact or interdependency with other technologies in delivering a service. The second approach was, in theory, a cross-domain approach with aspirations of being a serviceoriented platform but being an assembly of silo-ed approaches lacks the dynamism necessary in today s complex, hybrid environments. Centerity s new approach to Cloud Monitoring is to create a unified platform providing end-toend coverage via a single, software appliance purpose built to be both service-centric and application-centric. Due to its broad coverage, Centerity can offer comprehensive Business Service Management (BSM) process views where technology interdependencies are well understood enabling IT to become a dynamic business-driven culture. New Revenue Opportunities Centerity is now providing Service Providers with new revenue opportunities for advanced monitoring of public, private and hybrid cloud applications. In a 2013 CIO survey, 78% of respondents said they considered it highly important to be able to manage data seamlessly across multiple cloud environments. Centerity s next-gen platform is equally competent with on-prem or off-prem applications including applications that span both! Moreover, through Centerity s BSM application-centric capabilities, it can provide business process views and do predictive, trend and route cause analysis independent of location. These features and the ones discussed below are essential to providing service-centric deliverables that customers are now demanding.

2 Application-Centric Opportunities via a Next-Gen Platform Centerity s unified platform is delivered as a single, software appliance which has two significant advantages. First, it s a single solution with all features and functionality included as a unified bundle leading to an extremely short time-to-value (TTV). Secondly, as new technologies are added into the mix, metrics from these can be immediately collected and distributed throughout the platform thus maintaining end-to-end business process views of applications no matter how dynamic the environment. The ability to rapidly extend monitoring coverage to new or novel technologies is essential to attracting new customers and retaining existing ones. Some prime examples of this are Big Data Layer deployments such as SAP HANA, Hadoop and NoSQL, new applications on converged infrastructures or reference architectures like VCE s Vblocks or EMC s VSPEX, and distributed applications spanning cloud and on-prem facilities. These are high profile, high impact applications that are prioritized and well-funded. More importantly, these applications require real-time monitoring and alerting in complex, dynamic environments where complete, end-toend visibility and real-time business process views are essential. Combine this visibility with the ability to drill into each contributing technology layer via a single console to do rapid root cause, trend and impact analysis is key to reducing MTTR. Only a comprehensive and flexible platform that is as dynamic and extensible as the IT environment will do. To be able to extend coverage to these new applications and technologies quickly and efficiently, cloud monitoring platforms need to be able to quickly build procedures that will query new performance metrics and normalize same so these can be shared by all features in the platform. Furthermore, enterprise and carrier class Cloud Monitoring platforms require the deployment flexibility and agility that comes with having multiple agentless and many agentbased capture methodologies that are both light-weight and efficient. Having limited capture approaches is insufficient and will leave gaps in coverage ultimately limiting business process views. Enterprise and carrier class cloud monitoring platforms need to be able to handle multiple clients on a single instance via multi-tenanted architectures for obvious operational efficiencies. Lastly, these monitoring platforms must also be able to rapidly expand to any size environment with federated scalability. This means more revenue for Service Providers that deploy Centerity! More Margin via reduced Complexity, MTTR & OPEX One IDC research report shows that IT operations typically spends over 70% of its time on dayto-day IT management operations monitoring, troubleshooting, patching, updating and configuring resources leaving little time to deliver business value or enable the business. With respect to the monitoring, this is especially true of legacy tools whether deployed individually or

3 collectively. In a Case Study with the Israeli Air Force (IAF), the IAF reports that With the All-in- One visibility of Centerity Monitor, the Israeli Air Force is now able to monitor and maintain its critical information systems far more effectively while realizing significant cost savings. When compared with other enterprise and carrier class solutions, Centerity is up to 80% less expensive when all costs are considered including CAPEX, OPEX, human resource and maintenance costs due to the overly complex, inflexible and unscalable characteristics of these legacy systems. The IAF also reports that Because of its fully featured, unified platform, Centerity was able to deliver next-generation [application-centric] BSM at a fraction of the cost while increasing business service availability and reducing MTTR by up to 80%. Furthermore, the IAF reports that Centerity was the most complete solution evaluated in terms of features, functionality and integration and had much greater value to the IAF in terms of visibility into our IT environment with deployment flexibility and future scalability. All this means higher margins for Service Providers that deploy Centerity! Five Data Center and IT Infrastructure Lessons from the Cloud Giants Per a Forrester paper entitled Five Data Center and IT Infrastructure Lessons from the Cloud Giants, the lessons are as follows: Lesson No. 1: Bring IT Process Automation to the Facilities Level Lesson No. 2: Prioritize Speed-To-Market and Standardization Over Customization Lesson No. 3: Automate Basic IT Infrastructure Processes Lesson No. 4: Shift from Infrastructure Management to Infrastructure Service Delivery Lesson No. 5: Break Down Organizational Silos Lesson No. 1: Bring IT Process Automation to the Facilities Level While Lesson No. 1 in this paper deals mostly with power and cooling management, it s important to note that Centerity can monitor the passive environmental systems holistically with all the other critical KPIs in the IT environment. Many monitoring solutions profess to cover many IT elements at the physical and network layers but few if any of these vendors monitor passive environmental equipment such as computer room air conditioning (CRAC) units, heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) units, uninterruptible power supply units (UPS) or power distribution units (PDU). Furthermore, most vendors do not cover elements like alarms, security cameras, weights, valves and open doors to name a few. However, these environmental units are vital for the continuous support of critical infrastructure for Data Centers, NOCs, laboratories, pharmaceutical testing facilities, hospitals, utilities and applications that must always be available. Controlling these systems and the associated costs is a key contributor to improved margins.

4 Lesson No. 2: Prioritize Speed-To-Market and Standardization Over Customization Lesson No. 2 states that while customized infrastructures are not sustainable, these are typically what the business wants. This paper states that Service Providers must strike the most efficient balance possible between consistent, efficient automation and custom configurations where necessary per client. With Centerity, Service Providers and customers can have the best of both worlds! Centerity s unified platform was designed from the ground up to be a single platform with a unified approach to deployment, metric capture, dashboards, reporting, automation, discovery, template process modeling and hierarchical relationships. While these attributes greatly contribute to a standardized approach to monitoring across technical and functional domains, these also provide considerable latitude for custom operational configuration, executive dashboards, visual layouts, reporting and deployment. With Centerity, Service Providers, IT organizations and business users can have it both ways! Lesson No. 3: Automate Basic IT Infrastructure Processes Lesson No. 3 states that while process automation is key, most IT organizations have trouble developing and defining processes sufficiently to achieve automation. While the process of turning manual processes into automated ones can be challenging, Centerity can help here. Through our Business Service Management (BSM) facilities, we can help organizations model process behavior by helping Service Providers map which technology layers relate to which business processes and how performance KPIs impact these layers across domains. In terms of bringing new devices or applications into service, Centerity can help Service Providers by providing standard profile templates turning new monitoring challenges into revenue opportunities. Furthermore, Centerity s robust platform can initiate proactive actions based on systemic conditions by rebooting devices or executing pre-defined scripts. These features will provide management and administration with real-time, actionable intelligence coupled with automated procedures to maximize the efficiencies of IT across the board. Lesson No. 4: Shift from Infrastructure Management to Infrastructure Service Delivery Lesson No. 4 emphases the importance of virtualization and abstraction in service delivery. Centerity can support both with its coverage for all the industry standard virtualization tools (VMware, Hyper-V, Xen, KVM) and abstraction methodologies such as OpenStack. What this section also emphasizes is that Time-to-Market trumps most other considerations. With Centerity s unified platform, deployable as a single software appliance, Centerity can be up and running in hours or days for most deployments and in a few weeks for the most complex, challenging environments. No other enterprise-class or carrier-class solution can do this! Lesson No. 5: Break Down Organizational Silos Lesson No 5 states that Service Providers view tight coordination between IT teams as essential to driving greater SLA achievement; however, legacy or silo-ed tools don t contribute to tight coordination across technical and functional domains these do just the opposite! What is

5 needed is a single platform that can cover all IT assets and one that can act as a Manager-of- Managers (MOM) on an exception basis. This will re-enforce a collaborative environment where management and administrators alike can share the same view of the entire environment, endto-end, by having a single business intelligence layer that can act as a single version of the true. There will be less debate on what is the root cause of an incident is or on what remediative actions are appropriate! Dynamic, Service-Centric Platforms Today s hybrid environments are more complex than ever before. Currently, most IT organizations are using legacy monitoring tools focused on a single technology silo that only alert IT after something has gone wrong. Today s hybrid environments contain physical, virtual, application and cloud assets that may be on prem, off prem or both! Service Providers need a solution that: will present end-to-end, operational status in a clear intuitive way; reduce operational complexity, MTTR and OPEX; reduce visibility gaps and present real-time views of applications and business processes; provide impact, trend & root cause analysis that spans technical and functional domains; acts as a business intelligence layer across the entire IT environment; and increases job and customer satisfaction, retention and revenue. With respect to monitoring maturity, at the most basic level, Service Providers rely on tools provided by various hardware and software vendors. Such tools have limited functionality and are only focused on an individual technology silo. Typically, these have no ability to do predictive, trend and impact analysis in its own domain not to mention across technical domain correlation. These tools are more useful after an incident has occurred rather than to anticipate future events. Furthermore, these tools will have little or no automation capabilities and no service or application awareness. Some organizations, in order to increase visibility, will add more silo-ed tools to fill visibility gaps; however, there are consequences to just adding more tools. First, these tools, while being expensive, don t foster a collaborative atmosphere across functional areas as each technical team will have its own tool with little sharing of information with colleagues. Second, there will be no automated responses or impact analysis across these domains. Third, management will have no real-time status or visibility into its critical applications or business processes due to this silo-ed approach. Rather than being proactive, this organization will remain reactive causing low job and customer satisfaction leading to low employee and customer retention that negatively impacts costs and revenue. An advanced monitoring level will be characterized by an organization having standardized around a single monitoring platform that consolidates all monitoring into a single platform while still being able to act as a Manager-of-Managers (MOM) to aggregate metrics from specialized tools if needed. These advanced monitoring platforms must be able to do proactive alerting on

6 both fixed and dynamic thresholds for individual metrics, combinations of KPIs and for critical business processes. At this level, an advanced monitoring platform must be able to describe the service topology end-to-end and allow for the visualization of service delivery into quantifiable Service Level (SLA) performance via Business Service Management (BSM) features. Also, these platforms must have an extensive array of correlation analytics so business intelligence and analytics such as impact, predictive, trend and root cause analysis can be derived with false positives eliminated. Additionally, extensive discovery, automation, CMDB and ticketing features should be included for any robust, next-gen enterprise and carrier-class solution. All these features are necessary for an optimized service-centric delivery model for monitoring complex, hybrid environments. Summary There are many new revenue opportunities for Service Providers who embrace a dynamic nextgen monitoring platform that can provide immediate coverage for new, high value applications such as Big Data Layer deployments like SAP HANA, Hadoop and NoSQL, new applications on converged infrastructures or reference architectures like VCE s Vblocks or EMC s VSPEX, and distributed applications spanning cloud and on prem facilities. But generating more revenue by itself is not enough. Service Providers need to improve margins by reducing complexity, MTTR and OPEX while improving service delivery. Remember the Five Data Center and IT Infrastructure Lessons from the Cloud Giants of: (1) Facilities Automation, (2) Prioritizing Speedto-Market, (3) IT Automation, (4) Shift to a Service Delivery Model and (5) Create Organizational Cooperation by breaking down silos. In sum, Service Providers need to shift to dynamic, Business-Centric and Application-Centric Platforms that can delivery immediate business intelligence to increase customer satisfaction, retention and ultimately, revenue! Talk to Centerity!