How To Monitor Hybrid It From A Hybrid Environment

Hybrid IT Goes Mainstream Enterprises everywhere are accelerating toward hybrid IT. By connecting on and off-premises infrastructure, including private data centers and public clouds, IT organizations are better equipped to deliver IT services and meet business objectives. Enterprises everywhere are accelerating toward hybrid IT. Server, storage and network infrastructure are not the only elements of IT that are impacted by the hybrid trend. Enterprises and other large organizations use thousands of applications and many of those are now being deployed across these diverse environments. Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) makes up a rapidly growing percentage of application consumption and adds yet another dimension to hybrid IT. While a hybrid IT model involves outsourcing, the IT organization is generally still responsible for management. Even though IT lacks direct control over portions of their hybrid environment including public cloud and SaaS environments they must keep pace with all the rapid changes taking place within them. Unfortunately, IT organizations are still attempting to use legacy monitoring tools and methodologies to maintain visibility and control in their hybrid IT environments. This creates a number of challenges. Monitoring Challenges for Hybrid IT As more enterprises adopt a hybrid IT approach, they are struggling to achieve comprehensive monitoring. Their IT organizations lack tools that provide holistic visibility across disparate infrastructure, which means they can t confidently manage new environments such as public clouds. Interdependencies between infrastructure and applications are also becoming complex, making them difficult to identify and visualize. Without detailed insight into public cloud service metrics, it is nearly impossible to verify SLAs and monitor for noisy neighbors and other issues. Legacy monitoring tools generally don t support public clouds. At the same time, many legacy applications are incompatible with today s monitoring tools. For example, some legacy applications only support management through terminal interfaces and require additional tools and processes to achieve automated monitoring. Purchasing two sets of management solutions one for on-premises applications and another for cloud-based applications greatly raises the total cost of management. 2015 Neovise, LLC. All Rights Reserved. Page 1

Many IT organizations overspend on monitoring solutions for other reasons as well. For instance, they are often forced to purchase multiple, overlapping tools to fill feature gaps. They must also compensate for a lack of out-of-the-box integration, weaving data together from separate tools by using scripts and manual processing. This leads to manual overhead and additional staffing requirements. There is a new breed of monitoring tools purpose-built for the cloud, but some still fall short. These tools typically don t support on-premises environments and lack integration with existing solutions, giving IT organizations a fragmented view of their hybrid infrastructure. The same shortcomings can apply to the built-in tools offered by cloud service providers. They can be helpful, but may not deliver the right amount of granularity or visibility. For example, they may only monitor CPU performance from the hypervisor perspective and not the operating system. In addition to end-to-end hybrid visibility, enterprises want complete monitoring for their entire IT stack including database, server, network, storage, and OS. Once again, they are forced to tie together separate solutions that offer little complementary value. This makes monitoring difficult, expensive, and inaccurate particularly in rapidly changing virtualized environments. In addition to end-to-end hybrid visibility, enterprises want complete monitoring for their entire IT stack. IT organizations are moving toward a service-oriented management approach. This requires a detailed, holistic view of IT services rather than isolated views of the underlying technology components. To support service management, monitoring tools must relate applications and services to their respective infrastructure components, whether they are located on premises or in a public cloud. They should also enable drilldown to individual servers and instances regardless of where they are deployed. Today s enterprises demand a highly tuned hybrid IT environment with automation throughout. They also want cohesive, integrated monitoring capabilities that enable centralized management. To achieve these objectives, the right monitoring solution is essential. ScienceLogic ScienceLogic delivers a hybrid IT monitoring platform for the entire IT stack, including applications, networks, servers and services. ScienceLogic supports multiple deployment models giving enterprises flexibility in how and where they deploy. It can be deployed as a physical or 2015 Neovise, LLC. All Rights Reserved. Page 2

virtual appliance, or as an Amazon Machine Image (AMI). It is also available as a SaaS application, hosted by ScienceLogic. The solution is completely agentless and only needs to be installed once in an environment to deliver monitoring capabilities. ScienceLogic pulls data from all sources, including on and off-premises environments, orchestration tools, and other monitoring tools, to deliver centralized monitoring through a comprehensive GUI. Users can view correlations between all the interconnected components in their hybrid IT environment and see clear, color-coded issues that require further action. The GUI also enables roles-based monitoring, so IT organizations can assign separate monitoring responsibilities to individual staff. ScienceLogic delivers a detailed, contextual view of services to help enterprises gain a clearer understanding of IT delivery from the user perspective. CloudMapper The latest addition to ScienceLogic is CloudMapper, a built-in technology that supports hybrid environments, including public clouds, on-premises IT and converged infrastructures such as Vblock and FlexPod. With CloudMapper technology, ScienceLogic delivers unified monitoring across diverse environments and provides visibility to network, storage, servers, operating systems, and data stores. ScienceLogic pulls data from all sources to deliver centralized monitoring through a comprehensive GUI. 2015 Neovise, LLC. All Rights Reserved. Page 3

CloudMapper automatically discovers assets, and maps the complex relationships among applications, hardware and infrastructure. Monitoring staff can see which VMs are tied to which data stores, and understand connections between individual software and hardware layers. As new cloud instances are spun up, they are automatically discovered and mapped. Monitoring staff can also drill down to individual server instances to see detailed service metrics. For example, they can look at CPU performance from both the OS and hypervisor perspective to better understand how performance is being impacted. This enables SLA audits as well as monitoring for noisy neighbors on multitenant hardware. Hybrid Monitoring Use Cases CloudMapper extends ScienceLogic to enable a number of hybrid monitoring use cases. For example, IT organizations can set policies to automatically redirect traffic to cloud services when demand for on-premises resources hits a specified threshold. ScienceLogic also has a fully supported API, enabling deeper, customizable automation when needed. ScienceLogic can monitor cost, usage, and performance across hybrid environments. In addition, the policy engine can be used to establish contextual alerts based on dynamic thresholds. For example, IT organizations can set a fixed threshold on cost to ensure they don t go past their budget. They can also set performance thresholds based on standard deviation. ScienceLogic can monitor cost, usage, performance, and security across hybrid environments. Extensibility and Integration Through an open architecture, ScienceLogic is highly integrated and extensible. It offers over 1,000 PowerApps developed by its engineers and the community. These templates provide among many other capabilities preconfigured dashboards and alarms for a breadth of technologies. Users can design their own PowerApps and upload them for community use, or share them internally using a private repository. Beyond out-of-the-box integration with several public IaaS clouds, including AWS and Azure, ScienceLogic also comes tightly integrated with ServiceNow a SaaS-based ITSM solution used by many enterprises and can automatically log incidents and update them. ScienceLogic can also perform CMDB synching with ServiceNow, and provide visibility in to configuration item relationships and their dependencies. 2015 Neovise, LLC. All Rights Reserved. Page 4

Neovise Perspective Enterprise adoption of hybrid IT has been filled with unexpected obstacles, and many IT organizations still need the right monitoring tools to succeed in their journey. ScienceLogic can help enterprises establish a before-and-after view that enables seamless migration to off-premises environments like the cloud. A variety of deployment models provide flexibility and simplify the process of setting up monitoring in new environments. As more enterprises adopt cloud computing as part of their hybrid IT model, the automatic discovery enabled by CloudMapper will essentially be a requirement for controlling cloud sprawl and understanding the complex relationships between applications, hardware and infrastructure. Cloud computing has matured over recent years, and enterprises need tools that go beyond the capabilities of legacy monitoring tools. They need a service-oriented management view, and deep insight in to every component of the IT stack. The end-to-end visibility, automation, and integration provided by ScienceLogic are critical for enterprises adopting the cloud for production and hybrid use cases. ScienceLogic provides tight integration with AWS and Azure, but comprehensive out-of-the-box integrations with other public clouds will likely be in high demand in the near future. Integration plus automation plays a vital role in enabling large-scale hybrid management, and gives IT organizations the context they need to take a service-oriented management approach. The event-based automation enabled by ScienceLogic can help enterprise IT organizations maintain control even as their environment expands and new sources of infrastructure are added. The integration with additional management tools, such as ServiceNow, also helps them eliminate siloed operations and reduce management overhead. Hybrid monitoring is about establishing the big picture as well as capturing the details, and ScienceLogic excels at both. A centralized GUI, out-of-the-box integrations, and over 1,000 preconfigured PowerApps equip today s IT organizations for their most critical hybrid monitoring needs. As hybrid IT becomes the dominant IT framework, we expect to see more organizations using ScienceLogic to achieve end-to-end monitoring and visibility across their on-premises and public cloud environments. Hybrid monitoring is about establishing the big picture as well as capturing the details, and ScienceLogic excels at both 2015 Neovise, LLC. All Rights Reserved. Page 5

About Neovise Based on independent research and analysis, Neovise delivers essential knowledge and guidance to cloud-related technology vendors, service providers and systems integrators, as well as business and IT organizations that purchase and use cloud-related services and technology. Our offerings include research, advisory and collateral development services that help our customers and their customers make optimal decisions and formulate winning strategies. Research. Analyze. Neovise. For more information, visit www.neovise.com. 2015 Neovise, LLC. All Rights Reserved.