The New Wave of Virtual Monitoring and Management

Virtualization has promised to help companies maximize their infrastructure investments while minimizing their hardware and labor costs. So far, over 50% of companies are saving between 19-30% on hardware, however 75% more savings are available through better workload management. In addition, the proportional labor savings haven’t materialized either, with studies citing 50% of companies saving less than 10% on labor costs after consolidating servers. Research also estimates a growth in virtual infrastructure of 100% per year through 2010. Will companies be able to cope with such a quickly growing virtual environment (from a labor perspective) and maximize the full cost savings and productivity gains of virtualization? To help realize these benefits, a more effective virtual management tool is needed. Welcome to up.time 5.

up.time 5, from uptime software, helps IT Directors, IT Managers, and System Administrators plan, manage, and monitor their virtual infrastructure better. In addition, up.time’s powerful solution has gained praise from VMware, the leader in virtualization today.

1. Finally, Control Virtual Sprawl with Dynamic Discovery and Tracking of Instances

The benefits of real-time virtual machine (VM) creation are clear.  However, uncontrolled VM creation ultimately results in virtual sprawl, a state where instances seem to be “lost” within ones ESX infrastructure. up.time 5 helps solve sprawl by dynamically discovering ESX servers and automatically providing visibility into running VMs. In addition, up.time 5 automatically finds new instances as they are spun up, giving IT managers and system administrators the visibility, control, and auditability required to manage VM lifecycles within ESX. up.time 5 provides system administrators the ability to see where their instances are migrating to at any given time. Have a mission-critical application that’s virtualized? up.time 5 can show you exactly where it is in the ESX infrastructure and how it’s performing.

• “up.time dynamically tracks VMotion as instances migrate around and I am able to quickly report and graph it. up.time provides a powerful platform to deeply monitor all our virtual and physical servers.” – Frank Mollenhauser, Newedge Group .

2. Maximize Hardware Savings with VM Density Optimization

The new wave in virtualization will be increasing the VM density to maximize IT resources. This has huge cost saving implications in terms of hardware, footprint, power, and cooling. up.time 5 helps system administrators understand the workload performance characteristics of each VM, leading to increased VM density without sacrificing stability. This ensures IT departments are driving the most out of their IT investments.

• “We've been able to stretch the hardware a lot further, and in some cases we're getting 20-to-one virtual workloads per server with up.time.” – Joe Kitchen, Senior Manager of Infrastructure Development, Bank of Montreal

3. Better Management of Virtual Asset Relationship

System Administrators need deep metrics to successfully manage their infrastructures. To make the right decisions, administrators need to see an integrated perspective that shows the relationship between ESX server performance and VM workload performance. Now, not only is the performance of the ESX server visible, but so are the performance metrics of instances and the applications that reside inside them.  The true value is not in managing the physical server, but in monitoring and managing the business applications and how service resource dependencies can impact performance. up.time’s “VMware Workload Profile” report clearly illustrates potential dependency bottlenecks, helping resolve resource problems faster and leading to increased capacity and stability at the same time

4. Customer Friendly Cost-Per-Server Licensing

Perhaps the biggest advantage with up.time 5 is its virtual-friendly pricing. uptime software has decided to buck the industry trend and provide what customers have been calling for – per server virtual licensing. This model allows customers to spin up as many instances as they want on licensed servers at no additional cost, helping companies realize the true cost savings of virtualization.

• “With up.time, rolling out to 250 servers across VMware, Solaris, Linux, and Windows was a snap and we didn’t have to pay for each virtual host; that’s a huge cost savings.” – Frank Mollenhauser, The New Edge Group

Service Level Management and Reporting made Easy with Quick Deployment

1. Easy Service Level Management that’s Quick to Deploy

up.time 5 has kept its customer promise of powerful, yet cost-friendly and quick-to-deploy software with its Service Level Agreement Management (SLAM) capabilities. Customer research has shown that while many companies are interested in SLAM, too many are running into complex requirements, long timelines to deploy, and escalating costs. No longer is this the case, as up.time 5 can have SLA reports and graphs running in a matter of days, not months.

• “We really wanted a product that we could drop in place easily and not incur 2 years of professional services. We also wanted a solution that was powerful from an expandability point of view, and we wanted 90% of the functionality out-of-the-box. up.time was the answer to those needs.” - Stephen Boucher, Unix Infrastructure manager, Toll Holdings Group

2. Mapping Business Needs to IT Infrastructure Means a Win for IT

The business units aren’t worried about servers or network issues; what they do care about are mission-critical services and applications like Email, Payroll, and CRM. That’s a big problem for IT departments to manage, especially when trying to meet aggressive Service Level Agreements (SLAs). However, up.time 5 maps the business needs to the infrastructure used to deliver it, providing reports the business units want and can understand. This helps map operational service-level thresholds to business objectives. The result is higher service levels, as IT can spot and fix any infrastructure issues before they negatively affect the business service levels and generate simple and easy to understand reports and graphs the business can use.

3. Remove Risk by Looking into the Service Level Agreement Crystal Ball

Imagine if you knew the outcome of your service level agreements before you committed to them. Will the IT team be able to achieve the SLAs or will your objectives, and bonus, be at risk? With up.time 5, you can see into the future. up.time 5 has groundbreaking new functionality that uses proactive SLA ‘what-if’ type modeling that’s based on historical data. Quickly learn, based on your past performance, if you would have hit, exceeded or missed your targets.

4. Proactive Alerting gives IT Time to Adjust

up.time 5’s intelligent alerting can tell if an SLA is trending to meet, exceed, or miss its target in the future, whether that’s in one hour, one week, one year or any time in between. That helps the IT department stay on top of SLA targets and commit resources properly when those targets are in jeopardy.

Application and Server Transaction Monitoring

1. Reflect True End-User Application Interactions

At the end of the day, the truly important issue when delivering technology is the customer or end-user experience. If customers and business units are satisfied with the performance and availability of their needed applications, then IT has done their job and no one gets yelled at. However, this is not as easy as it sounds. With up.time 5, IT managers and teams can easily monitor, report, and graph the experiences of the end-users and stay on top of application issues. No more calls from frustrated CIOs wondering why Email is down.

2. Monitor and Measure Services Health and End-user Experience

Why is measuring and monitoring service and application health so important? Most tools today are designed to monitor infrastructure components and devices. Unfortunately, this is proving time consuming to IT and ineffective for the business units. In fact, 74% of all application problems are reported to the IT department by the end-users (through the Service Desk). Clearly, the IT department needs a solution that can proactively see these problems and help solve them before the end-user is impacted. up.time 5 has specific features to track and alert on application and service health, notifying you before problems on applications and services impact the end-user. The result is fewer Service Desk calls, less downtime, and the earned reputation of a more proactive IT department.

3. Compare Application Performance Across Different Locations

up.time 5 will help monitor the performance of applications across geographies. Is the CRM system meeting your minimum loading speeds in New York, what about San Francisco and London? up.time 5 can quickly report on these locations, giving full control over the global infrastructure. If one location is not performing, use up.time to quickly drill down and find the issue. Get the performance back with faster Mean-Time-To-Repair before the end-user has a chance to call the Service Desk.

4. Proactive Alerts and Early Detection

With up.time 5’s early detection capabilities, proactively alert when application and service performance is trending down. Set alerts and thresholds based on small response time variations of applications to alert before problems get out of control and affect the business.

“We looked at a stack of solutions, including the larger tier vendors, but the timelines to deployment and costs were not reasonable. I’d had a few recommendations from peers on up.time and it really stood out as a quick deployment and quick results software solution. I would absolutely recommend up.time, as they’re not just a product, but a company that has become more of a partner with us. I couldn’t be happier with it.”

- Stephen Boucher, Unix Infrastructure manager, Toll Holdings Group