Virtualization, Cloud Management Climbs Up IT Priority List, uptime Survey Finds 
As virtualization and cloud projects explode, IT professionals are making monitoring and management a top priority – for IT reliability and business service levels. A survey by uptime software finds 62% of IT professionals ranked deploying and managing virtualized environments as Job #1. More than one-fourth (28%) ranked cloud management and monitoring as the top job.
As virtualization and cloud projects explode, IT professionals are making monitoring and management a top priority – for IT reliability and business service levels. A survey by uptime software finds 62% of IT professionals ranked deploying and managing virtualized environments as Job #1. More than one-fourth (28%) ranked cloud management and monitoring as the top job.
“These results continue to underscore the importance of tools that offer end-to-end IT performance monitoring for the hybrid datacenter,” uptime software’s CTO, Alex Bewley told IDN. up.time, from uptime software, monitors the performance and availability of physical, virtual and cloud infrastructures and applications to provide proactive management via deep server monitoring and capacity planning capabilities across any hybrid infrastructure.
View a Flash Demo of uptime’s Cloud, Virtualization Management here.
up.time provides deep-dive virtual and physical server monitoring software for Windows Server Monitoring, VMware Monitoring (ESX hosts and guests, including vSphere and ESX 4), IBM AIX monitoring (LPARs and Entitlements), Solaris monitoring (Containers), and more popular platforms.
In specific, up.time provides Amazon EC2 cloud monitoring, virtual server monitoring (VMware, etc), physical server monitoring (Windows, Solaris, AIX, HP-UX, Linux, Novell NetWare) from a single console.
Beyond the infrastructure components, up.time also provides IT with real-time information on datacenters, virtualized applications, and cloud-based applications. We can detect and simply present the impact of any infrastructure performance disruptions on applications, SLAs and a variety of business-level performance issues, Bewley said. It provides IT “a single pane of glass view” for easy reporting and correlating infrastructure disruptions to performance hits.
Management and monitoring tools need to understand how applications change over time and must trigger workflows to deal with changing workloads. up.time can automatically spin up and monitor virtual or cloud instances to meet capacity demands.
“As systems grow more complex with increased adoption of virtualization and cloud, systems management needs have changed, said Phil Didaskalou, CEO of uptime software in a statement. “IT management now requires a bird’s eye view across all IT environments, regardless of platform or technology, to ensure performance and availability of IT services.” <>br
"uptime provides a ‘single pane of glass’ view for correlating infrastructure disruptions to performance hits."
Alex Bewley
CTO
uptime software
up.time is IT systems management software designed for mid-enterprises that aims to simplify the performance and availability management of infrastructure, applications and services across physical, virtual, and cloud platforms from a single dashboard.
Bewley told IDN that up.time takes its approach to cloud and virtualization monitoring and management from disciplines based in principals of multi-vendor measurement and deep analysis of systems performance, and the ability to translate all that data capture into metrics that mean something to IT and business.
“Having a very heterogeneous multi-stack background was very beneficial,” Bewley, a former Sun Microsystem engineer, told IDN. “And, when virtualization came along, and now cloud, it helped lead us to pay special attention to all the bits and pieces that make up [system performance], and how the pieces work together.”
“We take what we know about monitoring all these environments, and help IT cope with the real questions they worry about, which come from the line of business and go something like this: ‘I see a problem with x. What are you doing about it?’” Bewley explained.
Among some of up.time’s most notable features are:
- Outage Avoidance: Proactively identify problem infrastructure and applications to find issues before they happen
- Automate: Set thresholds to automatically add or remove capacity as needed
- Optimize Capacity: Graph capacity over time, and get alerted before potential capacity problems arise
- Service Level Management: Map Business needs and services to the underlying IT infrastructure
- Dry-Run SLAs: Quickly learn, based on your past performance, if you would have hit, missed, or exceeded the SLA targets before you commit to them
- Easily Map Business Needs to Infrastructure: Map relationships between application logic, resources and the infrastructure level, allowing you to monitor the SLA end-to-end across hybrid infrastructure
up.time is finding traction across many enterprise sectors.
The sweetspot for up.time is the mid-sized enterprise already sold on virtualization and private cloud, but not quite sold on using VMware’s Service Catalog.
“VMware’s service catalog can be difficult to deploy for many in enterprise development, and especially for lines of business,” Bewley said. “And, these mid-sized enterprises just don’t really need a service catalog because they don’t have many thousands of servers.”
The company is even getting traction in Fortune 1000 firms, as a virtualization-specific extension to traditional IT service management products from IBM, HP and others. Another adopter class is companies that use outsources or off-premise cloud services and are concerned about maintaining SLAs. “Pushing workloads around the world, these companies need to keep tabs on the performance of the application,” Bewley said.
