Uptime Offers Monitoring and Capacity Planning for VMware

As we move into a world where organizations make more and more usage of heterogeneous infrastructure resources, providers that offer those same organizations tools to ensure the performance of those resources will become more and more important. Into that role steps uptime software, an existing player in the IT systems performance space that is releasing a new product to give automated real-time monitoring of VMware.

I got a run through the product prior to launch and specific areas that uptime is trying to target in this release include;

New features added to up.time include:

• Real-time vSync (VMware Sync) for monitoring and alerting that’s automatically applied to all VMware servers, applications, instances, resource pools, clusters and vApps
• Sprawl Control to find sprawl sources and shut them down rapidly
• Virtual Machine Power Awareness to monitor power usage in VMware environments
• VMware Capacity Metrics for capacity bottleneck alerts
• Global VMware Capacity Reporting across all assets
• Virtual Capacity Forecasting for dynamic forecasting of future capacity or storage

The uptime offering is comprehensive but I had a few comments around the heterogeneity pain point that they’re attempting to solve. It seems to me that the reality for an enterprise is that VMware based assets are but one of the multitude of cloud services they’re potentially utilizing. Add to this the higher level cloud offerings – PaaS and SaaS – and we quickly run into a situation where uptime is doing a fantastic job of monitoring one particular silo of our IT asset base.

What excites me more in this space are vendors that are trying to deliver insights across all levels of the stack and across different vendor type – in the same way that data integration services become more powerful the more individual services they integrate, so to will monitoring be ever more valuable as it both broadens and deepens its fundamental proposition.

I like what uptime is doing and think the latest release is an incredibly comprehensive offering for VMware shops, I’d just like it to be extended to provide an awesome offering for ALL shops.

(Cross-posted @ The Diversity Blog - SaaS, Cloud & Business Strategy)