Virtual Instruments extends Cisco integration to AppDynamics

The new capabilities allow VirtualWisdom and AppDynamics to share a common view of the infrastructure consumed by business applications, enabling a collective understanding of application topology. The integration between VirtualWisdom and the SAN Telemetry Streaming facilities of Cisco’s MDS 9700 32G Module, along with the entire Cisco MDS 32GB portfolio, enables holistic visibility into Fibre Channel SAN Fabrics. Together, the Virtual Instruments and Cisco integrations help ensure the highest availability and performance of business-critical applications.  

In October 2017, Virtual Instruments announced an innovative technology integration with Cisco to dramatically simplify and lower the cost of real-time performance and availability monitoring for business-critical infrastructures. Now available, the integration of Cisco SAN Telemetry Streaming with VirtualWisdom eliminates the requirement to deploy physical network TAPs and probes.

VirtualWisdom enables Cisco customers to find and resolve infrastructure issues before they can impact application service levels by applying machine learning to determine root cause and recommending remedies and configuration optimisations to proactively resolve problems. VirtualWisdom 5.6 offers significant value in three key areas – Application Service Assurance, Workload Infrastructure Balancing, and Problem Resolution & Remediation.

Application Service Assurance

Most infrastructure performance monitoring tools overwhelm operations teams with numerous alerts that are often irrelevant to the performance of key applications. Infrastructure teams are then led to either de-activate the alerts or ignore them altogether. VirtualWisdom 5.6 discovers key applications with their associated SLAs and automatically recommends a custom monitoring policy to each infrastructure service. This translates into a non-manual policy assignment and fewer, but more meaningful, actionable alerts.

VirtualWisdom 5.6 delivers on the first phase of integration with AppDynamics by discovering applications from the AppDynamics controller and providing visibility into the application through the SAN fabric down to the storage LUN. This enables shared context and understanding of how the infrastructure supports application SLAs, resulting in accelerated problem resolution. VirtualWisdom can also detect applications using ServiceNow, SSH/WMI, and through the analysis of NetFlow from physical routers/switches and the VMware vSphere Distributed Switch.

Workload Infrastructure Balancing

Many application performance and availability issues result from Workload-Infrastructure imbalance. While workloads are typically in harmony with their infrastructure when initially deployed, they can shift across the infrastructure and drift in their behaviour. This invariably results in greater workload concentration on fewer infrastructure resources – such as compute hosts, switch ports, storage ports or storage arrays –  that then become congested and overwhelmed. VirtualWisdom analytics continuously assess the infrastructure environment from the virtual machine to storage in order to identify workload infrastructure imbalance conditions and provide optimal re-balancing recommendations. 

Problem Resolution & Avoidance

Application performance or availability issues can stem from any part of the Application-Infrastructure stack. Misconfigurations, mismatches between workload and infrastructure, and component failures can happen anywhere from the application through the compute, network and storage stacks. Diagnosing issues requires breadth of visibility across all components, as well as depth and specialized knowledge within each stack.

VirtualWisdom 5.6 offers algorithmically-driven automated correlation services that replace traditional, manual methods of remediation. When an alert occurs, a case is automatically opened that starts an investigation, which automatically generates the charts necessary to solve problems and then recommends an analytic to guide the user through actual remediation procedures. Unlike other tools, VirtualWisdom goes beyond identifying a problem and offers guidance to accelerate resolution. 

“Modern IT operations within the enterprise consists of both legacy and modern application architectures and their supporting infrastructure systems. Constructing an application to infrastructure topology is a major challenge, yet it is required for successful transformative projects and ongoing operations. By integrating VirtualWisdom's ability to map the logical and physical infrastructure from compute to storage with AppDynamics’ automated transactional topology flow map, enterprises have a new and powerful solution for IT operations,” said Jonah Kowall, vice president of market development at AppDynamics, a Cisco company.

As enterprises continue to shift towards increasingly complex hybrid data centres to meet their customers' needs, infrastructure monitoring must be able to evolve rapidly to assure optimum availability and performance. Holistic visibility into the performance, health and utilisation of infrastructure from the perspective of the application is essential to keeping up with the growing demands of new and changing applications. The integration of VirtualWisdom with Cisco’s SAN Telemetry Streaming and AppDynamics’ application intelligence platform allows customers to deploy more granular monitoring that provides additional actionable insight across their organisations.

“Virtual Instruments and Cisco working together so closely is having a dramatic impact on our infrastructure deployment and performance monitoring strategies. The new VirtualWisdom/Cisco integration enables us to holistically assess the impact of shared infrastructure on application performance,” said Carla Lambrecht, assistant vice president at Enterprise Holdings, Inc. “We view this integration as being fundamental to our application performance and availability goals.”

“The integration with Cisco means our customers can seamlessly gain the visibility of a fully instrumented infrastructure in the context of the application, as well as accelerated problem resolution,” said Tim Van Ash, SVP of products at Virtual Instruments. “VirtualWisdom 5.6 offers real-time visibility without the costs involved with installing hardware probes and TAPs, resulting in superior application performance assurance and more informed problem solving.”