Former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld once famously talked about known unknowns, unknown unknowns, and things we don’t know we don’t know. He was talking about military strategy, but the same conundrum could apply to IT Operations managers. Keeping track of the converged infrastructure of a sprawling IT landscape in a physical, virtual, and cloud environment is daunting. With so much of the business dependent on IT, what you don’t know about your system operation can indeed hurt you.
That’s where an advanced solution like VMware’s vRealize Operations 6.0 comes in. You can rely on vRealize for intelligent operations management across a disparate landscape for everything from VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper V to Amazon Web Services (AWS). vRealize correlates data in a unified, easy-to-use management tool that enables you to control every aspect of your IT environment. It can transform you from a reactive firefighter into a proactive problem solver.
There are three main areas where effective operations management can yield huge benefits.
Proactive Monitoring
Separate systems management tools with static thresholds can’t adapt to rapidly changing conditions across physical, virtual, and cloud infrastructures. This can lead to alert storms that can have IT ops teams scurrying around in an unproductive quest to identify sources of downtime. vRealize Operations 6.0 expands the familiar high level badges with Smart Alerts to not only tell you when and what objects need attention, but also identify the problem, the underlying cause, the system components impacted, and how to easily fix it. This greatly accelerates time to identification and resolution.
Capacity Planning
In a dynamic business environment, IT capacity demands can fluctuate significantly. You need a way to be more agile in adapting to this demand volatility. You also need visibility into capacity usage to be able to forecast future capacity requirements. vRealize allows you to apply demand and allocation capacity principles while managing the capacity of your virtual and cloud environments across any object type. This prevents shortfalls when additional capacity is required to meet demand, but it also makes sure you’re not over provisioning and paying for capacity you don’t need. This helps you optimize your system while operating in the most cost efficient way possible.
Policy-Based Automation
Manually based operation of many IT tasks drains staff resources and drives up costs. vRealize provides policy-based automation that you set and control, enabling you to optimize performance, capacity, and configuration from a single console across your entire environment. You can create policies for specific workload types, applications, or clusters. You can customize the operational view of your infrastructure and tailor it to your business requirements. This improves how you prioritize the management of business critical applications and production versus non-production workloads. Intelligent operations groups and flexible group policies give you maximum control over your IT infrastructures and reduce the need for time-consuming manual interventions.
As your IT landscape becomes more diverse and complex, the need for overall visibility and centralized control becomes more acute. I believe that GTRI, along with VMware’s vRealize Operations 6.0 can help you gain both. Contact us for more information.
