45 Percent of IT Professionals Lack Confidence in Ability to Manage Virtual Infrastructure

RESTON, Va. - A recent survey by Netuitive, Inc. pinpoints traditional monitoring systems as a major hurdle for companies moving towards a virtual infrastructure. The survey reveals that 45 percent of IT professionals polled have little or no confidence in their current performance management tools’ ability to monitor such an environment, which is bad news for the thousands of companies on the path to server virtualization.

Today the industry is starting to see more and more companies looking at virtualization technology. As companies begin to embrace virtualization they are afforded a level of freedom, choice and flexibility previously unknown to them. These opportunities however bring about new complexities and challenges in the way of allocating server resources, managing performance and isolating problems. According to nearly half of IT professionals polled in the survey, there is a strong feeling that traditional monitoring tools simply won’t be able to deliver in a virtual environment.

According to Daniel Heimlich, Vice President at Netuitive, one of the reasons for the general lack of faith in existing management tools is the high rate of false alerts. He attributes this to the fact that the current generation of monitoring software relies on static thresholds, manual rules and scripts.

“Companies are already dealing with hundreds and thousands of false alerts daily in their physical server environments. So it’s no wonder that users lack the confidence in these tools when it comes to virtualized infrastructures which is even more variable and highly interdependent,” said Heimlich. “Trying to understand the hundreds of simultaneously moving parts in a typical virtual deployment -- and their impact on one another -- is humanly impossible.”

Making the Impossible Possible

Netuitive SI for VMware, announced in March 2007, installs on the host server and integrates with VMware’s VirtualCenter. The software monitors servers, virtual machines and the applications that run on them to learn normal behavior for the entire environment, as well as the relationships between each component. In this way, the software can intelligently identify any components that behave outside of the normal parameters.

Unlike existing infrastructure monitoring software which is setup with human created thresholds and plagued with false negatives, Netuitive SI for VMware self-learns and cross-correlates the performance behavior characteristics of the virtual infrastructure, rendering performance degradation forecasts up to 2 hours in advance, immediate pinpointing of problems and proactive managing of system health.