Imagine you’ve flown into an unfamiliar city. You may have no idea how to get to your hotel or where to grab lunch. But no worries, right? You just open up your trusty Google Maps, and instantly you know where to go and what’s available along the way. Google Maps even warns you about traffic conditions, so you can steer clear of trouble.
Now compare that situation to managing your hybrid IT environment. While cloud and virtualization technologies have done wonders to improve server utilization, curb IT costs, and support digital transformation, the downside is limited visibility across the entire interconnected IT stack – transactions, application, and infrastructure, physical and virtual. This low visibility into business transaction flows makes it tougher for IT operations to troubleshoot application and system performance issues. This can lead to disruption of key business processes.
Full Visibility of Your Entire IT Environment
What if you had a Google Maps type solution for managing your end-to-end IT environment? What if it could display the full picture of your complex, dynamic hybrid stack in real time and automatically keep up with changes?
With a visual map of your entire environment, you could easily connect the millions of data points, identify the resources within your datacenter, their dependencies, the services that run on them, and all of your applications. And if the solution highlighted trouble spots – the way Google Maps highlights traffic jams – you could figure out what’s happening, decide what to do about it, and act quickly to resolve issues and ward off potential downtime. To go a step further, it would also be great if the solution could predict when the next issue would arise.
The Google Maps of Virtual Landscapes
Well, such a solution exists, and it’s called Discovery and Dependency Mapping (DDM). It detects and predicts issues across the hybrid IT stack, correlates and visualizes the outcome by creating an application dependency map overlay.
Most of the data centers today are hybrid, so distributed applications make it very difficult to locate the devices, identify application flows, and troubleshoot issues. DDM will dynamically discover, correlate, and visualize these entities and flows.
In the same way that Google Maps reveals the streets and points of interest within a city, DDM visually displays the entire topology of public and/or private data centers, the devices within them (including network, storage, VM, and compute), and the applications they support. It either collects the operational data from devices or combines the alerts, faults, logs, tickets, changes, and other important information from other siloed tools for correlated visibility.
Faster Troubleshooting and Trend Spotting
The Google Maps resemblances don’t stop there. DDM solutions highlight trouble spots with red dots similar to Google Maps’ real-time accident location feature.
DDM provides the up-to-date information you need to recognize and proactively correct IT problems, including recurring or new issues that you can’t otherwise foresee. As a result of improved system availability and performance, your business will function more efficiently, and your IT staff can focus on more valuable activities than IT firefighting.
To see how DDM can help map the relationships of your infrastructure and applications, request your personalized demo.
