We will now explore how multi-cloud adoption is forcing cloud monitoring and cost management to work in new ways for enterprises.
Our panel of Micro Focus
experts will unpack new Dimensional
Research survey findings gleaned from more than 500 enterprise cloud
specifiers. You will learn about their concerns, requirements and demands for
improving the monitoring, management and cost control over hybrid and
multi-cloud deployments.
We will also hear about new
solutions and explore examples of how automation leverages machine learning (ML)
and rapidly improves cloud
management at a large Barcelona bank.
Here are some excerpts:
Gardner: Let's begin with setting the stage for how cloud computing complexity is rapidly advancing to include multi-cloud computing -- and how traditional monitoring and management approaches are falling short in this new hybrid IT environment.
In many ways, the ability to
manage in a hybrid fashion has been overtaken by the actual hybrid deployment
models. The cart is in front of the horse. IT managers do not own the performance
data generated from their cloud infrastructure. Their management agents can’t
go there. They have insights from their own systems, but far less from their
clouds, and they can’t join these. They therefore have hybrid computing -- but without
commensurate hybrid management and monitoring.
They can’t assure security or compliance and they cannot determine true and comparative costs -- never mind gain optimization for efficiency across the cloud computing spectrum.
Similar in concept to self-driving cars, wouldn’t you rather have self-driving IT operations? So far, a majority of you surveyed say yes; and we are going to soon learn more about that survey information.
The lion’s share, or nearly two-thirds, of this population that we surveyed are using between two to five different cloud vendors. But more than 12 percent of respondents are using more than 10 vendors. So, the world is becoming increasingly complex. Of course, this strains a lot of the different aspects [of management].
So, one of my next questions was,
Across the different monitoring ideas or types, what’s needed for the hybrid IT
environment? What should people be focusing on? Security infrastructure,
getting better visibility, and end-user experience monitoring, service delivery
monitoring and cloud costs – all had high ranking on what people believe they
need to be able to monitor. Whether you are a provider or a consumer, most
people end up being both. Monitoring is really key.
So that, Dana, is the set of the different results that we got out of this survey.
And then we take this further
because we have the analytics capability that’s described by Gartner and others.
We couple that with the ability to execute different types of automation as a
means to let the operator, the operations team, have more time to spend on
what’s really impacting the business and getting to the issues quicker than
trying to spend time searching and sorting through that vast amount of data.
Last, but not least, you need to keep your stakeholders up to date. They need to know, anywhere that they go, that the services are working. Our real-time dashboard is very open and can integrate with any type of data -- not just the operational data that we collect and manage with the Operations Bridge, but also third-party data, such as business data, video feeds, and sentiment data. This gets presented on a single visual dashboard that quickly gives the stakeholders the information: Is my business service actually running? Is it okay? Can I feel good about the business services that I am offering to my internal as well as external customer-users?
We are working with private
and public clouds and it’s quite difficult to correlate the information in
events and incidents. We need to aggregate this information in just one
dashboard. And for that, OpsBridge is a perfect
solution for us.
[And that’s for] every single item that we have in the cloud now, even across the private and public cloud. The bank has invested a lot of money in this solution and we need to show them that it’s really a good choice in economical terms to migrate several systems to the cloud, and this tool will help us with this.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app. Read a full transcript or download a copy. Sponsor: Micro Focus.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes.
Get the mobile app. Read a full transcript or download
a copy.
To share more about interesting new cloud trends, we are joined by Harald
Burose, Director of Product Management at Micro Focus, and he is based in
Stuttgart; Ian Bromehead,
Direct of Product Marketing at Micro Focus, and he is based in Grenoble,
France, and Gary Brandt,
Product Manager at Micro Focus, based in Sacramento. The discussion is moderated by Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions.Here are some excerpts:
Gardner: Let's begin with setting the stage for how cloud computing complexity is rapidly advancing to include multi-cloud computing -- and how traditional monitoring and management approaches are falling short in this new hybrid IT environment.
Enterprise IT leaders tasked
with the management of apps, data, and business processes amid this new level
of complexity are primarily grounded in the IT management and monitoring models
from their on-premises data centers.
They are used to being able to
gain agent-based data sets and generate analysis on their own, using their own
IT assets that they control, that they own, and that they can impose their will
over.
Yet virtually overnight, a
majority of companies share
infrastructure for their workloads across public clouds and on-premises systems.
The ability to manage these disparate environments is often all or nothing.
The cart is in front of the horse. IT managers do not own the performance data generated from their cloud infrastructure.
They can’t assure security or compliance and they cannot determine true and comparative costs -- never mind gain optimization for efficiency across the cloud computing spectrum.
Old management into the cloud
But
there’s more to fixing the equation of multi-cloud complexity than extending
yesterday’s management means into the cloud. IT executives today recognize that
IT operations’ divisions and adjustments must be handled in a much different
way.
Even with the best data assets
and access and analysis, manual methods will not do for making the right
performance adjustments and adequately reacting to security and compliance
needs.
Automation, in synergy with big data analytics, is absolutely the key
to effective and ongoing multi-cloud management and optimization.
Fortunately, just as the need
for automation across hybrid IT management has become critical, the means to
provide ML-enabled analysis and remediation have matured -- and at compelling
prices.
Great strides have been made
in big data analysis of such vast data sets as IT infrastructure logs from a
variety of sources, including from across the hybrid IT continuum.
Many
analysts, in addition to myself, are now envisioning how automated bots
leveraging IT systems and cloud performance data can begin to deliver more
value to IT operations, management, and optimization. Whether you call it BotOps, or AIOps, the idea is the same: The rapid concurrent use
of multiple data sources, data collection methods and real-time top-line
analytic technologies to make IT operations work the best at the least cost.
IT leaders are seeking the
next generation of monitoring, management and optimizing solutions. We are now
on the cusp of being able to take advantage of advanced ML to tackle the
complexity of multi-cloud deployments and to keep business services safe,
performant, and highly cost efficient.
We
are on the cusp of being able to take advantage of ML to tackle the
complexity of multi-cloud deployments and keep business services safe.
Similar in concept to self-driving cars, wouldn’t you rather have self-driving IT operations? So far, a majority of you surveyed say yes; and we are going to soon learn more about that survey information.
Ian, please tell us more about
the survey findings.
IT leaders respond to their needs
Ian Bromehead: Thanks,
Dana. The first element of the survey that we wanted to share describes the
extent to which cloud is so prevalent today.
More than 92 percent of the
500 or so executives are indicating that we are already in a world of
significant multi-cloud adoption.
 |
| Bromehead |
The lion’s share, or nearly two-thirds, of this population that we surveyed are using between two to five different cloud vendors. But more than 12 percent of respondents are using more than 10 vendors. So, the world is becoming increasingly complex. Of course, this strains a lot of the different aspects [of management].
What are people doing with
those multiple cloud instances? As to be expected, people are using them to
extend their IT landscape, interconnecting application logic and their own
corporate data sources with the infrastructure and the apps in their
cloud-based deployments -- whether they’re Infrastructure
as a Service (IaaS) or Platform as a
Service (PaaS). Some 88 percent of the respondents are indeed connecting
their corporate logic and data sources to those cloud instances.
What’s more interesting is that
a good two-thirds of the respondents are sharing data and integrating that
logic across heterogeneous cloud instances, which may or may not be a surprise
to you. It’s nevertheless a facet of many people’s architectures today. It’s a
result of the need for agility and cost reduction, but it’s obviously creating
a pretty high degree of complexity as people share data across multiple cloud
instances.
The next aspect that we saw in
the survey is that 96 percent of the respondents indicate that these public
cloud application issues are resolved too slowly, and they are impacting the
business in many cases.
Some of the business impacts range
from resources tied up by collaborating with the cloud vendor to trying to solve
these issues, and the extra time required to resolve issues impacting service
level agreements (SLAs) and contractual agreements, and prolonged down time.
What we regularly see is that
the adoption of cloud often translates into a loss in transparency of what’s
deployed and the health of what’s being deployed, and how that’s capable of
impacting the business. This insight is a strong bias on our investment and
some of the solutions we will talk to you about. Their primary concern is on
the visibility of what’s being deployed -- and what depends on the internal,
on-premise as well as private and public cloud instances.
People need to see what is
impacting the delivery of services as a provider, and if that’s due to issues
with local or remote resources, or the connectivity between them. It’s just
compounded by the fact that people are interconnecting services, as we just saw
in the survey, from multiple cloud providers. So the
weak part could be anywhere, could be anyone of those links. The ability for people
to know where those issues are is not happening fast
enough for many people, with some 96 percent indicating that the issues are
being resolved too slowly.
How to gain better visibility?
What
are the key changes that need to be addressed when monitoring hybrid IT absent
environments? People have challenges with discovery, understanding, and visualizing
what has actually been deployed, and how it is impacting the end-to-end
business.
They have limited access to
the cloud infrastructure, and things like inadequate security monitoring or
traditional monitoring agent difficulties, as well as monitoring lack of
real-time metrics to be able to properly understand what’s happening.
It shows some of the real
challenges that people are facing. And as the world shifts to being more
dependent on the services that they consume, then traditional methods are not
going to be properly adapted to the new environment. Newer solutions are
needed. New ways of gaining visibility – and the measuring availability and
performance are going to be needed.
I think what’s interesting in
this part of the survey is the indication that the cloud vendors themselves are
not providing this visibility. They are not providing enough information for
people to be able to properly understand how service delivery might be
impacting their own businesses. For instance, you might think that IT is
actually flying blind in the clouds as it were.
The
cloud vendors are not providing the visibility. They are not providing
enough information for people to be able to understand service delivery
impacts.
People say they really need to
span infrastructure monitoring, metric that monitoring, and gain end-user security
and compliance. But even that’s not enough because to properly govern the
service delivery, you are going to have to have an eye on the costs -- the cost
of what’s being deployed -- and how can you optimize the resources according to
those costs. You need that analysis whether you are a consumer or the provider.
The last of our survey results
shows the need for comprehensive enterprise monitoring. Now, people need things
such as high-availability, automation, the ability to cover all types of data
to find issues like root causes and issues, even from a predictive perspective.
Clearly, here people expect scalability, they expect to be able to use a big data
platform.
For consumers of cloud
services, they should be measuring what they are receiving, and capable of
seeing what’s impacting the service delivery. No one is really so naive as to
say that infrastructure is somebody else’s problem. When it’s part of this
service, equally impacting the service that you are paying for, and that you
are delivering to your business users -- then you better have the means to be
able to see where the weak links are. It should be the minimum to seek, but
there’s still happenings to prove to your providers that they’re
underperforming and renegotiate what you pay for.
Ultimately, when you are
sticking such composite services together, IT needs to become more of a service
broker. We should be able to govern the aspects of detecting when the service
is degrading.
So when
their service is more PaaS, then workers’ productivity is going to suffer and
the business will expect IT to have the means to reverse that quickly.
So that, Dana, is the set of the different results that we got out of this survey.
A new need for analytics
Gardner: Thank
you, Ian. We’ll now go to Gary Brandt to learn about the need for analytics and
how cloud monitoring solutions can be cobbled together anew to address these
challenges.
Gary
Brandt: Thanks, Dana. As the survey results were outlined and as
Ian described, there are many challenges and numerous types of monitoring for
enterprise hybrid IT environments. With such variety and volume of data from
these different types of environments that gets generated in the complex hybrid
environments, humans simply can’t look at dashboards or use traditional tools
and make sense of the data efficiently. Nor can they take necessary actions
required in a timely manner, given the volume and the complexity of these
environments.
 |
| Brandt |
So how do we deal with all of this?
It’s where analytics, advanced analytics via ML, really brings in value. What’s
needed is a set of automated capabilities such as those described in Gartner’s
definition of AIOps and these include traditional
and streaming data management, log and wire metrics, and document ingestion
from many different types of sources in these complex hybrid environments.
Dealing with all this, trying
to, when you are not quite sure where to look, when you have all this information
coming in, it requires some advanced analytics and some clever artificial intelligence
(AI)-driven algorithms just to make sense of it. This is what Gartner is
really trying to guide the market toward and show where the industry is moving.
The key capabilities that they speak about are analytics that allow for
predictive capabilities and the capability to find anomalies in vast amounts of
data, and then try to pinpoint where your root cause is, or at least eliminate
the noise and get to focus on those areas.
We are making this Gartner report available for a limited
time. What we have found also is that people don’t have the time or often the
skill set to deal with activities and they focus on -- they need to focus on
the business user and the target and the different issues that come up in these
hybrid environments and these AIOps capabilities that
Gartner speaks about are great.
But, without the automation to
drive out the activities or the response that needs to occur, it becomes a
missing piece. So, we look at a survey -- some of our survey results and what
our respondents said, it was clear that upward of the high-90 percent are
clearly telling us that automation is considered highly critical. You need to
see which event or metric trend so clearly impacts on a business service and
whether that service pertains to a local, on-prem type of solution, or a remote
solution in a cloud at some place.
Automation is key, and that
requires a degree of that service definition, dependency mapping, which really
should be automated. And to be declared more – just more easily or more
importantly to be kept up to date, you don’t need complex environments, things
are changing so rapidly and so quickly.
Sense and significance of all that data?
Micro Focus’ approach uses analytics
to make sense of this vast amount of data that’s coming in from these hybrid
environments to drive automation. The automation of discovery, monitoring,
service analytics, they are really critical -- and must be applied across
hybrid IT against your resources and map them to your services that you define.
Those are the vast amounts of
data that we just described. They come in the form of logs and events and
metrics, generated from lots of different sources in a hybrid environment
across cloud and on-prem. You have to begin to use analytics as Gartner
describes to make sense of that, and we do that in a variety of ways, where we
use ML to learn behavior, basically of your environment, in this hybrid world.
And we need to be able to
suggest what the most significant data is, what the significant information is
in your messages, to really try to help find the needle in a haystack. When you
are trying to solve problems, we have capabilities through analytics to provide
predictive learning to operators to give them the chance to anticipate and to remediate
issues before they disrupt the services in a company’s environment.
When
you are trying to solve problems, we have capabilities through
analytics to provide predictive learning to operators to remediate
issues before they disrupt.
And we built this on different
platforms. One of the key things that’s critical when you have this hybrid
environment is to have a common way, or an efficient way, to collect
information and to store information, and then use that data to provide access
to different functionality in your system. And we do that in the form of microservices
in this complex environment.
We like to refer to this as
autonomous operations and it’s part of our OpsBridge
solution, which embodies a lot of different patented capabilities around AIOps. Harald is going to speak to our OpsBridge
solution in more detail.
Operations Bridge in more detail
Gardner: Thank
you, Gary. Now that we know more about what users need and consider essential,
let’s explore a high-level look at where the solutions are going, how to access
and assemble the data, and what new analytics platforms can do.
We’ll now hear from Harald Burose, Director of Product Management at Micro Focus.
Harald
Burose: When we listen carefully to
the different problems that Ian was highlighting, we actually have a lot of
those problems addressed in the Operations
Bridge solution that we are currently bringing to market.
 |
| Burose |
All core use cases for
Operations Bridge tie it to the underpinning of the Vertica big data analytics platform. We’re
consolidating all the different types of data that we are getting; whether
business transactions, IT infrastructure, application infrastructure, or
business services data -- all of that is actually moved into a single data
repository and then reduced in order to basically understand what the original
root cause is.
And from there, these tools
like the analytics that Gary described, not only identify the root cause, but
move to remediation, to fixing the problem using automation.
This all makes it easy for the
stakeholders to understand what the status is and provide the right
dashboarding, reporting via the right interface to the right user across the full
hybrid cloud infrastructure.
As we saw, some 88 percent of
our customers are connecting their cloud infrastructure to their on-premises
infrastructure. We are providing the ability to understand that connectivity
through a dynamically updated model, and to show how these services are
interconnecting -- independent of the technology -- whether deployed in the
public cloud, a private cloud, or even in a classical, non-cloud infrastructure.
They can then understand how they are connecting, and they can use the toolset
to navigate through it all, a modern HTML5-based interface, to look
at all the data in one place.
They are able to consolidate
more than 250 different technologies and information into a single place: their
log files, the events, metrics, topology -- everything together to understand
the health of their infrastructure. That is the key element that we drive with
the Operations
Bridge.
Now, we have extended the
capabilities further, specifically for the cloud. We basically took the generic
capability and made it work specifically for the different cloud stacks,
whether private cloud, your own stack implementations, a hyperconverged
(HCI) stack, like Nutanix, or a Docker container infrastructure that you
bring up on a public cloud like Azure,
Amazon, or Google Cloud.
We are now automatically discovering
and placing that all into the context of your business service application by
using the Automated Service Modeling part of the Operations Bridge.
Now, once we actually
integrate those toolsets, we tightly integrate them for native tools on Amazon
or for Docker tools, for example. You can include these tools, so you can then automate
processes from within our console.
Customers vote a top choice
And,
best of all, we have been getting positive feedback from the cloud monitoring community,
by the customers. And the feedback has helped earn us a Readers’
Choice Award by the Cloud Computing Insider in 2017, by being ahead of the competition.
This success is not just about
getting the data together, using ML to understand the problem, and using our
capabilities to connect these things together. At the end of the day, you need
to act on the activity.
Having a full-blown orchestration
compatibility within OpsBridge provides more than
5,000 automated workflows, so you can automate different remediation tasks --
or potentially point to future provisioning tasks that solve the problems of
whatever you can imagine. You can use this to not only identify the root cause,
but you can automatically kick off a workflow to address the specific problems.
If you don’t want to address a
problem through the workflow, or cannot automatically address it, you still have
a rich set of integrated tools to manually address a problem.
Having
a full-blown orchestration capability with OpsBridge provides more than
5,000 automated workflows to automate many different remediation tasks.
Last, but not least, you need to keep your stakeholders up to date. They need to know, anywhere that they go, that the services are working. Our real-time dashboard is very open and can integrate with any type of data -- not just the operational data that we collect and manage with the Operations Bridge, but also third-party data, such as business data, video feeds, and sentiment data. This gets presented on a single visual dashboard that quickly gives the stakeholders the information: Is my business service actually running? Is it okay? Can I feel good about the business services that I am offering to my internal as well as external customer-users?
And you can have this on a network
operations center (NOC) wall, on your tablet, or your phone -- wherever
you’d like to have that type of dashboard. You can easily you create those dashboards
using Microsoft Office toolsets, and create graphical, very appealing
dashboards for your different stakeholders.
Gardner: Thank
you, Harald. We are now going to go beyond just the telling, we are going to do
some showing. We have heard a lot about what’s possible. But now let’s hear
from an example in the field.
Multicloud monitoring in action
Next up
is David Herrera,
Cloud Service Manager at Banco
Sabadell in Barcelona. Let’s find out about this use case and their use of
Micro Focus’s OpsBridge solution.
David
Herrera: Banco Sabadell is fourth largest Spanish banking group. We
had a big project to migrate several systems into the cloud and we realized
that we didn’t have any kind of visibility about what was happening in the
cloud.
 |
| Herrera |
We started to develop new
functionalities on OpsBridge, to customize for our
needs. We had to cooperate with a project development team in order to achieve
this.
The main benefit is that we
have a detailed view about what is happening in the cloud. In the dashboard we
are able to show availability, number of resources that we are using -- almost
in real time. Also, we are able to show what the cost is in real time of every
resource, and we can do even the projection of the cost of the items.
The
main benefit is we have a detailed view about what is happening in the
cloud. We are able to show what the cost is in real time of every
resource.
[And that’s for] every single item that we have in the cloud now, even across the private and public cloud. The bank has invested a lot of money in this solution and we need to show them that it’s really a good choice in economical terms to migrate several systems to the cloud, and this tool will help us with this.
Our response time will be
reduced dramatically because we are able to filter and find what is happening, and call the right people to fix the problem
quickly. The business department will understand better what we are doing
because they will be able to see all the information, and also select
information that we haven’t gathered. They will be more aligned with our work
and we can develop and deliver better solutions because also we will understand
them.
We were able to build a new monitoring
system from scratch that doesn’t exist on the market. Now, we are able to
aggregate a lot of detailing information from different clouds.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app. Read a full transcript or download a copy. Sponsor: Micro Focus.
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