Tear Down the Wall

We discovered that most people have about 2-4 monitoring solutions for their datacenter. Each does its own specific task of either monitoring whether its uptime, the compute resources, storage or even the applications and networks. These tools create certain barriers and its quite hard to correlate across these monitoring tools to get to the root cause.

In certain cases, employees within a team are responsible for only a certain task. They use a single tool, and if their tool shows everything is ok, then they feel they are vindicated from the problem. This creates a siloed working atmosphere within the same department. 

Having people within a same department work in siloes has a lot of dangerous implications such as –

Within these companies that have been surveyed, it has been observed that IT operations teams such as those handling the virtualization or cloud infrastructure such as VMWare, AWS or Azure get the wrath of this blame game. Often, the requests are very vague such as “Increase the memory or CPU”, without actual evidence that infrastructure is the leading source of error.

Solutions for the infrastructure teams provide great details on the infrastructure side, however the information on the networking and application side are minimal. This scenario reminds me of the “Not Hot Dog” app from the TV show Silicon Valley!

Application teams can use these infrastructure monitoring solutions to identify any infrastructure related issues, however if the problem does not lie in the Infrastructure, we circle back to the “Not Hot Dog” scenario, where the root cause has still not been determined.

This is where teams require a full-stack visibility solution which would tear down the walls between the application, network and IT operations teams! The main objective of the full stack visibility solution is to provide organizations with the capability to see through the barriers and identify the root cause immediately, with the added benefits optimizing the efficiency of the team, so they could focus on projects that really matter.

Note: This article was witten by Aditya Krishnan, TME at Uila and published originally on his personal blog site http://www.dcdummy.com/.