Your IT environment is getting more and more complex and you have lots of disparate monitoring tools. Are you looking to aggregate your monitoring tools? If so, you’ll find Gartner’s Market Guide for IT Infrastructure Monitoring Tools is a must read.
That report assesses tools provided by key vendors in the Infrastructure Monitoring Tools (ITIM) category. Gartner defines the ITIM category as tools that:
capture the availability of the IT infrastructure components that reside in a data center or are hosted in the cloud as infrastructure as a service (IaaS). These tools monitor and collate the availability and resource utilization metrics of servers, networks, database instances, hypervisors and storage.
The ITIM environment is shown in the following figure.
The report provides insights and recommendations for IT practitioners looking to implement a more strategic approach to their monitoring needs. It considers the trends affecting the ITIM market and the evolving features and functions being provided to address new requirements.
In 2018—when the Gartner report was published—NetApp offered OnCommand Insight (OCI), a monitoring tool installed on premises. OCI, which is sold as a licensed software, monitors your entire infrastructure, including your multi-vendor on-premises systems and your public cloud resources. OCI is used by over 800 large enterprises, including banks, retailers, and service providers to monitor, troubleshoot, and optimize their entire IT infrastructure.
The report identifies an important trend that’s underpinning a new set of requirements for monitoring tools: that is, the move to cloud-based technologies, such as containers and microservices. Monitoring your infrastructure goes beyond the sole realm of the operations team and now includes developers, SREs and LOB owners. This trend increases the importance of having a toolset that enables a panoramic view of your entire infrastructure.
One of the report’s key recommendations is to reduce management overhead by considering tools that "have modern user interfaces and are architected to support emerging technologies, such as containers and the Internet of Thing (IoT)."
NetApp’s cloud product offerings have evolved over the last 4 years, responding to this trend. We recognized the need to provide the functions of OCI as a SaaS offering and as a result, in October 2018, we introduced NetApp® Cloud Insights.
Cloud Insights is a SaaS-based monitoring tool that takes the key features of OCI and makes them available as a cloud service. Furthermore, Cloud Insights is designed specifically for today’s cloud-based infrastructures including microservices, containers, and Kubernetes. It provides advanced analytics on the connections between resources, enabling you to see the end-to-end performance of each element in your IT stack.
We encourage you to register for the Cloud Insights free trial, and to see how our new monitoring tool can help your entire IT team to keep your systems not just running, but also performing to meet the needs of your business.
Register for the Cloud Insights free 14-day trial and read the Gartner Market Guide for IT Infrastructure Monitoring Tools, or our blog on cloud monitoring best practices.