One of the charter responsibilities of operations in most organizations is monitoring. And not just monitoring applications, but monitoring the health and well-being of the infrastructure responsible for delivering those applications.
A survey conducted in late 2014 by James Turnbull on the subject of monitoring found that practitioners of operations monitor not just server infrastructure and apps, but network infrastructure as well.
Given the criticality of infrastructure like load balancing to not only application availability but performance, this makes sense. Those in operational roles associated with DevOps, in particular, are concerned with not just the app itself but with the ecosystem that delivers them.
It’s not just monitoring itself that’s important, but also the way in which monitoring is conducted. The importance of monitoring infrastructure – including “the network” – was also noted in a survey which found that a siloed approach to monitoring and management was the main limitation of the current monitoring solution. Across the board respondents were very interested in a more unified approach. The most important capability of such a unified system - garnering a 4.3 on an ascending scale of importance from 1 to 5 – was “breadth and depth of technologies that can be monitored.”
Given the breadth of responsibility noted by operators in Turnbull’s survey, this is unsurprising. Complexity is the enemy of more than security, and there are few things less complex in the enterprise than number of systems and devices that make up the critical path of an application; each of which needs to be monitored to ensure timely response to issues or worse, outages.
Which is where VMware vRealize Operations comes into the picture. VMware vRealize Operations is a policy-based, unified operations management platform that can be extended to support a broad set of solutions. This platform, ecosystem supporting approach is a must in today’s increasingly complex environments, especially when it comes to monitoring infrastructure and applications to ensure inclusion of not just the applications and their immediate supporting infrastructure (that’s servers), but the infrastructure that delivers them, like BIG-IP.
Blue Medora recently expanded that ecosystem with its latest offering, VMware vRealize Operations Management Pack for F5 BIG-IP. Blue Medora’s F5 BIG-IP Management Pack brings a variety of operational capabilities for F5 BIG-IP systems to vROps such as aggregated monitoring, visibility into client and server-side network performance, smart alerting for cluster failover and certificate expiration, as well as BIG-IP capacity planning through vRealize Operations Manager based on core metrics such as CPU, memory, and disk.
With F5 and VMware vRealize Operations working together, all layers of the application infrastructure – virtual, network, and compute – are available to the organization, enabling actionable insights into the performance of the application and network infrastructure responsible for delivering applications with the performance demanded by business and consumers alike.
F5 and Blue Medora will be hosting a webinar Tue, Oct 13 @ 9am PDT where you can further explore the Blue Medora vROps Management Pack for F5 with our own Matt Quill, Business Development Manager here at F5. It’s a great chance to see it action and get the low down from the experts.
You can also find more information on using the Management Pack at Blue Medora’s product page or see the VMware vRealize Operations Management Pack for F5 BIG-IP User Guide, which can be found at: http://support.bluemedora.com.
In the meantime, keep calm and monitor on!
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