Xangati ESP: Making the Hybrid Cloud Manageable

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irtualization paved the way for cloud computing when it gave IT departments the capability to abstract a server’s computing processes from its hardware. The traditionally inextricable link between available resource and physical component became abstracted, corralled with other processes, and then housed inside a single host computer. This many-to-one relationship is the foundation of virtualization and the processes we call virtual machines became the start of an evolving ecosystem that grew into cloud computing. Cloud computing expanded on the concept of full-fledged virtualized data centers that offered services in off-premise public clouds. These clouds were multi-tenant environments that provided both software- and platform-based solutions for businesses. Then public cloud vendors introduced virtual datacenters, which proved instrumental in persuading companies to move computing resources to off-premise data centers. The need to better economize on cloud computing spawned the rise of the hybrid cloud. Operating as a combination of the aforementioned cloud types, hybrid solutions typically carry higher value through running multiple cloud models compared to the restrictions of offering only a single type. Hybrid solutions are generally a private (on-premise) cloud that connects to an off-premise public cloud. One example might involve connecting your local data center’s cloud resources to an off-site infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) solution, such as Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) or Google App Engine.

XANGATI’S POSITION IN THE MARKET The modular Xangati ESP performance control platform for virtualized infrastructures stands apart from competitors in the virtualization management market. Xangati ESP uses its own AI-like technology to help IT monitor, measure, troubleshoot and predict cloud-related activities and events across traditional IT silos, putting it in a unique class of products targeting enterprise cloud operations. In order to face cloud computing’s challenges, Xangati developed a product line-up and modules for key technologies in the virtualization realm. Xangati ESP for Cloud Infrastructure looks at the bigger picture, helping manage virtual environments on a larger scale, including virtual hosts, VMs and containers. Modules for this platform include VI, WebApp, Network, Storage while Xangati Extensions include Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Docker Containers, EMC VNX and NetApp. Xangati ESP gives IT a bird’s-eye view of its cloud infrastructure, promoting system health and maximized uptimes. When IT needs to expand and include other cloud solutions outside of its own on-premise operations, Xangati ESP adapts, as well. With the recent introduction of extensions for off-site cloud services — specifically, AWS, Microsoft Azure and Docker Containers — Xangati further helps IT expand their investment into other clouds.

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CHALLENGES OF THE PRIVATE CLOUD Managing a cloud environment can be incredibly complex. Silo sprawl often becomes inevitable, especially under legacy deployments, and each of these challenges may require their own monitoring tool. However, using multiple monitoring tools for the various virtual and physical components that make up the cloud’s infrastructure will only mean: • Paying multiple vendors and complicating a company’s accounting practices. • Causing compatibility issues between vendors’ software and hardware tools, which requires additional product purchasing to make up for deficiencies. • Locking in vendor strategies that prevent expansion of a company’s IT strategic plan. • Requiring IT staff to endure additional training on vendor-specific technologies, interfaces and terminology. Due to the vast size and complexity of a cloud computing environment, monitoring highly visible components is a major focus for cloud security solutions while small, elusive events evade scans. For example, two VMs might act peculiarly and draw exceptionally elevated CPU usage. From a high-level perspective, these proverbial dots don’t necessarily connect. However, there could be malicious software running on these systems or a brute force attack by someone trying to acquire corporate data from the two virtual machines. Troubleshooting a cloud also goes hand-in-hand with securing it. In a siloed environment, vendor-specific solutions tend to monitor only themselves, limiting IT’s ability to easily correlate potentially related problems. The investment IT makes on cloud solutions includes hardware, software, support and services, which constitutes a significant outlay. Nevertheless, hope for excellent ROI is easily dashed when frequent downtimes happen or poor performance slows business. Additionally, news of stolen data or hacks can affect public confidence in a company, including sales and the bottom line, which is why companies need to protect their cloud investment.

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THE HYBRID CLOUD: CHALLENGES EXTENDED As we’ve already mentioned, running one cloud is already challenging. Turning to a hybrid cloud solution can complicate things even more. Simply put, there’s more cloud to cover. With a hybrid cloud, IT has more to manage and protect. Additional challenges to monitoring and managing a hybrid cloud include: • Monitoring additional interfaces between the clouds, especially those connecting interfaces critical to gluing the two or more clouds together. • No immediate access to monitor and troubleshoot a cloud running on someone else’s hardware, especially objects that move between clouds. • Finding the right scalable tools to manage, protect and troubleshoot your unique hybrid cloud environment.

XANGATI ESP: READY FOR THE HYBRID CLOUD Xangati ESP is already positioned to tackle the hybrid cloud. Xangati ESP for Cloud Infrastructure are formidable tools by themselves, but when teamed with extensions for AWS, Microsoft Azure and Docker containers, IT groups finally have the hybrid cloud covered. Xangati ESP provides IT with end-to-end visibility of the virtual infrastructure’s components. With physical CPUs, GPUs, storage, networking to VMs, virtual desktops and the virtual networking stitching it all together, Xangati ESP gives precise, second-by-second updates about the environment. Compared to other similar products that collect data over longer intervals, Xangati’s real-time processing prevents critical delays that lead to disaster if immediate action isn’t taken. In a hybrid cloud, time is of the essence, especially when an enterprise’s IT group doesn’t have direct control over an off-site cloud environment. Xangati ESP’s exceptional performance comes from its in-memory architecture. Xangati ESP predicts trends quickly, giving IT the time needed to identify, investigate and remediate a problem leading to fewer downtimes and better reliability for the cloud environment. Hybrid cloud environments also benefit from Xangati ESP’s AI-based automation. The ability to rebalance workloads is key to Xangati, helping free up IT’s time so that the department can work on new projects, innovate and prevent other fires. Xangati ESP’s features also help protect a company’s hybrid cloud from disastrous events. For example, the platform’s storm-tracker technology helps IT to identify events happening within the cloud’s virtual infrastructure. Classifying these events as storms, the storm-tracker utility can alert IT of a growing or potential hazard. Whether the storm is storage-, CPU- or memory-based, the storm-tracker utility takes related alerts, classifies the level of the storm and even records the storm as it’s happening. Once an analysis runs, the root cause is identified and recommendations are presented to IT, giving the department the predictive heads-up needed to avoid future incidents.

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XANGATI ESP EXTENSION: AMAZON WEB SERVICES

XANGATI ESP EXTENSION: MICROSOFT AZURE

Composed of several separate but related services, including the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Simple Storage Service (S3), Dynamo DB and several others, AWS has an impressive portfolio, making it the go-to cloud service for many businesses.

Azure is Microsoft’s response to the popularity and growth that cloud services experienced over the past few years. Composed of PaaS and IaaS offerings, Azure provides compute, storage, SQL and app services along with dozens of other cloud products.

Xangati collects statistics from EC2 virtual machines (also called instances) and AWS’s Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) on a per-minute basis using AWS’s CloudWatch APIs. Once collected these metrics are monitored and immediately available to IT.

Similar to the ESP Extension for AWS, Xangati’s Azure extension relies on Azure Service Management REST API to collect instance and group data every minute. Once gathered, Xangati takes the data and immediately profiles it while setting up alerts.

Xangati ESP collects the following trends and top stats for AWS EC2 instances:

Xangati ESP collects the following trends and top stats for Microsoft Azure instances:

• EC2 Instance CPU usage, datastore byte rate and datastore IOPS

• Aggregate Azure VM CPU usage, datastore byte rate and datastore IOPS

• Network metrics (hybrid network bitrate, hybrid network packet rate, hybrid ID count, hybrid service count and custom hybrid service network bitrates)

• Network metrics (aggregate hybrid network bitrate, aggregate hybrid ID count, aggregate hybrid service count and aggregate custom hybrid service network bitrates)

• Top datastores by byte rate and IOPS

• Top Azure VMs by CPU Usage, instances by datastore byte rate and instances by consumed memory

• Top hybrid services by network bitrate and top hybrid IDs by network bitrate

• Top datastores by byte rate and top datastores by IOPS

Trends and top top stats for Amazon VPC:

• Top services by hybrid network bitrate and top IDs by hybrid network bitrate

• Aggregate EC2 Instance CPU usage, datastore byte rate and datastore IOPS

Trends and top stats for Microsoft Azure Groups:

• Aggregate hybrid network metrics (aggregate hybrid network bitrate, aggregate hybrid ID count, aggregate hybrid service count and aggregate hybrid custom service network bitrates) • Top EC2 instances by CPU usage, datastore byte rate and datastore IOPS • Top EC2 datastores by byte rate and IOPS • Top hybrid services by network bitrate and top hybrid IDs by network bitrate

• Aggregate Azure VM CPU Usage, datastore byte rate and datastore IOPS • Network metrics (aggregate hybrid network bitrate, aggregate hybrid ID Count, aggregate hybrid service count and aggregate custom hybrid service network bitrates) • Top Azure VMs by CPU Usage, instances by datastore byte rate and instances by consumed memory • Top datastores by byte rate and IOPS • Top services by hybrid network bitrate and top IDs by hybrid network bitrate

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XANGATI ESP EXTENSION: DOCKER CONTAINERS Containers, particularly the Docker open source project, recently benefited from a surge in activity and publicity, especially as a lightweight alternative to virtualization. Containers are software wrapped within a filesystem containing code, runtime and system tools and libraries. Containers share resources with other containers running on the same Linux or Windows computer and supported on both AWS and Microsoft Azure. Xangati ESP collects the following trends and top stats for Docker containers: • Disk block: IOPS and rate • Kernel: user and total CPU usage count • Memory: RSS (resident storage), swap (on disk) and usage (total memory) • Network bit rate: error rate and packet rate • Top processes by total CPU usage, memory usage, memory RSS and virtual size

XANGATI ESP: HYBRID CLOUD SOLUTION The hybrid cloud infrastructure scenario allows you to take the best of two cloud technologies and merge them into one functional solution, adding elasticity to workflows while avoiding the limitations of a single cloud solution. However, managing, monitoring and securing such a complex system requires a product that can go beyond the basic features that many of today’s cloud service assurance solutions offer. Xangati, with its analytics-based operations and intelligence, is a product that IT departments can take advantage of in order to build a strong hybrid-cloud strategy for their businesses.

About Xangati Xangati is a Silicon Valley software innovator of Xangati ESP, a service assurance analytics and performance control platform that optimizes virtual app workloads through self-healing triggers for performance issues, while optimizing capacity against cost advantages, with minimal administrator intervention or agents, benefitting from an in-memory platform architected for automation based on machine-learned heuristics. Xangati empowers next-generation data center sysadmins to tie cloud performance management to business outcomes such as enterprise KPIs, end-user quality of experience, IT agility and productivity, infrastructure ROI and risk mitigation. The Xangati ESP platform provides highly granular metrics and end-to-end visibility for virtualized data centers and hybrid-cloud environments. Organizations such as Comcast, British Gas, Colliers, Harvard and the U.S. Army trust Xangati to resolve service quality issues more quickly by diagnosing root causes of contention storms and assure overall infrastructure health.

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