Bekah Suttner, Blue Medora
Technologies are always moving and changing, and chances are your company has made significant investments in IT tools that could stand to be upgraded now. They still work, but aren’t as efficient or helpful as they once were. We hear from more and more companies who want to reduce tool sprawl and standardize on the vRealize Operations platform, but aren’t ready to discard their previous investments in monitoring and management tools. Using the vRealize Operations management packs specifically geared towards monitoring other monitoring solutions, you can “manage your managers.” In doing this, it’s possible to standardize on vROps while also:
- Leveraging your previous IT investments
- Increasing monitoring efficiency
- Limiting long-term cost as infrastructure expands to new technologies
Leverage Your Previous IT Investments
Nobody likes having to stick to a budget. It’s hard enough to juggle the needs of growing infrastructure while keeping the current racks healthy and efficient. Trying to figure out how to pay for all of it can be downright overwhelming. If your company is moving to new technologies, it often seems like previous investments are being thrown away, along with all of the money you spent on those technologies. By managing your managers in vROps, you can continue making use of your investments while moving forward with new monitoring solutions.
Figure 1 – The SCOM Overview dashboard from the Management Pack for SCOM
For example, let’s say your company has a significant number of Microsoft resources. You monitor with Microsoft SCOM, and have a few odds and ends platforms to pick up visibility gaps in your stack. It’s an effort to see how everything is related, but at least you can keep an eye on your resources and know when failures occur. As your company expands to new infrastructure, you add proprietary monitoring software for each technology.
Soon enough, you have dozens of monitoring tools to keep track of and comb through to find issues in your system. At this point, you realize how nice it would be to have a single monitoring console, but don’t want to throw away your investment in SCOM. Cue the vRealize Operations Management Pack for SCOM. Now you can monitor your SCOM resources in vROps, taking you one step closer to a unified management console for your entire infrastructure.
Increase Monitoring Efficiency
This one is pretty straightforward – the more tools your company is using, the more time you have to spend learning how to use each tool. Chances are you don’t have the time to learn every tool well, so you end up juggling your time between a dozen monitoring tools that you understand superficially. Let’s put it this way:
Figure 2 – Some (Swift) programming humor to point out that a great number of platforms means more time spent learning platforms, and less proficiency on each platform
When you standardize on vRealize Operations, you can dig deep into the capabilities of the platform. Not only will you save time going between managers and learning all of their different quirks, but you’ll be able to dive deeper into your system because you’ll have a better understanding of your monitoring tool. Bonus perk – the relationships in vRealize Operations make it possible both to find problems and to track their root cause through the stack.
Don’t pay a penalty for consolidating your tooling
By this time, you probably think that you have found a fatal flaw in my argument. Pulling a dozen resources into vROps means a dozen management packs, which means purchasing the same amount of vROps solutions. That can’t be sensible or cheap, right? And if you move to new infrastructure, you’ll have to buy more management packs, which means standardizing on vROps is no more future proof than having a dozen different tools.
Luckily, Blue Medora worked with VMware to offer the True Visibility Suite for vRealize Operations to future-proof your stack. Pay for a single license and use any of the management packs offered at your license level. As your stack expands, you can add management packs from the suite without adding monitoring costs to your budget.
Figure 3 – Blue Medora’s True Visibility Suite for vRealize Operations
Know of more great reasons to use vROps as a manager of managers? Help out your fellow vROps blog readers by posting them in the comments below. If you’re interested in learning more about the products mentioned here, visit bluemedora.com.
