Many of you may have seen the recent announcement on VMware acquiring Wavefront, a Palo Alto-based cloud analytics firm. You can learn the initial details about the acquisition from the blog article written by Ajay Singh, the General Manager and SVP of the VMware Cloud Management Business Unit.
Now, I am glad to share with you more analysis of this event – this time, from one of the major analysts in the cloud space.
Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) is the leading industry analyst firm that provides deep insight across the full spectrum of IT and data management technologies. Torsten Volk, EMA’s managing research director, hybrid cloud, has just published an EMA Impact Brief focused on VMware’s acquisition of Wavefront. The brief covers the Wavefront’s background, its solutions and technology, and the EMA’s view on how Wavefront will help to further propel VMware’s DevOps capabilities.
Outline
Torsten starts off by providing the background on Wavefront going back to the time when it was started by former Google employees who set out to create a SaaS-based data analytics platform for cloud-hosted applications. Drilling down, we are introduced to the technology that drives the platform:
- Metrics collection and storage
- Analytics engine
- API and GUI
In essence, Wavefront connects to existing applications, containers, and big data frameworks as well as most popular mega-clouds, to collect and analyze their operational metrics for IT and business process optimization, capacity planning, and user experience monitoring purposes.
Not Your Grandfather’s Monitoring Tool
The article makes a critical point of explaining that Wavefront is not just a monitoring tool, but a data analytics, visualization and alerting platform that relies on input from all of the above components, including monitoring tools such as Nagios, NewRelic, or VMware’s vRealize products. Therefore, Wavefront does not require data collection agents, but receives its input directly from tools and services that are already in place.
The key to understanding the value of Wavefront is to clearly define the use cases it solves. Wavefront enables developers to understand exactly how their application consumes cloud infrastructure and services. The article explains how users can get impactful results both for IT, but also for business processes.
Strategic Fit and EMA Perspective
In conclusion, Torsten provides the EMA’s position on how Wavefront fits into VMware’s Cloud Management Platform strategy in general, and into its growing support of DevOps function within the IT organization. He looks at the Wavefront’s value on a broader scale, but also specific to the recently-announced and soon to be released VMware Cloud on Amazon AWS, as one very strong value proposition for customers who will be moving their applications into the public cloud.
