With the introduction of the Wavefront with vRealize Operations 6.7, customers interested in monitoring packaged applications using Wavefront by VMware have a quick and effortless way to try monitoring as a service. In previous blog posts, we have explained what this enables and how to use the VMware Application Proxy (“VAP”) to enable this integration. In this blog post, we’ll answer the most important question: “Why would I use both Wavefront and vRealize Operations together?”
Bringing AppOps and ITOps Together
Customers today are struggling with bimodal IT, a term coined by Gartner in 2014 to define the struggle within IT organizations due to digital transformation. This is a real problem, with real consequences. Successful transformation is not about getting the business edge, it’s really become a fundamental requirement to survive in the modern digital age.
As application and development teams (which we will call “AppOps”) work to quickly deliver newer and more innovative capability, IT operations (or “ITOps”) struggles to maintain acceptable levels of risk for availability and security. Both teams require purpose-built tools, with deep visibility into their own domain and some basic understanding of how they are impacting adjacent silos.
Wavefront with vRealize Operations helps close this gap, by addressing three specific use cases that stall digital transformation and cause headaches for the VP of Operations; the person responsible for managing and balancing risk versus agility. From the point of view of the VP, the ITOps and AppOps teams are siloed, resulting in lack of responsiveness and blind spots that limit the ability to quickly identify and react to business impacting issues.
Eliminate Blind Spots
One major hurdle in getting complete visibility is cost. Traditional APM tools are fantastic and provide excellent insight. However, it is not feasible to monitor all applications with these tools and typically enterprises will only use APM for 10-20% of the business-critical applications. What about the other 80% of applications, typically packaged applications, that support the business goals?
This is where vRealize Operations and Wavefront together can help. Wavefront provides cost-effective coverage for customers, delivered as a service. IT Operations can easily deploy and manage Wavefront monitoring for VMs running in the private cloud, extending coverage to application services such as Apache HTTP, PostgreSQL, APMQ and more.
This allows deeper visibility into application problems and quicker resolution of problems by lowering the barriers of complexity and cost. Check out the walkthrough demo of this use case here.
Agility for AppOps
Wouldn’t it be great to have AppOps and ITOps playing from the same sheet of music? ITOps controls resources (compute, storage and networking) and must make sure they are used efficiently. AppOps must respond quickly to a dynamic marketplace. Both are critical responsibilities and Wavefront with vRealize Operations allows these teams to work in concert, instead of at odds. Wavefront with vRealize Operations helps to identify and confirm resource usage by providing visibility to application performance and scale.
Consider an application that has seen a temporary spike in demand due to some seasonal event. While ITOps might notice an increase in resource usage, like increased CPU demand, they are reluctant to blindly increase CPU for an application without justification. Using Wavefront to correlate application metrics, the AppOps team can quickly confirm that the increase in demand is justified by a business need versus a non-business-related demand like testing, malicious users or hung processes. ITOps can now respond quickly to provide the needed compute resources with confidence.
If you want to see this in action, check out our walkthrough demo here.
Breaking Down Silos
Collaboration only works when teams have visibility and communication. Without optics into the full application stack, ITOps cannot understand the impact of infrastructure changes on business applications. Likewise, AppOps is equally unaware of how the SDDC is providing resources and how they might better utilize those resources.
For example, ITOps often offers infrastructure in tiers of service, designed to meet specific SLAs at variable cost points. This helps the business understand the cost of service, but AppOps may not understand the trade-offs in selecting a lower tier of service, or when it may be time to change to a different tier to improve performance or lower cost.
With Wavefront and vRealize Operations together, the two teams can easily identify how the currently delivered resources impact applications and quickly understand how changes are impacting application performance, in real time.
Curious to see how this might work in practice? Check out our walkthrough demo here.
Try Wavefront with vRealize Operations Today
Are you lacking visibility for the majority of your applications due to cost and complexity concerns? Do you desire full stack visibility for both ITOps and AppOps to improve collaboration, break down silos and remove blind spots?
It has never been easier to try Wavefront with vRealize Operations to monitor packaged applications. If you are currently a vRealize Operations customer, simply upgrade to version 6.7 to enable the integration and get started. It is quick and easy to sign up for a 30-day trial of Wavefront (directly from vRealize Operations 6.7).
