We are excited to announce the availability of VMware Tanzu Insights™ (formerly Aria Business Insights™). This product provides platform operators to SREs/DevOps Engineers and developers with simple, explainable AI/ML-based insights across modern cloud applications including the underlying infrastructure. Additionally, it delivers valuable troubleshooting insights for Kubernetes and public cloud environments.
VMware Tanzu Insights solution brings together and connects multiple sources of data for platform operators and their teams. By integrating observability tools and implementing AIOps, Tanzu Insights delivers actionable insights that simplify troubleshooting, lower the mean time to resolution (MTTR), and provide predictive remediation recommendations to help ensure system reliability.
Tanzu Insights helps teams to correlate data to understand why the problem is happening, and quickly resolve issues as they arise thereby driving operational efficiency.
Let us now look at exactly how Tanzu Insights achieves this …
Tanzu Insights currently takes inputs in the form of alerts and events from VMware Aria Operations for Applications (aka Wavefront by VMware or Tanzu Observability), VMware Aria Operations for Logs, Kubernetes clusters (all flavors via the K8s collector), AWS CloudWatch alerts and Azure Monitor alerts. As the product evolves over time, we at VMware aim to add many more input sources like GCP, vSphere, and generic ingestion ability for any external monitoring system/source etc.
Once Tanzu Insights starts receiving data from the input sources, the AI/ML engine kicks in and starts to work its magic by learning and analyzing the information coming in from multiple sources (btw you can use Tanzu Insights with a single input source as well…) and creating valuable insights for your consumption without any other extra configuration requirements.
So, once we have an Insight (which is an interpretation by the AI/ML engine of the inputs received from multiple sources of a problem or what could be a problem), how do you interpret it and what are the different pieces of information available for your consumption and interpretation … The home page or the landing page of Tanzu Insights shows you a bar chart of the incoming insights in a trend chart. By default, it shows you Active Insights for the last 48 hours. You can of course search on Insights using keywords or select a severity in the left pane to see Insights by severity, or even select a particular source to see Insights from that source or make combinations of these selections as per your requirements.
Each individual Insight is represented in the form of a card. The card displays the Severity of the Insight, and Insight ID number, its Status at the top followed by an ML-generated Insight Title and when that Insight was last updated based on information received for the Insights affected resources. At the bottom of the card, it shows you how many Observations have led to the Insight being generated and the number of resources affected due to the insight, and the different sources it has pulled information from to generate the Insight.
Once you click on the title of the Insight, the card opens up to the details of the Insight to the default Timeline view ….
The Timeline view shows the progression of alert events over time grouped by resource that its using to generate the Insight for you and also displays the changing severity of the alerts over time. The timeline view is important to highlight the series of events that have led to the Insight being generated by the ML engine, allowing you the user to check the progression of events over time.
At the top of the Insight below the Insight title, you see the description of the Insight which when expanded shows you the Summary and Potential Cause(s) as identified by the machine learning engine when it generated the Insight for you and shows other Insight details like severity and creation time below it.
The Summary and the Potential Cause are lead pointers in helping you understand the Insight and guide to a potential issue reducing your MTTR in finding and fixing the issue highlighted by the Insight.
Next to the Timeline tab is the Observations tab … here you will find the details of the Observations (which is primarily alerts, events and metric data) found by the machine learning engine for the events and information received by Tanzu Insights from the different sources for the various resources on which these events were reported. You can click on the Observation name to check out the details of the Observation in the right pane or click on a resource name to observe details about the selected resource to be able to drill down further into an issue to check if it’s a smoking gun or not …
Alternatively, you could also click on the link in the source column to directly jump to the source of the observation like Aria Operations for Application or the AWS CloudWatch console…
Next to the Observations tab is the Impact View tab … here you will find the impact details of the Observations found by the machine learning engine where you can see the real power of Tanzu Insights by being able to gauge the impact of the issue found by Insights from the different sources to be able to assess the Impact of the issue to the bottom line ($$) in terms of which resources, applications and services have been impacted. To the right is what we are calling the troubleshooting workbench where you can check details of properties for resources, services or applications highlighted in the impact view.
Last but not the least is the Notes and Activity Tab, where the ML engine leaves notes for tracking purposes or the users of Tanzu Insights can leave custom notes for reference or future use for themselves or their teammates.
As Tanzu Insights evolves as a product over time some of these features will change based on customer feedback and practical use but we hope that you can take advantage of this product and find value in it. With the whole context carryover in the form of logs, metrics, and events and all of this without having to switch between applications or switch context, can help you be proactive with your monitoring requirements and gauge the impact of the problem at hand.
For full details about this exciting new release, be sure to check out the product documentation or a video demonstration. If you want to learn more about how Tanzu Insights can help you and your organization then head over to VMware Tech Zone, Request a trial of Tanzu Insights or request a conversation with one of our experts today.
