Real-time, Streaming Data Analysis Part of Updated Reflex VMC
Highly-customizable analytics, charts, and reports deliver granular access into virtual environments, help IT manage virtual infrastructure.
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Reflex Systems, a virtualization management and automation solutions provider, has released the latest version of its Reflex VMC management suite. Enhancements to the product that help solve the “big data” challenges large-scale virtualization deployments can present.
The dynamic nature of server virtualization generates significant data volume and rates of change that can be difficult to manage and correlate. Reflex VMC now provides real-time, streaming data analysis that gives enterprises extremely granular visibility and pure data fidelity for managing virtual infrastructure.
Utilizing Reflex VMC, IT organizations can quickly analyze data in real time, wrap context around it and present it in a meaningful way to best decide how to control and optimize virtualized data centers and private cloud environments of scale.
“Working with customers doing some of the largest deployments, it’s clear that organizations are committed to virtualization for business-critical applications. They require a high level of virtual business intelligence in order to make accurate, effective decisions about how to optimize and control their environments, and they need to be able to do this at scale. With the new VMC enhancements, enterprises no longer have to worry about missing significant performance events requiring immediate reaction and remediation that might otherwise be hidden by blind spots created by overly averaged and normalized data,” said Mike Wronski, vice president of product management for Reflex.
“For example, one of our customers is a top 10 bank, managing over 10,000 virtual machines with Reflex. For them, the ability to produce both macro-level executive summarizations and perform analysis on specific real-time or historical health and performance criteria down to the virtual-machine level from the same solution and set of data is invaluable. We believe all customers, big or small, should have the ability to customize their virtualization management, monitoring, and reporting to meet their specific business needs.”
Reflex collects and stores vast amounts of detailed performance data in a proprietary time-series database to provide historical context to the performance of the virtual infrastructure at any given time. Storage of historical performance data is essential for effective chargeback and cost management processes as well as troubleshooting and performing root cause analysis.
For example, an organization can quickly and easily determine the root cause of slow application performance by analyzing the historical data over a particular timeframe and detecting a CPU spike that may have happened a week ago. In many cases, with other performance tools that do not store granular performance data, this CPU spike would have been significantly minimized if seen at all due to the over averaging of such information. Retrieving specific historical performance data provides powerful insight, accuracy and speed in solving infrastructure issues.
Customizable Analytics and Automation
Customizable analytics in Reflex VMC allow customers to apply business-intelligence-style modeling to the mountain of raw performance and configuration data inherent in virtualized infrastructure. Reflex VMC ships with significant pre-configured content and best-practice views into an organization’s environment and enables administrators to leverage all of it as building blocks to creating custom metrics that can be visualized, be the basis of reports and alerts, and be used in all parts of the Reflex solution.
Customers gain data fidelity and can manipulate data to tailor it to a specific environment. Through the new customizable analytics, customers can create new, business-specific charts and roll-ups that can be used in alerts, used to define policy, shown historically, used in performance forensics, and compared against configuration changes.
For example, enterprises can identify storage bottlenecks by combining the base metrics of IOPS and network response time into a new compound indicator that highlights both the location of the problem and its potential cause. This removes the error-prone and tedious task of manual correlation, reducing mean time to recovery.
Users can prioritize where to focus their time and efforts within the virtual infrastructure, simplifying root-cause analysis and real-time correlation. Users, not the vendor, determine infrastructure health indicators that are meaningful for their business, and can often reduce computing requirements across the data center by strategically analyzing their unique infrastructure, based on their needs. With this level of data fidelity and customization comes a greater level of confidence as enterprises make strides toward the automation of this infrastructure.
Customizable Charts and Chart Publishing
In addition to the comprehensive set of default performance/capacity charts relevant to many environments, Reflex VMC users can tailor the existing charts to align with business processes or organizational constructs as well as create net-new visualizations from the expansive number of performance and capacity metrics provided.
To facilitate the socialization of the virtual intelligence to the widest audience possible, Reflex VMC now can publish individual live charts or entire dashboards as a simple URL or embeddable HTML code. For example, custom dashboards related to the performance and operation of a Microsoft Exchange E-mail cluster can be published into a wiki or SharePoint instance managed by the E-mail administrators.
More information is available at www.reflexsystems.com.