Proactive Performance Management in the Cloud

Today, BMC launched cloud operations capabilities to safeguard cloud users. As part of that, we released our latest version of proactive performance management product. There are many new things included in this release. But one of them that I am really excited about is its focus on cloud operations.

Photo used under Creative Commons from danshouse

Behavior learning in the cloud

Cloud, compared to traditional IT infrastructure, has its own uniqueness that requires a different approach on how you manage its day-to-day operations. Its mixed workloads, elastic nature, and service-centric principal dictates any static, reactive, and disparate operations solution won’t be able to generate enough power to propel the new cloud engine. That’s why I am excited to see that we are focusing on tuning the analytic engine to better understand this new set of behavior of cloud services and resources. For example, the engine can now  support hundreds of VMs provisioned per hour and readjust the behavior learning within minutes. This release is just the first step in that direction. But the team at BMC worked really hard to understand from customers and the market and assessed the current knowledge based on many year’s of successful application of the behavior learning engine  in the virtualization environment. There are many we can leverage and some we can’t. But that’s the point. The cloud is different from anything we have seen so far, virtualization or not. We found out and have learned from the customer that behavior learning capabilities is generating bigger and bigger value in a cloud environment where dynamic rules the world, from the IT process, the service, to the infrastructure resources.

Get your value fast

Cloud market develops rapidly. Our customers who want to compete in this space need to make their offering available fast. So how to make sure the operations solution can be up and running is one of the focus in this release. Now there will be a guided wizard to allow you plan, install, and configure all the necessary cloud management pieces, including lifecycle management and proactive performance management. One of our customers used to take 2 weeks to put the whole cloud management solution up and running in a small environment. Now they have done that in just 2 days with an even more robust solution.

Scalability for cloud deployment

In this release, we also address the scalability difference between a typical service provider cloud environment and an enterprise data center. The solution now is able to provide performance data from 50,000 cloud devices to hundreds concurrent user access. This enables not only the administrator will see and act upon the data but also the cloud end users will get those data, just like what you can get from Amazon CloudWatch.

Public cloud monitoring for enterprise

Speaking of Amazon CloudWatch, many of our customers who deployed their services in to EC2 monitor the data constantly. But they couldn’t do is to translate those data into actionable insight automatically. Now, we are providing out-of-the-box capabilities (aka.”knowledge module” if you are familiar with our product) to allow enterprises to pull in the performance data from CloudWatch for their instances and feed into our behavior learning engine. You can even build a service that across both your provide and Amazon EC2 and use our solution to measure its availability, impact to your business, and workload by leveraging both our remote and in-guest monitoring capabilities on those public cloud instances. In addition, we also let you monitor Microsoft Azure remotely if you are building applications in its PaaS environment.

Of course, this is just a subset of new features we put in to this release. We will start share more information in the coming weeks. I will be in VMWorld next month, you can meet us and see our demo in BMC booth. I look forward to meeting you there and chatting more about how the cloud operations could be evolved.