Valovic on Virtualization

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Use Your iPhone for Virtualization Management?

Apple has reportedly now become the world's third largest mobile phone maker behind Nokia and Samsung. It's a rather amazing and meteoric rise and one of the best examples I know of the powerful and paradigm-shattering convergence of IT and telecom. But did you know that you can now use your iPhone to manage a virtualized environment?

Integrien is a startup company that competes with Netuitive, BMC and, to a lesser extent, Akorri. Like Netuitive, the company offers analytics software that baselines and correlates the performance of virtual and physical machines, performs root cause analysis, predicts performance degradations and, depending on the results, sends alerts to an IT admin. According to vice president of sales and marketing Steve Henning, this capability avoids what he says is an all too frequent occurrence: the all-hands bridge call involving different siloed groups. When database, network, server or application server admins get on calls like this, Henning says it often involves more fingerpointing than actual problem-solving.

Back in November, the company unveiled an iPhone option. It worked with Apple to develop the application, and the product is currently shipping. The configuration setup is similar to a Blackberry BES in that an Integrien server has to run in the data center.

Is this a capability that you would find useful in your IT shop? Post here or send me an e-mail.

Posted by Tom Valovic on 01/06/2009 at 10:28 AM


Reader Comments:

Mon, Jan 12, 2009

This application is considerably different than just an alert to a cell phone. There are multiple drill-down views in the application on the iPhone that provide forensic analysis capabilities that are deeper than you could get in any alert. It is NOT monitoring either. This iPhone application is a client that connects to an Alive server that is performing advanced, real-time analytics on data from the customer's existing monitoring infrastructure. Alive is thus, not a monitoring tool, but an analytics overlay. The visualizations available from the iPhone application or a web client are presenting the results of the analytics with forensics tools to get you to the root cause of the problem. It also is not typical reactive alerting. Alive Smart Alerts are proactive alerting based on analytics, delivering a 1.5-3 hour heads up to problems, before they could be identified by existing static threshold-based monitoring solutions or end users. This is proactive performance management. I don't see that "making changes" from the phone is relevant. In cases where complex, multi-tier applications are involved, the solution may require action to make changes to network, application servers, middleware, etc. There are going to be processes in place that must be followed to make such changes. You aren't going to just click a button on a phone of any kind. What you do get with the iPhone application is proactive alerting with the the ability to use advanced foresnics tools to establish root cause of performance problems.

Fri, Jan 9, 2009

How is this management? This is monitoring and alerting, unless you can then make changes from the iPhone as well.

I don't see anywhere in the release where it says this is differnet than a "Smart Alertâ„¢" sent to any other phone.

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