Dan's Take

Virtual Instruments Launches VirtualWisdom 5.4

• By Dan Kusnetzky
• 12/12/2017

From time to time, Len Rosenthal, CMO of Virtual Instruments, drops by to bring me up-to-date on what his company is doing in infrastructure performance management (IPM). This time, the discussion centered on VirtualWisdom 5.4 and its abilities to provide "application-centric performance management."

VirtualWisdom 5.4 Key Features
VirtualWisdom was designed to address enterprise requirements to have end-to-end visibility into how enterprise workloads are performing. This includes real-time analytics providing some level of "machine learning" or "predictive analytics" to simplify the view of a very complex infrastructure environment, providing customizable dashboards that allow different stakeholders to see what they need without overwhelming them with unneeded information, and integrating within an enterprise's complex mix of systems management, performance management, and other management tools.

The company claims that "VirtualWisdom 5.4 is the industry's first app-centric IPM platform" that offers the following:

• App discovery and mapping
• App-centric topology views
• Tier-based application service-level policies
• Executive dashboards

What's new with this release is the ability to examine the flow of data through the network, explore data flowing through Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) in a SAN switch environment, and help customers examine data flows in SMB or NFS network attached storage (NAS) environments. This includes the ability to examine data flows in a virtual SAN environment provided by VMware, Nutanix or Simplivity.

Dan's Take: When the Term "Datacenter" Doesn't Really Mean "Datacenter"
Virtual Instruments presents VirtualWisdom as "The Industry's most comprehensive infrastructure performance monitoring and analytics platform." The product, the company points out, provides both real-time and historical insights into "performance, health and utilization of your datacenter."

What the company really means is that it looks at industry-standard computing platforms (for example, based on x86 architectures) in enterprise datacenters as not offering direct ways to look into supporting application infrastructure that's based on single-vendor computing environments. VirtualWisdom offers capabilities that allow knowledgeable administrators to infer, at least, that performance problems can be attributed to "the other side of the wall" when data sources living in those computing environments slow down or become inaccessible.

If you look around this crowded market, you can see that Virtual Instruments faces intense competition from a number of places, including Cisco AppDynamics, New Relic, Microsoft Systems Center, Quest (now part of Dell) Foglight, Splunk and quite a number of other companies. While VirtualWisdom appears to offer features and functions that would be very useful, Virtual Instruments faces a challenge: The company has to gain some level of awareness of itself and its products, develop enterprise interest in what it does, demonstrate how it's different and somehow better, and only then can it win over large and well-funded competitors.

I'd suggest that decision makers take the time to see one of Virtual Instrument's demonstrations. I believe that if they would take the time to learn about this product and what it can do to help an organization, they would be quite impressed.