Our Approach
Xangati is the leading provider of infrastructure performance management solutions that empower IT departments to accelerate virtualization initiatives with confidence.
“A completely different breed of management solutions is essential to manage the dynamic environment of today’s growing virtualized infrastructures. ”
- Vanessa Alvarez, Industry Analyst at Frost & Sullivan
Overview
Xangati’s approach was specifically developed to address the limitations of solely relying on server metrics to manage the virtual infrastructure. Server metrics (CPU, memory and disk statistics) do not provide any insight into how the infrastructure is performing in terms of its delivery of applications to end-users.
In comparison, Xangati’s comprehensive approach known as Infrastructure Performance Management (IPM) tracks the performance and dependencies of all the critical components comprising the IT infrastructure, including servers, network, storage, applications, end devices, and their end-users. What is driving the adoption of IPM solutions is the overwhelming IT shift to infrastructure virtualization and the ramifications that this shift has had on the infrastructure’s ability to ensure the highest level of performance for business-critical applications.
The “shake-up” in the performance stability of the IT infrastructure comes in two major parts. The first is that virtualization migrates IT architecture from one of dedicated infrastructure components to that of shared resources. The second is that the over-provisioning of resources is no longer an accepted best practice—the expectation is that the shared infrastructure will have the capacity to dynamically scale up and down capacity to support the performance requirements of any given application. The challenge however for the virtual infrastructure (VI) administrator is that the shared infrastructure that they manage might NOT be able to provide deterministic performance to all applications across the board. Compounding that challenge is the management tools at their disposal provide insufficient insight in this regard. In fact, 82% of VI administrators surveyed lack the confidence in their current management solutions’ abilities to ensure the performance of business-critical applications.
VI administrators are challenged in this regard for two reasons:
- Traditional infrastructure management solutions were focused in a piece-meal fashion on individual infrastructure components. That may have been sufficient when resources were dedicated but the interdependencies of these components and how they relate to the applications that rely on them is now necessary.
- The management dashboards from the virtualization vendors, such as VMware and Citrix, are centered on server performance metrics such as CPU and memory, and can dynamically shift resources based upon these metrics. However, when the performance of an application degrades this information, it is often insufficient in tracking the cause of the performance breakdown.
In the end, these challenges all point to the need for new management solutions that take a comprehensive look at the performance of the infrastructure: both virtual and physical, and how that ties back to the applications they support which is where Xangati’s industry leading IPM solution is focused and is differentiated in these four distinct areas:
- Comprehensive framework for all infrastructure components
- Auto-discovery and auto-identification
- Continuous end-to-end visibility: Live and DVR recorded
- Automated alerting and recordings through precision analytics
Comprehensive Framework for All Infrastructure Components
All infrastructure components: A Xangati management dashboard has a unique vantage point into the performance of all the components that comprise the IT infrastructure including servers, networks, storage, end-users and their devices. All this information is available in one uniform dashboard that provides insights that transcend traditional IT “silos.” Moreover, the performance of all components is historically tracked in a fully integrated historical database.
Application-aware: Understanding the performance of the infrastructure is not enough for the VI admin, he has to be able to tie back what he knows about the infrastructure to the applications that it supports. The Xangati solution is able to provide this linkage for any application running across the infrastructure at any time and the dependencies the given application has to the infrastructure. This application independent model offers great flexibility in contrast to application performance management solutions which are usually tethered to no more than a handful of applications.
Uniform agent-free visibility across physical virtual and the cloud: Xangati can gather information from all three of these realms without the need for agents on a per VM basis. Xangati is able to do this by having a presence as a VM within each host and having those Xangati VMs relaying summary information back to a central Xangati Management Dashboard. Additionally, Xangati can gather information about the physical infrastructure by having communication flows summarized and presented as a data feed from switches and routers.
Auto-Discovery and Auto-Identification
Immediate auto-discovery: The Xangati solution is designed to discover IT components as soon as they have a heartbeat on the IT infrastructure. Given the dynamic nature of virtualized environments such as VDI for example, it is essential to begin tracking objects as soon as they are active. In addition, given that VMs can migrate at the drop of a hat the Xangati solution is aware when they have migrated from one ESX server to another.
Seamless auto-identification: It is not sufficient to simply be aware of IT objects on the infrastructure; they have to be presented in a fashion that is understandable to all parts of the IT organization and tracked in a way that allows for historical analysis. For instance, instead of presenting information by IP address the Xangati solution can present it by a DNS name which will remain constant vs. the IP address which is often fleeting. Xangati integrates with numerous identity data sources including vCenter, DNS, RADIUS, SNMP, LDAP etc. to help clearly define for the system user if he is looking at a storage target, a server or a client device. Additionally, Xangati can “out of the box” auto-identify over 125 applications and communication protocols.
Continuous End-to-End Visibility: Live and DVR Recorded
Continuous end-to-end visibility: At any moment in time, the Xangati Management Dashboards can provide continuous visibility (through a second-by-second scroll bar) into any active infrastructure component and application. Regardless of who the Xangati user is he will have the ability focus on the parts of the infrastructure that is most relevant to him at that moment in time. This visibility is in contrast to other infrastructure performance management solutions which have constrained insights into just one aspect of the IT infrastructure.
Live, navigational drill-down: A Xangati user has the ability to dynamically navigate through their infrastructure by starting with one infrastructure component and drilling down into another that is directly linked to it. For instance, he can focus on a given client device’s incoming VDI traffic or zoom-in on the interaction between an application server and its database. This navigational capability is not available through solutions who that have their architectures centered on delivering historical reports.
DVR recording: Leveraging the continuous scroll-bar views that Xangati presents, the Xangati administrator can record this information in the same way he can DVR record a TV program. This information can be used to diagnose a problem, or to relay a problem to another part of the organization through an email with a copy of the recording. Additionally, DVR recordings can be scheduled to catch persistent problems that often recurring at specific times in the day—for example a back-up that gets disrupted at 2AM in the morning. The Xangati solution also has a facility for an end-user to initiate recordings when he is experiencing a performance problem. This function known as the visual trouble ticket not only relays his experience at the time of a problem, but it can also initiate the opening of a service desk ticket and be appended to it as a visual note.
Automated Alerting/Recording through Precision Analytics
Precision analytics-based profiles: Given that the Xangati Management Dashboards can track thousands if not hundreds of thousands of objects then it would be a near impossibility for a system user to define alert thresholds for all of them. The Xangati solution with its rich analytical capabilities is continuously monitoring numerous performance metrics per object including CPU, memory and disk statistics. It will initially learn and establish a set of upper and lower profiles (a.k.a. thresholds) and will reflect variations based upon time of day. The system will also adapt these profiles as gradual changes happen over time.
Continuous Analysis: Xangati tracks the activity of all the objects on your infrastructure continuously against their profiled performance metrics. This continuous comparison versus the threshold is unique when compared with other solutions that rely on infrequent polling intervals to determine a problem. In this regard, the system is able to track changes immediately as they occur.
Real-Time Alerting with Auto-recording: Given that the Xangati solution can identify deviations in performance as soon as they occur; the administrator can determine how quickly they want to be notified of changes. That notification can occur in seconds or minutes and can come in the form of an email, syslog or an SNMP trap. As important as the alert notification is, it is enriched by the auto-recording that accompanies it which provides a granularity of detail about what was actually happening at the time of a problem that cannot be captured in a report. That way as an example, if a given server is running a backup in the middle of the day when it shouldn’t the Xangati recording will show this activity.
