Keeping Cool at Gartner’s IT Operations Summit

It’s been a great independent validation of Optanix to be chosen as a Gartner Cool Vendor this year.  After attending last week’s IT Operations Summit in Maryland, I have an even better understanding of why we are considered “cool.” As I met with event attendees, two pain points were consistently mentioned.

• Tools Rationalization:  Over the past few years, so many technologies have been deployed by Application Developers and Operators that data center complexity has increased significantly.   The increase is not arithmetic as each new technology often requires an increase in monitoring and best-of-breed support tools.  In addition, each of these new tools generates more alerts, events and incidents for the IT Operations team to analyze.  The result is that IT Operations has a more difficult job of maintaining availability and performance of business services. Many IT organizations actively have tool consolidation projects in place. Being “the IT guy” today can be extremely overwhelming.
• Need for Single-Pane-of-Glass:  We spoke to many companies that saw value in leveraging the Optanix platform as a single-pane-of-glass or manager-of-managers.  Companies are saddled with multiple monitoring tools (a few, in fact, that reported more than 40 tools deployed).  IT organizations with so many monitoring tools are generally unable to obtain much business value from the monitoring data.  It’s not surprising that so many different monitoring tools have proliferated as it’s natural for each domain function in a full-stack data center environment (such as applications, web servers, load balancers, databases, networking devices, storage and virtualized + physical servers) will want to bring in best-of-breed tools to monitor their specific domains.  The challenges start however when service availability is interrupted or service performance is degraded. Usually what transpires is that a “war-room” call is setup and the finger-pointing begins: the app woman says it’s definitely not in the application server or logic, the network guy says not in my domain, etc. etc. etc..  In the meantime, the business service is unavailable or under-performing.  Businesses that rely on digital services know that this is an unacceptable situation.

It is safe to say that the majority of attendees were interested in identifying solutions that address the pains highlighted above. Many expressed the common view that “with so many tools, it’s often impossible for my team to quickly identify the root cause of service unavailability.”  After we presented the Optanix value proposition, many people said “this is exactly what I have been looking for …  where has Optanix been?”  Our ability to quickly correlate alerts is the key to amerliatoring the pains describe above. In fact, one of our large financial customers achieved a better than five 9s correlation efficiency using the Optanix Platform  – consuming 646M raw events, alerts, incidents, etc (noise entering the system) and identifying the 489 root cause incidents that needed to be addressed first. At the end of the show, attendees understood why Optanix kept the “Cool!”.