Zyrion Uses Automation To Simplify Monitoring

Specializing in cloud and IT monitoring solutions, Zyrion Inc. wants to "dramatically" simplify monitoring the performance of distributed, heterogeneous cloud infrastructures with its Traverse Automation Module. Automation is the second element of the company's three-party strategy that was launched in April with the Data Capture and Processing module for monitoring cloud technologies like VMware, Xen and AWS, and will be completed next month with the unveiling of an Intelligence & Predictive Analytics capability.

The rampant growth of virtualization and cloud computing has also grown complexity and administration, including monitoring, says Zyrion CEO Vikas Aggarwal. One customer soared from having 1,000 physical servers before a virtualization project began to having to manage more than 7,000 virtual servers after the first phase of the initiative. "What resulted from this, and people adding virtual machines, was a requirement from a lot of our customers for the ability to automate a large part of the provisioning on the monitoring side."

The Automation module includes Dynamic Linked Templates that allow administrators to create a master definition for monitoring a particular type of cloud component, which includes alarm thresholds, event-driven actions, notifications, schedules and more. The company says any number of child components can then be linked to the master, and have their full definition based on whatever has been specified for the master. Whenever changes are made to the master, these changes are seamlessly propagated to all linked child components.

With Centralized Configuration Management, administrators can perform all monitoring configuration operations and changes for a heterogeneous IT environment--physical, virtual, cloud--from within a single UI, requiring no separate access to any remote applications, devices or locations. And the Workload Management Integration includes API and plug-in framework extensions to enable automated resource provisioning or resource deletion based on performance metrics crossing defined thresholds. Zyrion says Service Container rules, Composite metrics and the escalation framework can be used to initiate complex resource change actions.

The latest addition to Zyrion's lineup is really pragmatically relevant and needed, says analyst Dennis Drogseth, VP, Enterprise Management Associates. "This is automation, but very focused on the administrative burden in operations." He says he's always loved the company's container approach and the ability to create policies around a service model. "It is very mature, very flexible and very easy to maintain."

JP Garbani, VP and principal analyst, Forrester Research, calls it a complete solution, from soup to nuts, for cloud monitoring and management. "The key to its positioning is the workload increase brought on by the use of cloud computing, and our inability to manually cope with the complexity increase. At Forrester, we believe that complexity is the main issue that IT operations are facing today, and that this complexity overwhelms most organizations, making them inefficient. Gaining the right level of productivity in IT operations will come from using better tools, and, specifically, automation."

Next up will be the analytics capability to deal with very large quantities of data, says Aggarwal. "There are a lot of false alarms that are being triggered as to what is normal or not normal behavior, so we're working on predictive analysis based on the data we collect to reduce the noise." Zyrion is currently working with customers on the development, and plans to release a beta in December and have general availability in early 2012.

Garbani says this strategy is a logical approach in terms of solution build up: Data collection is the first step in any management solution deployment, and it addresses the opacity of the virtual environment. "Automation of data classification and normalization through the use of templates for configuration of the monitoring tools is the next logical step and addresses the issue of deployment costs, which comes right after licensing costs in terms of impact. The final piece, intelligence and analytics, is really what will bring all the value to the solution. It is the part that abstracts complexity by amplifying the human capabilities of IT operations to deal with a mass of abstract data."

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