IT organizations like yours around the world are grappling with the challenges and opportunities presented by digital transformation initiatives. Through our engagements with enterprise clients, we have observed that adoption of hyperconverged infrastructure, or HCI, tends to be a leading indicator of that organization’s progress along their IT transformation journey. Since successful transformation projects depend on key capabilities that HCI delivers, like IaaS capabilities delivered through automation and cloud orchestration, this shouldn’t surprise anyone. But as you deploy new technologies like HCI in your data center, you may find it difficult to manage complete visibility across all the technologies deployed within.
HCI can dramatically simplify the management overhead of your IT infrastructure by abstracting and automating many of the configuration, care and feeding tasks that more legacy IT platforms can require. Nutanix has built one of the best platforms for HCI, and combining it with a monitoring platform like Zenoss can provide enterprise clients with a solid foundation for the software-defined IT operations that successful transformation initiatives require. The core values of the integration delivered through the Zenoss platform and the Nutanix Prism management interface are so powerful that Zenoss is the only enterprise monitoring solution certified as Nutanix Ready - Integrated.
The Value of Prism
If you’re a current Nutanix customer, or have ever evaluated it for your data center environment, then you are already familiar with Nutanix Prism. This software is the linchpin of the Nutanix experience — offering an end-to-end management solution for hyperconverged data center environments that streamlines and automates common workflows, eliminating the need for multiple management solutions across data center operations.
The Prism software is an essential component of the simplified workflows Nutanix infrastructure can deliver, offering single-click management of capacity planning, performance monitoring, infrastructure management, or operational visualization and analytics. But it can only provide visibility to the health and performance of the Nutanix infrastructure, not the entire infrastructure stack responsible for delivering your critical services.
Boosting Visibility and Understanding of Service Health
The key benefit Zenoss provides is clear visibility of IT status through deep infrastructure metrics collection, coupled with a broad understanding of how different technology components work together to deliver a business service. Â
Zenoss extends the capabilities of the Prism interface by collecting detailed data points on Nutanix clusters, hosts, CVMs, storage pools and so on. When coupled with Service Impact, the Nutanix ZenPack maps out not only the Nutanix resources but also all associated mission-critical services they enable as well. This gives users the ability to see when and where issues are occuring, identify affected services that rely on Nutanix infrastructure, and quickly pinpoint and resolve issues hindering service delivery. Zenoss also maintains a rich history of these data points over time so system performance can be explored retrospectively. Our machine learning algorithm utilizes this historical data to identify anomalous behavior and help you head off future issues before they occur.
A Single Source of Truth for the Data Center
If you’re like most of our clients, you don’t have the luxury of cutting over your entire data center completely to HCI. There are probably quite a few systems running Mode 1 systems that will persist for some time to come, and you still need to be able to maintain visibility on their health.  These infrastructure components can include legacy servers, networking hardware, detached storage, power supplies, CRAC units, etc.
Zenoss uses a rich library of extensions to pull data points from all kinds of IT resources, storing them in the same repository alongside the data it senses from your Nutanix infrastructure. Â This means that exploring the infrastructure performance of any resource in your entire data center is just a few queries away in the Zenoss interface. The new Zenoss Cloud platform is a fully scalable monitoring solution that eliminates blind spots in the data center, enabling your IT Ops teams to predict service impacts and resolve issues faster across the entire landscape.
If you’re curious about the capabilities of Zenoss Cloud or our rich integration with Nutanix, you should check out our upcoming joint webinar with Nutanix taking place August 23. Krishnan Badrinarayanan from Nutanix will join Alex Lamont and myself to go deeper on this integration and show a demonstration of how it works!
