Several months ago, the team here at Zenoss made some key predictions about infrastructure and service monitoring for 2019. Among them was this observation: A strategy relying on multiple disparate solutions to track the performance of the various aspects of an application’s performance no longer has legs, much as groups of infrastructure point tools are not effective at providing complete visibility across data center infrastructure.
Mike Lunt, our vice president of engineering, explains further (emphasis mine):
“As ML-touted tools become status quo, operations teams are already learning their existing ITOM tools need expansive breadth to create meaningful ML models. This means that adding intelligence on top of logs or events alone is not sufficient to create trustworthy automation. For operations teams to realize robust self-healing, tools must be able to stream varying types of data from all sources to provide enough context to be trustworthy in hands-off scenarios.”
Mike is stating what many IT Ops and DevOps leaders are now starting to realize: Most IT infrastructure monitoring (ITIM) solutions, even the ones that have been restructured to monitor modern cloud environments, aren’t well-equipped to provide the complete picture when application performance and service health are being measured. The same applies to application performance monitoring (APM) solutions that can’t see below the OS or AIOps tools that collect events, logs and metrics but lack context explaining how different IT resources are related.
A successful monitoring solution needs to build a core competency in accepting data of any type (metrics, events, logs, etc.) and from any source, whether it’s an infrastructure device, cloud service or application. It then needs to use service visibility and machine learning to stitch that data together into a holistic view, providing IT teams with an opportunity to get ahead of major problems, discover real root causes, and retire incidents quickly so they can focus on the exciting projects they’d all rather be working on. It needs to take a blended approach that contains the most important aspects of ITIM, APM and AIOps tools.
In our view, this point of view gained significant credibility when Forrester Research recently published the inaugural edition of The Forrester Wave™: Intelligent Application and Service Monitoring, Q2 2019. According to the report:
“Operations leaders need new monitoring technologies that can provide a unified view of all components of a service, from application code to infrastructure.”
At the end of the day, customers want a streamlined way to monitor and assure service health, not a patchwork of tools that cover overlapping functional areas. So, rather than solutions that focus on ITIM, APM or AIOps individually, our customers are telling us the market needs solutions that holistically combine performance metrics, service context understanding, and machine learning. This is the market space that this new Forrester Wave report focuses on. We see over 80 vendors across this space and are proud of the fact that, of the 13 that are included in the report, we are one of four vendors that was named as a leader. It is our view that many well-known ITIM, APM and AIOps have solutions that are too narrow and do not solve customer challenges holistically in the context of intelligent application and service monitoring (IASM).
The report identified three IASM capabilities IT leaders should look for when evaluating modern solutions in this space:
- Intelligent root-cause analysis and remediation
- Robust tools for measuring digital customer experience
- Ease of deployment and fast time to value
Zenoss is pleased to be recognized as a leader in the emerging IASM space identified in The Forrester Wave™: Intelligent Application and Service Monitoring, Q2 2019. Here is what Forrester had to say about our approach to software-defined IT operations:
“Zenoss’ strategy emphasizes simplifying integration across multiple IT data sources and corporate analytics systems. The company has spent a great deal of technical capital building strong integrations into hundreds of technology solutions … Customers that have large volumes of disparate data sources and need a highly scalable solution should consider Zenoss.”
To learn more about the emerging IASM solution category, I highly recommend downloading the report. In future blogs, we’ll tackle more aspects of the report, including the Zenoss take on each of the three key critical capabilities Forrester has identified for this market.
