Insight Is Essential for Business-Essential Services in VMware Environments

When smart people must be at a certain place, at a certain time, they try to get some insight into the traffic conditions before they leave so they know when to leave, and what routes to take. Knowing ahead of time that very few cars are on the road and are traveling at or above the speed limit is much different than knowing that thousands of cars are not moving because of one major and two minor accidents. Driving blind without this knowledge or insight would be fine under scenario one and result in painful consequences under scenario two.

Likewise, gaining insight into the traffic of the highly complex modern virtualized data center is necessary for success. VMware software is pervasive and powering businesses and organizations around the world with critical cloud, networking, security, and digital workspace offerings. VMware and NETSCOUT have a strong technology partnership and long history of collaboration. The attractiveness of virtualized environments from a cost and performance perspective must be balanced with maintaining control for visibility and insight to achieve the desired ROI.

Visibility Creates Knowledge

Virtualized environments have a lot going on that requires visibility and insight. Data centers have DMZs. Compute capabilities include bare metal, virtual machines (VMs), and containers. East-west traffic inside virtual computing accounts for an overwhelming majority of traffic. Change is constant and elasticity remains essential in virtualized environments. And services include thousands of VMs, virtual load balancers, virtual firewalls, authentication components, and layers of diverse servers.

The insight NETSCOUT provides into performance, availability, and security traditionally is hitting two broad use cases. The first is always solving problems faster and the second is truly understanding how systems are behaving so you can fine-tune performance and get the returns you need. But our insights also get used for more comprehensive data analysis in other platforms, including VMware. 

NETSCOUT’s nGenius Enterprise Performance Management provides a scalable deep-packet inspection approach for real-time, continuous visibility in VMware environments to enable effective and efficient monitoring and troubleshooting of problems with those highly complex, customer-facing/revenue-generating services hosted in global cloud environments. In VMware environments, continuous success and risk mitigation require monitoring and visibility for north-south traffic among zones and between data centers, east-west traffic deep inside hypervisors on-premises, and instances in a private cloud.

Utilizing our “always-on” and “back-in-time” capabilities to examine data before, during, or after an issue is essential for IT problem-solving and risk mitigation in VMware environments. Plus, since cost savings are likely one of the catalysts for embracing virtual servers, NETSCOUT’s agentless deployment is a critical part of driving out unnecessary costs and remaining elastic and scalable on demand.

VMware values the insight we provide as applications migrate into VMs. Providing a clear before-and-after picture helps enterprises understand who talks to whom, how much, and what the performance of the microservices is—at any depth of the virtualization stack. When hundreds of millions of transactions happen every day, the small details matter. Smart IT professionals use those details to harness and map the right resources to ensure continued success. Insight and a glimpse into the darkness of the unknown provide intelligence to make it meaningful to IT and the business.

Know What We Know

Matt White, staff solutions engineer for the Virtual Cloud Network at VMware, and Giampiero Lo Monaco, chief solutions architect at NETSCOUT, share their own insights and takeaways from working with some of the largest and most complex businesses in the world that are utilizing VMware technology in “Solving Complex Problems with Business Essential Services in VMware Environments” as part of our Problem Solvers Series. These experts go into great depth and provide rich examples. Their insight is something to hear and see and can help to ensure your own journey into and within the virtualized world is a great success.

Learn from the experts in NETSCOUT’s “Solving Complex Problems with Business Essential Services in VMware Environments” discussion, part of our Problem Solvers Series.