Analytics to face the new challenges of applications in the data centers

Many companies nowadays depend on the good performance of their applications. Applications, in fact, have become essential tools for the companies to work and conduct their business, however, their evolution over the years, due to the technologies of cloud, automation, portability, virtualization, containers, micro-services and hybrid clouds among others, bring the following concerns to engineers and business personnel:

• Do they know exactly the sections of each component of their application? Who is communicating against whom?
• Do they know what ports you are consuming and providing each workload within your Data Center to perform a more secure segmentation?
• When the entire infrastructure is up and someone reports slowness within the application, do they have the necessary tools to find the root cause of the problem?
• How long does it take and how many people are required within the organization to solve a problem which is affecting the applications of a Data Center?
• Are you optimizing the infrastructure resources on which your applications run, no matter they are on private or public cloud?
• How is your business affected in terms of reputation and revenue, due to the bad performance of your applications?

Questions like these are the new challenges that the organizations and IT experts of each company have to face today: managing a Data Center is becoming increasingly complex.

The amount of workloads and data is increasingly growing year after year, applications’ components interact with each other (traffic from east to west) and these components begin to be located between public and private cloud and sometimes between different public clouds. In addition, IT departments have to face these challenges with the same staff because the budgets do not increase at the same speed of business or the demands of workloads within the Data Center.

Many of the monitoring tools to have visibility in the Data Center infrastructure are not prepared to face this type of challenges. When users report a problem to their applications, it is required to correlate the infrastructure logs, networking, databases, servers … No one is visualizing the complete scenario and therefore many of the decisions to solve the problem are taken without any ground.

This leads to another problem, we overprovision the infrastructure, how do we solve the bad performance of the application without knowing exactly the root cause of the problem? The obvious answer may be “ to provision more infrastructure”, more CPU, RAM, more efficient storage, improve the bandwidth of LAN and WAN links, however in many cases this does not constitute the solution.

The problem can be simply in a request for advise to a database which is made inefficiently or even the inconvenience may be due to a third parties’ entity outside our Data Center where we are making a call to a web service, for example. Now, if we are provisioning more infrastructure than necessary when workloads are hosted in the public cloud, how much money are we losing? or better, how much money could we be saving? The challenge of allowing only the necessary traffic between the different components of our applications, blocking other traffic to have a much more transversal security and having a Zero Trust architecture, is undoubtedly one of the biggest challenges for companies, because they do not have a tool that gives them real-time visibility of how the components of their applications are communicating.

In addition, the portability and the fact that the applications are dynamic generate that the IT teams find it very difficult to know and keep these policies updated; it is required that they rely on analytical software that helps them with that visibility. At Ikusi Latam we understand this type of challenges that Data Centers have today and we have different solutions that will help them to face each of the described challenges. Support you in the Data Center analytics tools to face the challenges that the evolution of applications brings.