Nutanix MP Part Two: Application Awareness: A missing piece in infrastructure monitoring layer

We are online all day every day, 24/7. We are in the cloud, on the ground and even the astronauts are tweeting from space. We depend on applications not only to do our jobs, but to stay socially connected, pay bills, plan trips and even binge watch our favorite shows. But do we really care how all this stuff works? We do if it isn’t working. Whether we realize it or not, most of what we do on the Internet is facilitated by cloud providers behind the scenes. Our apps are critical for many aspects of our lives – when unavailable it makes us moody, but in the enterprise if mission critical applications are unavailable for a minute it can cost the business enormous losses of revenue and productivity.

Building an infrastructure which de-risks the potential loss of revenue or productivity is critical. Enter Nutanix who provides market leading hyperconverged infrastructure that is highly performant and simple to manage and expand. The hyperconverged infrastructure helps IT teams easily organize their stack by providing an underlying foundation for business critical applications laying on top of it. These two layers are interdependent, and there is no business service provided by applications without underlying infrastructure. Prove me wrong.

Application layer insights aren’t enough

Applications running on Nutanix reside on virtual machines created by the Nutanix Prism management interface, and are being managed by application admins, who are familiar with service quality measures. But just looking at the application layer is not enough to ensure high quality of service, because:

• Applications run on virtual machines, which reside on a hyperconverged infrastructure – and its performance impacts the application performance
• High storage consumption and network issues on a hyperconverged infrastructure can impact application performance
• High IO rates on a hyperconverged infrastructure can temporarily impact application performance

Clearly, having a complete overview of the entire IT infrastructure is important, and Microsoft System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) offers that insight in a single pane of glass. The new Comtrade Nutanix Management Pack (MP) for SCOM provides additional features linking the Nutanix hyperconverged infrastructure layer and applications layers. It also exposes monitoring capabilities for IT level 1 and 2 admins by identifying applications running on Nutanix and connecting them with the virtual machines (VMs) that host them. In the first release, the MP will be available for Citrix XenApp/Xen Desktop applications, with more to come in the near future, including Microsoft SQL, Exchange or SharePoint.

How the Nutanix MP for SCOM works

Once an admin enters credentials in SCOM, the Nutanix MP automatically discovers VMs running the Citrix XenApp/Xen Desktop application and determines their roles within that environment. These VMs are listed in an applications dashboard that reveals the overview and connection between the infrastructure layer and application layer to IT admins (level 1 and 2) to help them quickly identify potential network issues, which can affect application performance. By having an overview of application and infrastructure layers, level 1 and 2 IT admins coordinate solutions in collaboration with applications, network and Nutanix admins. By predicting possible application performance issues, they can quickly notify applications admins or perform corrective actions themselves. This saves applications and Nutanix administrators’ valuable time so they can focus on their other priority tasks.

Application awareness overview with Nutanix MP

Application awareness overview with Nutanix MP

Comtrade’s Nutanix MP for SCOM adds the important missing piece in infrastructure monitoring by connecting infrastructure and application layers for IT level 1 and 2 admins, saving these IT positions precious time to focus on mission critical issues.