Getting the whole picture: VirtualWisdom’s update enhances systems visibility

Monitoring your company’s entire infrastructure is a critical task, but many platforms do not allow for a full view of all components, such as applications. VirtualWisdom — the infrastructure performance monitoring and analytics platform (IPM) from Virtual Instruments — is set to change that.

By adding application monitoring to its current analytic capabilities, VirtualWisdom has achieved what company CMO Len Rosenthal calls the “Holy Grail of performance management.”

Keeping your infrastructure healthy is a matter of good customer service, Rosenthal says.

“There are lots of different components in a data center and a lot of technologies changing all the time. You have to be able to monitor all the technologies and change with it,” Rosenthal said. “Nothing frustrates a user more than downtime.”

For example, a company might have an inventory control system, an online catalog, a promotional system and more, Rosenthal said. “If any of those go down, a customer may not be able to process any orders.”

Screen shot of the VirtualWisdom dashboard. The areas of concern are indicated in red.

The goal of VirtualWisdom is to find potential problems before they become evident to end users. The technology uses monitoring devices called “probes” to find issues and then provides guided analytics to help solve them.

“People who buy our product do not want to be in reactive firefighting mode. They want to be proactive,” Rosenthal said.

Virtual Instruments acquired Xangati and merged with Load DynamiX last year to pursue this app-centric approach, the company said.

Current and past customers include Safeway, Ikea and Tractor Supply Co.

“With the new release of VirtualWisdom, we’re able to remove the anxiety our customers felt by ‘flying blind’ with their business-critical applications,” CEO Philippe Vincent said in a release. “By leveraging VirtualWisdom to take an app-centric approach to the management of their infrastructures, IT operations and architecture teams can collaboratively work with their application owners and business unit executives to proactively optimize the performance and cost of the supporting infrastructure. This increases business agility and the overall value of the infrastructure to the business.”