How do I get a centralized view across applications

How do I get a single view of my environment...across business transactions, applications not to mention supporting infrastructure down through virtualized layers? In this brief interview, get a glimpse into what's possible with help from eG Innovations.

 

Transcript:

 

Mike Matchett:                  All right. Here we go. Hi, I'm Mike Matchett with Small World Big Data. I'm here with John Worthington of eG Innovations, and we're going to talk a little bit about IPM and APM, the convergence of IPM-APM, and unified motioning, and what's new. Welcome, John.

John W.:                                  How are you doing, Mike?

Mike Matchett:                  So maybe just start off telling us a little bit about eG Innovations, how long you guys have been doing what you're doing, and what your specialty is?

John W.:                                  Well, eG Innovations has been a provider of performance management solutions for 15 years now. We pioneered Unified Monitoring back in 2001, and most recently, we announced what we call Converged Application and Infrastructure Performance Management.

Mike Matchett:                  So Unified Monitoring and this convergence of monitoring, both the infrastructure and the application, is your sort of core solution offering. And we talked a little bit about how you put that together. It's all very interesting. You can go from code level, a little bit of code level introspection in Java, all the way down to the infrastructure through the virtualization layers and give someone that full end-to-end look. How are people accepting that from a monitoring perspective? How valuable is that to an enterprise today?

John W.:                                  Well, I think IT has wanted a unified single-pane of glass, if you will, for many years. And a converged application and infrastructure performance management solution provides a unified view across all components of a digital business service that affect end-user experience. So that would include business transactions, applications, as well as supporting infrastructure. All from, again, that single-console, single-pane of glass.

Mike Matchett:                  And I want to be clear, we're not just talking about on-premise infrastructure, we're also talking about cloud, and virtualization, and legacy infrastructure, as well, right?

John W.:                                  Absolutely. It doesn't matter what the deployment model is, whether it's on-prem, public, private, or hybrid cloud, yep.

Mike Matchett:                  So we were talking a little bit about the role of, how root causes has came up, and has been sort of mistakenly thought to be finger-pointing. When really, it's about finding out what a problem is across many different areas. There's a little bit inherently about finger-pointing, because you got to point at something when you're doing root cause, right. But what's ... How should people really think about root cause?

John W.:                                  Well, I think what's critical today, is and the reason we call it say, unified monitoring, is we want to move from finger-pointing to collaboration, right. So when we talk about a culture of observability, or shifting to a service-oriented culture, again, instead of saying, "It's the other guy's fault." What we want to be able to do is to give everyone a transparent view of what's actually happening in real time from a performance perspective so we can collaborate and say, "Okay, now that we know what's going on, how can we create self-healing so this doesn't happen again, or so we can automate actions to keep the user experience as best as we can?"

Mike Matchett:                  We talked a little bit about reorienting IT around this idea of business service, and you had mentioned that that's really what DevOps is about. And I can agree with that, but tell me now a little bit more since you've introduced this, this idea of self-healing, and closing the full lifecycle loop of ... I don't know, problem resolution. How do you even describe that?

John W.:                                  Well, let's say, if we are looking at an end-to-end digital business service, and there's a performance issue, it could be in the network, it could be in the database, it could be in the application code. It doesn't really matter. Wherever it is, if we can automatically isolate it, and we know what action to take, instead of focusing on whose issue it is, we can start focusing on how to create automated actions, so we can automate the operation. So if this pattern happens again, we can automatically work around it and keep the experience that the user's having at a high level.

Mike Matchett:                  So monitoring is really evolving into this, not just alerting, and not just finding the root cause, but really evolving into a state where it's about keeping continuous availability almost. It's really kind of reversing the whole equation these days.

John W.:                                  Yeah, it's a critical ... Event management is going to be critical to achieving that kind of autonomous operations. It's essential.

Mike Matchett:                  Very cool. Where can someone go to find out more about what you guys are doing currently, and maybe take a test run?

John W.:                                  Well, the easiest thing to do is to go to our website, which is www.eginnovations.com, and there's plenty of information on the website. You can actually get, if you are a user of Digital Workspace Services, for either Citrix or VM ware, you can actually get a free log-on simulator for those environments, and get someone from eG on the phone, and kick the tires a little bit. Either be it demo or a trial.

Mike Matchett:                  That sounds like actually a lot of fun to try out if I was in a big company with lots of moving parts. I'd love to see it all on one big pane of glass, and get my hands on it.

John W.:                                  Of course, we'd love to have you do that, too.

Mike Matchett:                  All right. Well, thanks for coming on and talking to us today, John. I hope to talk to you again soon.

John W.:                                  Thanks, Mike. Have a good day.

Mike Matchett:                  All right. This is Mike Matchett from Small World Big Data. Thank you for watching.