Sl virtual apps-131106

Shortfalls in Monitoring Virtualized Apps
Deficiencies and Opportunities
Tom Lubinski, CEO, SL Corporation
6/7 November 2013

© 2012 SL Corporation. All Rights Reserved.
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• What do we mean by “Virtualized Apps” ?
• What are the “shortfalls”
• Deficiencies
• Opportunities

2


Another way to look at our agenda:
• Hope springs eternal in the Human breast
– the promise

• Be careful you don’t go from the frying pan into the fire
– the reality

• Everybody wants to save the earth; nobody wants to
help Mom do the dishes – P.J. O’Rourke
– what needs to be done

3


Virtualization: The Promise
Ready and Easy Access to Infrastructure …

Success !
4


Automatic Scaling of Applications …

Not so successful … yet
5


Virtualization Changes Everything …

Hmmm … not so fast
6


Virtualization: The Reality
See how far we have come …
1990

Terminal + BSD Unix + vi

2013

putty + Linux + vi +
colored fonts !!

A Virtual Machine doesn’t look that much different
from a physical machine at this level …
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We’ve gone from …

Timesharing on an IBM
Mainframe Computer

8


To …

Timesharing on an
ESXi Hypervisor
… on a smaller box,
of course

9


Problem #1 – Hypervisor Overhead
There is a cost associated with slicing
CPU time and resources for each VM

Sometimes called “Cpu Steal” … can be
> 10%
See Patrick Eaton’s blog:
http://www.stackdriver.com/understan
ding-cpu-steal-experiment/

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Problem #2 – Noisy Neighbors
You don’t have the CPU to yourself !
If a “neighbor” is using a large part of the
Host CPU, your performance will be
affected
Result = poor response time
See Bernd Harzog’s blog:
http://www.virtualizationpractice.com/app
lications-performance-equals-responsetime-not-resource-utilization-9916

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Problem #3 – Resource Exhaustion
You don’t have the Network and Storage to
yourself !
Network-dependent apps can have highly
unpredictable response time
Storage-centric apps can be impacted by
limited read/write capacity

12


Problem #4 – Poor Capacity Utilization
(my favorite …)
Expectation: Virtualization = better
resource utilization
Problem: Too easy to say “let’s just fire up another VM”
You can “see and touch” hardware

Virtual Machines get lost in the aether

13


Deficiencies in Monitoring …
Cannot just monitor the CPU of the VM itself;
must know what the Host and hypervisor
are doing
No direct correlation between VM resource
utilization and application performance
System Management tools are NOT part of
platform provisioning; monitoring must
accompany the application
Distributed nature of VM deployment means
that traditional agent-based tools don’t work
14


Virtualization: The Opportunity

Good News:
The shift to virtualization provides an
opportunity to improve on the old
ways of monitoring applications
Let’s look more closely at what is
meant by “virtualized applications”

15


Virtualization: The Opportunity (1)
Level One … Survival !
Adapt Monitoring to Virtualized Environments:
Use agentless data collection and/or agents that communicate data
across firewalls or over public internet
Include data from Hypervisor in health state and performance calculations
(cpu / mem / disk / network)
Include application-related metrics such as response time in HS and Perf
calculations

16


Level Two … Accomplishment !
Provide Complete Visibility into Health State of Virtualized Apps:
Collect ALL data relevant to every application
(infrastructure, middleware, application metrics)
Normalize data so it can be aggregated and correlated across all data
sources and types
Provide application-centric “Views” of monitoring data relevant to each
application

17


Collect ALL data relevant to every application
Each application is
typically dependent
on multiple
component types
This includes both
VMWARE-VM AND
VMWARE-HOST

Health State of App is the
aggregate of all
components weighted
by criticality

18


Provide application-centric “Views”
Aggregate health state of
each application
propagates up to
higher-level summary
views
Single alert generated for
an application
independent of
number of alerts in
components

19


Including History can provide longer-term views of app behavior

20


Level Three … Mastery and Automation !

Use Provisioning Data to Automate Monitoring
Configure all Monitoring at time of Provisioning
(define target connections, operating parameters)
Configure component dependencies based on component type
(WebLogic App runs on WebLogic server, e.g.)
Populate Service Dependency Model from Provisioning Metadata
(dynamic CMDB)

21


Configure all Monitoring Connections at time of Provisioning …
Infrastructure as a Service – IaaS

(well-defined)

Provision VMs, Storage, Network Resources
 metadata readily available for use in CMDB
(vSphere, e.g.)
and make connections to collect monitoring data

Platform as a Service – PaaS

(a little more vague)

Provision Middleware on which Apps are built
 metadata needs to be extracted for use in CMDB
when deploying JMS servers or App Servers (e.g. IBM SmartCloud)
 some custom development in this area

22


Determining component dependencies based on component type
Here, all components are determined from the single entity: WLS-CLUSTERAPP …

WLS-CLUSTERAPP
WLS-APP

WLS-APP

OC-CLUSTER
OC-CACHE

OC-CACHEOC-CACHE

WLS

WLS

VMWARE-VM

VMWARE-VM

VMWARE-HOST
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Examples of “defined dependencies” …

WLS-CLUSTERAPP

WLS-APP

OC-CACHE

WLS-CLUSTER

OC-CLUSTER

WLS
VMWARE-VM

TOMCAT-APP

JMS-TOPIC

TOMCAT

JMS-SERVER

JVM

VMWARE-VM

VMWARE-HOST

HOST

VMWARE-HOST

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Generate table of dependencies in CMDB from single entry !

25


An Even Better Approach:

(Future !)

Generate all dependencies during Application Provisioning

User
Demand

Deployed
Application +
Infrastructure

Provisioning
System
Config
Metadata

Monitoring
System

In a sense, the provisioning metadata is the CMDB of the future …

26


Monitoring Virtualized Apps
Some Conclusions …
Virtualization DOES change things … adds complexity
Deficiencies in traditional monitoring approaches require new
tools and processes – survival first
Opportunity exists when virtualizing apps to upgrade monitoring
approach
Powerful techniques can be used to automate much of what used
to be very manual

27


How RTView Addresses This Problem
www.sl.com

www.sl.com/blog

28


Thank you!
For more information, please visit

www.sl.com

www.sl.com/blog

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Sl virtual apps-131106

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