VMware acquired Wavefront, a startup that provides monitoring and analytics capabilities for microservices and DevOps environments. This positions VMware to better support customers' shift towards microservices and DevOps practices. However, some customers are choosing competitors' tools over VMware's due to lack of clarity in VMware's strategy and capabilities not keeping pace with modern infrastructures. The Wavefront acquisition aims to help VMware strengthen its role in analytics for hybrid cloud environments.

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VMWARE’S ROLE
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evOps is sweeping through the IT world
andVMwareislookingtohelpitgrow.See
how VMware’s recent acquisition better
positions them to fend off their competi-
tion and leverage the cloud as they move forward.
D

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VMWARE ANALYTICS WADE INTO DEVOPS MONITORING
FRAY
Beth Pariseau, Senior News Writer
A VMware analytics acquisition this week seeks to win over the hearts and
minds of progressive enterprises as part of a bigger -- and still hazy -- foray for
the virtualization company into microservices and DevOps.
The addition of Wavefront, a Palo Alto, Calif., startup, offers support for
large enterprises to manage VMware analytics as they shift to microservices
by capturing more granular infrastructure data than VMware tools currently
provide.ThemoveisalsomeanttoraiseVMware’sprofileamongappdevelop-
ment and DevOps teams.
Wavefront will add the ability to normalize logs and other data generated
byinfrastructure,aswellasbyotherapplicationmonitoringtools,intometrics
for rapid analysis. Wavefront’s analytics on that data -- claimed to be over 100
original algorithms -- can help IT pros get to the root of problems and predict
how the infrastructure will behave. Such capabilities have largely been the
domain of large web-scale IT shops with massive infrastructures to manage,

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VMWARE’S ROLE IN THE GROWING DEVOPS CULTURE
as well as progressive enterprises that develop cloud-native, microservices-
based apps.
VMware already offers VM and infrastructure management and monitor-
ing with its vRealize products, but microservices are a different animal. The
vRealize tools collect information every five minutes, for example, which may
not be fast enough to capture transitory container-based microservices. By
comparison, Wavefront’s software can sample infrastructure data every sec-
ond. Microservices may also involve an order of magnitude more objects and
services than are present in a VM infrastructure -- Wavefront can collect a
million data points per second and analyze them simultaneously.
ITanalyticsisaburgeoningfield,withdozensofcompanieshavingentered
thespaceinrecentyears.ForresterResearchcounts60suchcompaniesonthe
market, and thosearejusttheonesthattargetIT,withdozensmorethattarget
the general line of business, said Milan Hanson, an analyst at Forrester.
Hanson predicted further consolidation as big players such as VMware
look to capitalize on analytics companies’ foot in the door with progressive
DevOps shops.
“I don’t think the market can sustain 60 different players,” he said.
Wavefront’sclaimtofameinthiscrowdedmarket--nowpartofVMware’s

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analytics intellectual property -- has been its query-centric interface, which
can parse sophisticated questions to figure out what’s going on in a complex
infrastructure, said Nancy Gohring, an analyst at 451 Research.
“It’sthewaylargeweb-scale[shops]dotroubleshooting--theykeepasking
questions until they find the root of the problem,” Gohring said.
This is more efficient than dashboard-based monitoring, provided the
operator knows what they’re doing. “It’s harder to use for enterprises just be-
ginning to adopt modern infrastructure,” she said. Wavefront also introduced
canned dashboards to accommodate this type of IT user last June.
COMPETITORS ERODE VMWARE ANALYTICS CUSTOMER BASE
Wavefront can act as a manager of managers, ingesting and correlating data
betweenexistingtoolsthroughoutahybridcloudinfrastructure,whichissimi-
lar to VMware’s goals with vRealize tools. But there’s no guarantee this new
combination will increase VMware’s relevance among progressive IT teams,
ascompetitorsinITanalyticsalreadydobriskbusinesswithinVMware’scus-
tomer base.
OpsDataStore, for example, this week claimed an industry first in root-
cause analysis and infrastructure mapping -- historically the domain of the

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vRealizesuitefromVMware.Thecompany’sDynamicTopologyMappingcan
establish the relationships between transactions, applications, and their vir-
tualandphysicalinfrastructureeveryminute,anditreportedlysolvesacorre-
lationproblembetweenapplicationmonitoringandchangemanagementtools.
One large VMware shop has already left vRealize in favor of monitoring
withtoolsthatincludeCisco’sAppDynamicsandTurbonomic,withOpsDataS-
tore as an umbrella over them all. The company, Navis, maker of software that
runsshippingportsaroundtheworld,hasbeguntouseanalyticstopredictthe
availabilityofITresourcesonaglobalscaleandplaceworkloadsappropriately.
OpsDataStore’s correlations also make it easy to prioritize troubleshoot-
ingonmission-criticalsystems,saidDaveMcCandless,vicepresidentofITat
Navis, based in Oakland, Calif.
“VRealizeissomethingIcouldlookatagaininthefuture,butTurbonomic
and OpsDataStore already put a stake in the ground,” he said. Navis has begun
to look at the new Dynamic Topology Mapping for root-cause analysis in an
infrastructure composed of thousands of VMs.

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VMWARE USERS WANT CLARITY
VMware’slargestandmostentrenchedcustomersstilllooktothecompanyfor
helpastheymoveforwardintomicroservicesinfrastructuresandDevOpssoft-
ware development techniques. Those companies still need updated VMware
analytics tools to help modernize their approach.
Varian Medical Systems Inc., a medical devices company based in Palo
Alto, Calif., has a massive private data center infrastructure, but also uses Mi-
crosoft Azure and Amazon Web Services public cloud platforms, and it wants
to unify management across them. No human can sift through all the metrics
associated with such an environment, which is where Wavefront’s analytics
would come in.
“It seems like VMware is playing catch-up and they’re behind the curve,
which would explain the acquisition of Wavefront,” said Jason Greenback,
systems engineer with Varian. “But for me as a customer, there’s not a lot of
clarity about their portfolio.”
Due to confusion about VMware’s overall strategic direction, Varian has
also begun to look into vRealize competitors such as RightScale and Cisco’s
CliQr.

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BETH PARISEAU is senior news writer for TechTarget’s Data Center and Virtualization Media Group. Write to
her at bpariseau@techtarget.com or follow @PariseauTT on Twitter.
VMWARE CLOUD STRATEGY CLAIMS NEW TERRITORY
WITH WAVEFRONT ACQUISITION
Brian Kirsch, IT Architect, Instructor
Inamajordepartureforthecompany--andamajorstepupinitscloudstrategy
-- VMware acquired cross-cloud monitoring, metrics and analytics company
Wavefront in April 2017. VMware’s journey to the cloud has been rocky, to say
theleast,butitisn’tforlackoftrying.Previousefforts,suchasvCloudDirector
andtheshort-livedvCloudAir,havefailedtoseriouslycompetewithofferings
fromlarge-scalecloudproviderslikeAmazonWebServicesandAzure.Despite
thesestumblingblocks,VMwarehascontinuedtomovetowardthecloudinan
attempt to combat rising license costs associated with scaling, and the com-
pany might have found its place in this new ecosystem.
The foundation of the new and improved VMware cloud strategy is

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partnerships,particularlythecompany’srecentpartnershipwithAmazonWeb
Services (AWS). As part of this partnership, an administrator can now run a
VMware infrastructure inside AWS. Administrators are now able to try out
a relatively new technology -- cloud -- from the comfort of an infrastructure
theyalreadyknowwell.Ideally,thiswillspeedtheadoptionofadditionalcloud
resources because VMware already offers infrastructure and NSX portability
betweenonsiteandthecloud,whicheliminatestheissueofmovingandrecon-
figuring workloads.
VMWARE SEIZES AN OPPORTUNITY
There’s just one thing missing from this plan: monitoring. AWS, Azure, IBM
andothercloudprovidersoffersomelevelofmonitoring,butit’softenfractured
acrossmultipletoolsfromthird-partyvendors.Thesecloudprovidersempha-
size the portability and configuration of workloads, but stop paying attention
once workloads reach their destinations. As you can imagine, this leaves a
pretty big hole, one most IT personnel aren’t happy to see. Although VMware
hasitsownmonitoringsoftwareandtools,they’redesignedforinfrastructure,
not the cloud. Rather than try to develop its own cloud monitoring products,
VMwaredecidedtopurchaseamatureofferingandintegrateitintoitssoftware

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stack, much like it did with AirWatch.
Data centers are typically in a state of flux as workloads move not just to
thecloud,buttomultipledifferentcloudsdependingontheworkload,specialty
and cost. Although the cost-saving aspect of multicloud appeals to the busi-
ness side, it fractures tools and management on the IT side. Some monitoring
products operate as a single pane of glass, but it’s rare to find one that does it
all. Many come close, though, and share a common subset of products, which
isgoodenoughformostdatacenters.However,thechallengewithpubliccloud
is that these monitoring products have different owners and a varied set of in-
terfaces depending on the services the cloud offers.
WAVEFRONT IS GOOD FOR BUSINESS
VMware already had its own set of monitoring tools for data center infra-
structure, but didn’t have much in place for the private cloud and even less for
public cloud. Therefore, it made more sense for VMware to purchase a unified
cross-cloudmonitoringtoolratherthanbuildonefromscratch.TheWavefront
acquisition gives VMware quick entry into a cloud market in serious need of
attention. It’s also good for business. VMware intends to position Wavefront
asabusinesstoolthatbalancescosts,cloudperformanceandlocaldatacenter

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services with customer experience. This data-driven approach will help man-
agers and staff make more enlightened decisions about what types of environ-
ments they use.
This move helps solidify the VMware cloud strategy in a market in which
the company has had very mixed results. Although VMware owns a large per-
centage of the data center, when it comes to cloud, AWS and Azure still reign
supreme. The Wavefront acquisition allows VMware to own a slice of the pie
that no one has stepped forward to claim ownership of rather than go head to
head with competitors. Though it comes with some challenges -- namely inte-
gration and dealing with ever-changing APIs and interfaces from major cloud
providers -- this purchase looks to be a smart move forward for the VMware
cloud strategy.

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