Specializing in cloud and IT monitoring solutions, Zyrion Inc. wants to "dramatically" simplify monitoring the performance of distributed, heterogeneous cloud infrastructures with its Traverse Automation Module. Automation is the second element of the company's three-party strategy that was launched in April with the Data Capture and Processing module for monitoring cloud technologies like VMware, Xen and AWS, and will be completed next month with the unveiling of an Intelligence & Predictive Analytics capability.
The rampant growth of virtualization and cloud computing has also grown complexity and administration, including monitoring, says Zyrion CEO Vikas Aggarwal. One customer soared from having 1,000 physical servers before a virtualization project began to having to manage more than 7,000 virtual servers after the first phase of the initiative. "What resulted from this, and people adding virtual machines, was a requirement from a lot of our customers for the ability to automate a large part of the provisioning on the monitoring side."
The Automation module includes Dynamic Linked Templates that allow administrators to create a master definition for monitoring a particular type of cloud component, which includes alarm thresholds, event-driven actions, notifications, schedules and more. The company says any number of child components can then be linked to the master, and have their full definition based on whatever has been specified for the master. Whenever changes are made to the master, these changes are seamlessly propagated to all linked child components.
With Centralized Configuration Management, administrators can perform all monitoring configuration operations and changes for a heterogeneous IT environment--physical, virtual, cloud--from within a single UI, requiring no separate access to any remote applications, devices or locations. And the Workload Management Integration includes API and plug-in framework extensions to enable automated resource provisioning or resource deletion based on performance metrics crossing defined thresholds. Zyrion says Service Container rules, Composite metrics and the escalation framework can be used to initiate complex resource change actions.
The latest addition to Zyrion's lineup is really pragmatically relevant and needed, says analyst Dennis Drogseth, VP, Enterprise Management Associates. "This is automation, but very focused on the administrative burden in operations." He says he's always loved the company's container approach and the ability to create policies around a service model. "It is very mature, very flexible and very easy to maintain."
