Evolution of Monitoring

Having started my IT Career in the 80’s, I’ve had a front row seat to the ever-evolving landscape that makes up IT Infrastructure. In the days of centralized systems, with Dumb Terminals, monitoring and managing systems was simple relative to today’s environments. As distributed computing made its way into the data center and across desktops, monitoring and management became far more challenging. Troubleshooting, software/hardware upgrades, and deployment often means visiting each desktop in the organization.

As centralized and distributed infrastructures began to converge over time, we never got back to the simplicity of centralized systems. We saw day-to-day monitoring and management improve with centralized software distribution and updates, remote desktop access, centralized alerts and notifications, etc. However, the management solutions that evolved to support a world in which Hypervisors, co-location, and multi-site infrastructures rule, have themselves become large, complex, infrastructures to deploy and maintain. Today, managing the IT Infrastructure means dealing with a multitude of device managers and monitoring tools across a siloed environment of storage, compute, network switches, and firewalls.

 

Simplify the Monitor Experience

Our IT Infrastructures are becoming more diverse and geographically distributed than ever before. It’s no surprise that we are now starting to see solutions that simplify the Monitoring and Management experience. These solutions are going to be mandatory as IT Infrastructure continues its evolution to a hybrid, compute anywhere landscape.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise has embraced the idea of managing and monitoring a compute anywhere environment. They have underscored their commitment based on tools like InfoSight. They have recently announced new solutions in the spring of 2021. To get to the point where they are now, there were many HPE developed technologies and hardware/software acquisitions along the way.

One of their most visible and telling acquisitions was Nimble Storage. While the Nimble Storage technology has been a solid solution by itself, we were told from the start that HPE really purchased Nimble because of its InfoSight AI/predictive analytics platform.

 

HPE InfoSight

In 2017, InfoSight was a tool used to monitor and report on Nimble storage arrays from anywhere you could access a browser. But, at the time, Nimble was the only device included. Today, HPE InfoSight has expanded its use cases. Most all HPE Storage and Compute as well as the virtualized environments are supported by InfoSight.

InfoSight uses cloud-based machine learning to build Global Intelligence and insights for IT Infrastructure. The platform simplifies IT operations by predicting and preventing problems across the infrastructure stack. It makes decisions that optimize application performance and resource planning. This intelligence is based on telemetry data from many of HPE’s global installed base. I can personally attest to the power and usefulness of InfoSight. It has helped many of our clients troubleshoot issues and plan for expansion using the information provided through HPE InfoSight.

HPE continues to grow the capabilities of HPE InfoSight predictive analytics and monitoring across their compute and storage solutions. They have also been working on tools to improve the deployment, provisioning, and management of those solutions. Starting in April of 2021, HPE has made announcements for solutions built on a cloud-native architecture. It manages infrastructure components through a SaaS-based control plane that abstracts infrastructure control from the physical infrastructure.

 

Aruba ESP

In April, HPE announced The Aruba ESP (Edge Services Platform), designed to address fragmented network operations and simplify the network management lifecycle. ESP converges the management of wired, wireless, and WAN networks across campus, branch, remote worker, and data center locations. It will be no surprise, to those who have managed Aruba environments, that the Unified Infrastructure announced with ESP is based on Aruba Central, a cloud-native, microservices-based platform that has been part of the Aruba portfolio for some time.

With the inclusion of ESP, Aruba Central provides a full range of management services for the network.
To continue the theme of SaaS management solutions, in May, HPE announced their Data Services Cloud Console. Data Services Cloud Console is based on the Aruba Edge Services Platform. Because Data Services Cloud Console is delivered as SaaS, there is no software to deploy, manage, or maintain. You can constantly stay current on the latest software features, without any action or involvement required.

 

New Solutions

Data Services Cloud Console (DSCC) is a subscription service integrated with the new Alletra platform and will also support Primera and Gen 5 Nimble Arrays. It is deploys, provisions, and monitors supported storage arrays through role based access controls. DSCC delivers global unified management. It enables customers to manage and monitor geographically distributed systems across edge to cloud from a single web interface. So, managing hundreds of systems is as simple as managing one.

 

 

In June 2021, HPE announced an expansion of the Cloud Console with its Compute Cloud Console solution. Like ESP and DSCC, Compute Cloud Console is another part of the SaaS platform that will allow you to manage your Compute environments from anywhere and wherever they are across your infrastructure.

Hybrid infrastructure is here to stay. It is essential that we find ways to deploy, manage, and monitor  infrastructure without proliferating the siloed tool sets and manual processes that have become common in geographically limited environments. Since our infrastructure is geographically dispersed, it is likely that those who manage that infrastructure will also be spread across, the country, and around the globe. So, role-based, self-service deployment, management and monitoring should also be part of how we plan to support our IT Infrastructure.

With InfoSight, Edge Services Platform on Aruba Central, Data Services Cloud Console and Compute Cloud Console, HPE has provided a suite of tools that will support our journey to the next evolution of the IT Infrastructure landscape.

Contact Zunesis to find out more about the solutions discussed throughout this blog.

HPE InfoSight

With the purchase of Nimble, HPE gained a great storage platform. It also gained the valuable asset of InfoSight. InfoSight is an AI-driven predictive analytics tool which enables customers to gain higher efficiency and reliability with smarter, easy to manage infrastructure. HPE InfoSight automatically predicts and resolves 86 percent of issues before a problem is identified.

Since that time, HPE has extended the InfoSight predictive analytics and recommendation capabilities to the HPE Server line This includes Proliant, Apollo and Synergy compute products.

 

Benefits

InfoSight will enable a smarter, self-monitoring infrastructure. This helps to drive down operating costs. It analyzes millions of sensors across the installed base across the globe. Using this data, it will provide trend insights, forecasting and recommendations, to predict and prevent problems.

HPE storage customers are already enjoying the benefits of HPE InfoSight. They are seeing operational costs decreased by as much as 79 percent. Trouble tickets are resolved in 85 percent less time. Above all, 86 percent of issues are automatically predicted and resolved before a problem is identified.

The Infrastructure for Servers will provide Global Visibility into the Server Infrastructure through the wellness monitoring dashboard. Predictive Analytics on parts failures, and recommendations based on patterns or signs of abnormality will be available to eliminate performance bottlenecks on servers.

 

Capabilities

A foundational set of capabilities that can be augmented over time has been delivered by the first release of HPE InfoSight for servers.

 

The Capabilities includes:
1) Predictive data analytics for parts failure
2) Data analytics for server security
2) Global Operational Dashboard with a consolidated view of the status, performance, and health of their server infrastructure. This includes system information, server warranty, and support status
4) Global Wellness Dashboard with a consolidated view of the health of the server infrastructure, including recommendations
5) Recommendations to eliminate performance bottlenecks on servers
6) Support for HPE ProLiant servers, HPE Synergy compute modules and HPE Apollo systems (Gen10, Gen9, and Gen8 with iLO 5 and iLO 4)

 

HPE Infosight improves the customers infrastructure management experience. When combined with HPE OneView, it can simplify the on-premises experience. HPE OneView provides compute lifecycle management and template driven infrastructure deployment. It transforms the infrastructure to software-defined. This allows customers to deploy infrastructure faster, simplify lifecycle operations and increase productivity.

 

How to Install

To start using HPE InfoSight for servers, you’ll need to download and install the iLO Amplifier Pack which serves as the aggregation point for the collection of the data for all of the servers. In addition, it passes the health, configuration, and performance data of each server to InfoSight. Should InfoSight need to take any action on the servers, InfoSight will communicate the action to iLO Amplifier Pack to perform the action.

 

Contact Zunesis to see how InfoSight can improve your current infrastructure.

In Search of the Holy Grail (and avoiding the killer rabbit)

 

In this post, I’m going to be writing about a solution from HPE to help improve the management of IT Infrastructure. First, I want to say that I have come to understand the term “IT Infrastructure” can be used very broadly, depending on the perspective of the Speaker or Writer and their audience. So, before I get started, let me define what the term means for me.

 

When I talk about IT Infrastructure components, I am referring to the hardware and software that provide the foundation for Applications supporting the line of business. The Business Applications will include email, document management, ERP and CRM Systems, etc. The foundational components that support these applications include Compute, Storage, and Networking hardware as well as Operating Systems and Hypervisors. In my mind, these foundational pieces are the IT Infrastructure.

 

Managing Can be a Challenge

 

Management of IT Infrastructure has long been a challenge for Systems Administrators. Once we moved past the mainframe dominated environment, to a distributed architecture, the number of devices and operating environments (operating systems and hypervisors) grew very quickly. Each component of an IT Infrastructure requires configuration, management, and monitoring (for alerts, performance, capacity, etc.) Of course, each device and operating environment comes with their own management and monitoring tools, but, because of the disparate toolset, the burden of correlating the information from each of these sources falls on the shoulders of Systems Administrators. This task of monitoring and correlating data from our IT Infrastructure can be incredibly time consuming. And, because our days are often filled with the unexpected, it is difficult to be consistent in our execution of the monitoring/correlation tasks.

 

To help ease this burden, the industry has seen the introduction of many applications over the years, designed to aggregate alerts and performance metrics. These tools certainly help, but they can often fall short.

 

What do we do with the information they are presenting to us?

 

How do we make sense of the data?

 

Can these tools help us understand trends in utilization, predict resource short-falls, proactively warn of component failures?

 

And, can they provide any correlation in the context of analytics data collected from thousands of similar environments from around the world?

 

 

That would be the Holy Grail of IT Management. Wouldn’t it?

 

 

Okay, a mid-post pause. My reference to the Holy Grail (and the killer rabbit) is from the movie, Monty Python and the Holy Grail. I only used it here because some of my Zunesis Colleagues have written posts using various movie references and I felt the need to respond with my own. I’m older than many of my colleagues so my reference may be a little more dated. However, I think the movie is iconic and will still be familiar to most.

Okay, now back to the discussion of IT Management and the challenges we face. To borrow a phrase from Monty Python, “…and now, for something completely different…”.

 

HPE InfoSight

 

In April of 2017, HPE completed the acquisition of Nimble Storage. This acquisition introduced a great storage solution into the HPE Storage family, but, one of the biggest drivers for this acquisition was InfoSight Predictive Analytics. At the time, InfoSight collected data from thousands of sensors across all deployed Nimble arrays globally. This data was fed into an analytics engine allowing global visibility and learning to provide predictive problem resolution back to each Nimble user. The analytics allowed many problems to be resolved, non-disruptively, sometimes before the end-user knew it was a problem.

 

So, in addition to providing localized alerting, phone-home support, performance data, resource trending, System Administrators now had a tool that could act on their behalf and provide correlations that wouldn’t be possible without the global context.

 

At the time of the acquisition, HPE committed to leveraging InfoSight for other HPE solutions over time. They have been honoring that commitment ever since. Very quickly they included InfoSight support for 3PAR StorServ, StoreOnce, and RMC. These were in addition to the existing support for Nimble Arrays and VMware.

 

As of January 7^th of 2019, HPE officially included support for Gen 10, 9, and 8 ProLiant Servers, Synergy, and the Apollo Server families. This recent announcement means that many key components of the IT Infrastructure are now part of the InfoSight Predictive Analytics environment.

 

 

For HPE storage solutions, HPE InfoSight Predictive Analytics answers questions like:

 

• How has my data usage trended?
• When am I going to run out of capacity?
• What if I ran these apps… on the same array?

 

For the newly announced HPE Server environment HPE will provide:

 

• Predictive analytics to predict and prevent problems
  • data analytics for server security
  • predictive data analytics for parts failure
• Global learning that provides wellness and performance dashboards for your global inventory of servers
  • global inventory of servers
• A recommendation engine to eliminate performance bottlenecks on servers

 

For VMware environments, InfoSight Cross-stack Analytics identifies:

 

• Noisy Neighbor
• Inactive VMs
• Latency Attribution – identify root cause across host, storage, or SAN
• Top Performing VMs – Visibility into Top 10 VMs by IOPS and Latency

 

Benefits of InfoSight

 

Based on an ESG Report titled, “Assessing the Financial Impact of HPE InfoSight Predictive Analytics”, published in September 2017, InfoSight provided the following benefits based on a survey of nearly 500 users:

 

• 79% lower IT operational expenses.
• 73% fewer trouble tickets in the environment.
• 85% less time spent resolving storage-related trouble tickets.
• 69% faster time to resolution for events that necessitate level 3 support.
• The ability to manage and troubleshoot the entire infrastructure environment from a single, intelligent platform.

 

HPE InfoSight is an application of AI that is here today and will continue to grow in the IT Infrastructure components it supports as well as the benefits it provides. If you have an HPE environment today, you’ll want to find out if HPE InfoSight can be leveraged to help you better manage your IT Infrastructure.