Hi there! I’m michael stump, a technology consultant with a keen focus on virtualization and a strong background in systems and application monitoring. I hope to spark some discussion this month on these topics and more.
Last month, I published a post on my personal blog about the importance of end-to-end monitoring. To summarize, monitoring all of the individual pieces of a virtualization infrastructure is important, but it does not give you all of the information you need to identify and correct performance and capacity problems. Just because each individual resource is performing well doesn’t mean that the solution as a whole is functioning properly.
This is where end-to-end monitoring comes in. You’re likely familiar with all of the technical benefits of e2e monitoring. But let’s talk about the operational benefits of this type of monitoring: reducing finger-pointing.
In the old days of technology, the battle lines between server and network engineers were well-understood and never crossed. But with virtualization, it’s no longer clear where the network engineer’s job ends and the virtualization engineer’s job begins. And the storage engineer’s work is now directly involved in both network and compute. When a VM starts to exhibit trouble, the finger-pointing begins.
“I checked the SAN, it’s fine.”
“I checked the network, it’s fine.”
“I checked vSphere, it’s fine.”
Does this sound familiar? Do you run into this type of fingerpointing at work? If so, share a story with us. How did you handle the situation? Does end-to-end monitoring help this problem?