Virtual Instruments Aims to Meld DevOps, ITSM Worlds

Virtual Instruments today announced additions to an IT management platform that leverage machine learning algorithms to identify application drift and dynamically right-size virtual machines.

Tim Van Ash, senior vice president of products for Virtual Instruments, said version 6.2 of the company’s VirtualWisdom platform is part of an ongoing campaign to meld the traditional world of IT service management with best DevOps practices using an AIOps platform. As part of that effort, Virtual Instruments last month acquired Metricly, a provider of tools for monitoring cloud costs in real-time.

The latest update to that platform also adds tools to monitors, reports, forecasts and alarms against the capacity consumption rate of any application, while a capacity forecast alarm now allows IT teams to specify how many days, weeks or months they wish to be notified prior to potential capacity exhaustion occurring on any one node or cluster.

Finally, Virtual Wisdom 6.2 provides access to updated VirtualWisdom Proactive Dashboards that provide access to Smart Charts, through which the AIOps platform now supports annotation, linking and smart naming in addition to topology views that are specific to a set of IT infrastructure or an application.

Van Ash said the Virtual Instruments approach to AIOps is that it allows IT teams to respond to changing application conditions in real-time and set granular limits on how much capacity can be consumed by any particular application. For example, IT teams can ensure that specific applications are given a Platinum-level preference that prevents any other application from consuming resources allocated to that application, he said.

In general, Van Ash said Virtual Instruments is pursuing an application-centric approach to AIOps that will make it easier for IT organizations to optimize IT infrastructure capacity dynamically. Rather being overly focused on utilization rates and tracking events, AIOps platforms need to be able to address the entire IT life cycle as it relates to the value that IT environment has to the business, he said, noting today many DevOps teams are building and deploying applications with little regard or actual control over the service levels those applications need to achieve and maintain. The goal, he said, is to provide a single platform through which DevOps and IT operational teams steeped in legacy IT service management (ITSM) models such as ServiceNow can collaboratively achieve a common set of goals.

A day of reckoning is coming for proponents of DevOps and IT teams that have built sprawling IT environments employing ITIL-based processes. Those ITIL-based processes are not especially flexible, but they have been employed successfully to roll out applications at scale consistently. Advancements in AIOps should go a long way to bring the two schools of IT management together by making it easier to bend the available IT infrastructure resources to the will of multiple application developers trying to share a common pool of resources.

In the meantime, no one should expect AI to solve their problems magically overnight. It takes a while for algorithms to solve all their IT headaches. However, the days when the relationship between developers and IT operations teams could be described as mostly contentious soon may be coming to a merciful end.

— Mike Vizard