Service level management - a conversation with Zenoss

Floyd Strimling, VP of Community, Technical Evangelist at Zenoss, stopped by to discuss Zenoss 4.2 and what his company is doing to address the growing need to manage "services" rather than systems.

Zenoss points out that increasingly organizations are transforming their own internal infrastructure to be more cloud-like and are using services from outside suppliers along side of their own traditional approaches.

The conversation turned to Zenoss' newest release and what the company is doing to address the transformation.

Zenoss 4.2

Here's what Zenoss has to say about Zenoss 4.2

The biggest IT challenge in the cloud era remains managing complexity and the ability for IT operations to maintain necessary service levels in the modern data center. IT operations must have the capability to deliver products and services that depend on a combination of legacy infrastructure and today’s converged offerings. Zenoss Service Dynamics 4.2 provides the ability to monitor, model, and visualize an organization’s infrastructure, no matter how heterogeneous. IT leaders must have confidence that they can monitor the entire data center and reduce complexity through advanced service-based monitoring.

Organizations can gain new flexibility and scalability with Zenoss Service Dynamics 4.2:

• Native Cisco Converged Infrastructure support validated on Cisco’s Virtual Multiservice Data Center (VMDC) reference architecture
• Unified heterogeneous monitoring across legacy IT infrastructure and new converged infrastructure solutions like VMDC
• Smart Cisco element discovery, classification and infrastructure service modeling support
• Over 50% faster user interface in large deployments, employing the fastest, most feature rich and browser-compatible ExtJS framework yet
• Intelligent tuning advisor, takes the guesswork out of running Zenoss at scale while reducing operational overhead and improving infrastructure utilization
• Optimized task engine for enhanced scalability, usability and performance.  Keep staff moving while complex operational tasks are executed in the background

Snapshot analysis

Data Centers are experiencing fundamental changes that are expected to increase the levels of complexity seen by IT administrators. Workloads, once tied to a specific system, are now likely to be encapsulated and may move from system to system or data center to data center. The organization may own and operate some of those data centers and some of them might be operated by cloud service providers.

In order to reduce costs, organizations are transforming their own IT infrastructures to be more cloud-like. Rather than allowing each business unit or department to own and operate its own systems, organizations are increasingly moving workloads to multi-tenant systems.

Managing an environment that contains traditional systems, converged infrastructure systems and cloud services is beyond the capabilities of some management tools. Zenoss would assert that a new generation of tools are an absolute requirement.