Virtualization Management

Added Complexity and No Visibility into Virtual Instances

Server virtualization is being rapidly adopted by organizations around the globe for very compelling business reasons. Unfortunately, IT staff have to deal with the added complexity. Existing tools built to manage, secure and audit relatively stable environments have not kept up. New tools to monitor the hypervisor and virtual machines become their own operational silo. This makes it difficult to correlate activity and performance at an application level with resource utilization and performance down to the bare metal.

Does lack of monitoring across your physical and virtual environments make it impossible to get visibility or proactive warning of performance errors and trends at a service level? Do your developers have trouble getting access to all the data they need to quickly troubleshoot application outages? Can you investigate security incidents and produce required compliance reports across your entire environment, including power-down virtual machines? Are you able to capture transient data that’s critical for operations, security and compliance?

Manage and Secure "Both" Virtual and Physical Environments

With Splunk, users can now index, search and analyze all their IT data from a single location in real time, troubleshooting applications, investigating security incidents, and meeting compliance requirements, in minutes instead of hours or days.

The hundreds of customers using Splunk in IT environments including virtual systems routinely report eliminating up to 90% of escalations and cutting problem identification time by 60 to 80%, thereby reducing downtime and saving operating expenses and providing higher service levels.

Splunk indexes all IT data across every tier - the physical servers, hypervisor, VMs, and deployed applications, capturing and persisting 100% of your data in real time. Powerful search and navigation lets you trace performance problems and errors across components. Visibility across VMs highlights resource competition issues. Flexible alerting and reporting give you continuous visibility and monitoring of changing virtual environments. Investigate security incidents that cross from network security into your virtual environments. Collect, retain and monitor logs from transient environments that may be critical for compliance.

Let the results speak for themselves. Download Splunk now for free.

Splunk Benefits

  • Stop playing "data butler" by giving developers self-service, controlled, real time access to production data across all application stacks – virtual or otherwise.
  • Increase system security and stability by eliminating direct access to production systems for troubleshooting and analysis.
  • Overcome knowledge silos by enabling IT staff in different areas to classify and interpret the data they understand – both inside and outside the VM
  • Diagnose problems 60-80% faster by searching all production and staging environment system logs, configurations, changes and metrics from a single place in real time, without needing to request data from sysadmins.
  • Radically improve Mean Time to Repair (MTTR) by searching all production and staging environment system logs, configurations, changes and metrics from a single place in real time, without needing to request data from sysadmins and even if the relevant VM is powered down.
  • Improve development productivity by eliminating much of the time spent on production support.
  • Get a comprehensive view of 100% of your IT data - server, hypervisor, VM, guest OS, applications, network, and more.
  • Increase visibility even with the greater complexity of virtualized environments.
  • Optimize your initial planning and ongoing use of virtualization.
  • Retain data from transient guests for root cause analysis, security investigations and compliance.
  • Improve application availability and performance by speeding problem diagnosis in a virtual environment.
  • Be responsive to new business requirements by freeing developers from time-consuming production support.
  • Increase customer satisfaction by enabling operations to find and fix problems before customers see them.

Solution Areas

Virtualization Next Steps

VMware Virtualization App

Splunk for VMware

Splunk brings powerful indexing, search, alerting and reporting to the challenge of managing server virtualization. It's the only approach that easily crosses virtual boundaries - both inside and outside of the VM - for a complete picture.

Virtualization Management Using Splunk

Index metrics, configurations, status and logs from the hypervisor via the VMware ESX, Xen and other APIs as well as logs and other data from the guest OS and applications. This indexed data repository will survive guest power-down, critical for compliance-mandated log retention.
Systems administrators and developers will initially use Splunk to troubleshoot problems with apps deployed in the virtual infrastructure, with the ability to navigate from the application tier to guest OS, underlying hypervisor, and identify cross-guest issues. Security analysts will use Splunk to investigate incidents and identify zero-day attack footprints across both running and power-down systems.
Over time, everyone will enrich the indexed data with knowledge of the environment and the data it produces, breaking down the even more severe silos of knowledge endemic to virtualized environments.
Virtualized infrastructure managers will come to automate Splunk searches with alert triggers to easily monitor for new problems they identify as they adopt virtualization and lack adequate monitoring coverage.
Splunk reports and dashboards will provide a quick way to build visibility into utilization, performance and faults across all tiers of the virtualized environment, even where existing management tools haven't kept up. Ultimately, operations staff will realize that proactively searching and visualizing IT data across the stack with Splunk is one of the best approaches to navigating the unknowns of new virtualized infrastructure.