Transcript of a discussion exploring a recent survey of more than 500 enterprise cloud professionals and their concerns, requirements, and demands for improving the monitoring, management, and cost control of hybrid and multi-cloud deployments.

1. Solving the Complexity
Of Hybrid Cloud Monitoring
Transcript of a discussion exploring a recent survey of more than 500 enterprise cloud
professionals and their concerns, requirements, and demands for improving the monitoring,
management, and cost control of hybrid and multi-cloud deployments.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app. Download the
transcript. Sponsor: Micro Focus.
Dana Gardner: Hello and welcome to a panel discussion on improving performance
and cost monitoring of various IT workloads in a multi-cloud world.
I’m Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, and I’ll be your moderator as
we learn how multi-cloud adoption is forcing cloud monitoring and cost management to
work in new ways for enterprises.
Our panel of Micro Focus experts and I will explore new Dimensional Research survey
findings gleaned from more than 500 enterprise cloud specifiers. We will share their
concerns, requirements and demands for improving the monitoring, management and
cost control over hybrid and multi-cloud deployments.
We will also learn about new solutions and hear about examples of how automation
leverages machine learning (ML) and rapidly improves cloud management at a large
Barcelona bank.
Traditional monitoring falls short
Let’s begin with setting the stage for how cloud computing complexity is rapidly
advancing to include multi-cloud computing -- and how traditional monitoring and
management approaches are falling short in this new hybrid IT environment.
Enterprise IT leaders tasked with the management of apps, data, and business
processes amid this new level of complexity are primarily grounded in the IT
management and monitoring models from their on-premises data centers.
They are used to being able to gain agent-based data sets and generate analysis on
their own, using their own IT assets that they control, that they own, and that they can
impose their will over.
Yet virtually overnight, a majority of companies share infrastructure for their workloads
across public clouds and on-premises systems. The ability to manage these disparate
environments is often all or nothing.
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2. In many ways, the ability to manage in a hybrid
fashion has been overtaken by the actual hybrid
deployment models. The cart is in front of the horse.
IT managers do not own the performance data
generated from their cloud infrastructure. Their
management agents can’t go there. They have
insights from their own systems, but far less from
their clouds, and they can’t join these. They
therefore have hybrid computing -- but without
commensurate hybrid management and monitoring.
They can’t assure security or compliance and they cannot determine true and
comparative costs -- never mind gain optimization for efficiency across the cloud
computing spectrum.
Old management into the cloud
But there’s more to fixing the equation of multi-cloud complexity than extending
yesterday’s management means into the cloud. IT executives today recognize that IT
operations’ divisions and adjustments must be handled in a much different way.
Even with the best data assets and access and analysis, manual methods will not do for
making the right performance adjustments and adequately reacting to security and
compliance needs.
Automation, in synergy with big data analytics, is absolutely the key to effective and
ongoing multi-cloud management and optimization.
Fortunately, just as the need for automation across hybrid IT management has become
critical, the means to provide ML-enabled analysis and remediation have matured -- and
at compelling prices.
Great strides have been made in big data analysis of such vast data sets as IT
infrastructure logs from a variety of sources, including from across the hybrid IT
continuum.
Many analysts, in addition to myself, are now envisioning how automated bots
leveraging IT systems and cloud performance data can begin to deliver more value to IT
operations, management and optimization. Whether you call it BotOps, or AIOps, the
idea is the same: The rapid concurrent use of multiple data sources, data collection
methods and real-time top-line analytic technologies to make IT operations work the best
at the least cost.
IT leaders are seeking the next generation of monitoring, management and optimizing
solutions. We are now on the cusp of being able to take advantage of advanced ML to
tackle the complexity of multi-cloud deployments and to keep business services safe,
performant, and highly cost efficient.
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In many ways, the ability
to manage in a hybrid
fashion has been
overtaken by the actual
hybrid deployment
models. The cart is in
front of the horse.

3. Similar in concept to self-driving cars, wouldn’t you rather have self-driving IT
operations? So far, a majority of you surveyed say yes; and we are going to soon learn
more about that survey information.
First, please join me in welcoming our panel to learn more about
these interesting enterprise trend results. We are here with
Harald Burose, Director of Product Management at Micro Focus,
and he is based in Stuttgart. We are also joined by Ian
Bromehead, Direct of Product Marketing at Micro Focus, and he
is based in Grenoble, France. Lastly, Gary Brandt, Product
Manager at Micro Focus and based in Sacramento, joins us as
well.
Ian, please tell us more about the survey findings.
IT leaders respond to their needs
Ian Bromehead: Thanks, Dana. The first element of the survey
that we wanted to share describes the extent to which cloud is so
prevalent today.
More than 92 percent of the 500 or so executives are indicating
that we are already in a world of significant multi-cloud adoption.
The lion’s share, or nearly two-thirds, of this population that we
surveyed are using between two to five different cloud vendors.
But more than 12 percent of respondents are using more than 10
vendors. So, the world is becoming increasingly complex. Of
course, this strains a lot of the different aspects [of management].
What are people doing with those multiple cloud instances? As to be expected, people
are using them to extend their IT landscape, interconnecting application logic and their
own corporate data sources with the infrastructure and the apps in their cloud-based
deployments -- whether they’re Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) or Platform as a
Service (PaaS). Some 88 percent of the respondents are indeed connecting their
corporate logic and data sources to those cloud instances.
What’s more interesting is that a good two-thirds of the respondents are sharing data
and integrating that logic across heterogeneous cloud instances, which may or may not
be a surprise to you. It’s nevertheless a facet of many people’s architectures today. It’s a
result of the need for agility and cost reduction, but it’s obviously creating a pretty high
degree of complexity as people share data across multiple cloud instances.
The next aspect that we saw in the survey is that 96 percent of the respondents indicate
that these public cloud application issues are resolved too slowly, and they are impacting
the business in many cases.
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Burose
Bromehead

4. Some of the business impacts range from resources tied up by collaborating with the
cloud vendor to trying to solve these issues, and the extra time required to resolve
issues impacting service level agreements (SLAs) and contractual agreements, and
prolonged down time.
What we regularly see is that the adoption of cloud often translates into a loss in
transparency of what’s deployed and the health of what’s being deployed, and how that’s
capable of impacting the business. This insight is a strong bias on our investment and
some of the solutions we will talk to you about. Their primary concern is on the visibility
of what’s being deployed -- and what depends on the internal, on-premise as well as
private and public cloud instances.
People need to see what is impacting the delivery of services as a provider, and if that’s
due to issues with local or remote resources, or the connectivity between them. It’s just
compounded by the fact that people are interconnecting services, as we just saw in the
survey, from multiple cloud providers. So the weak part could be anywhere, could be
anyone of those links. The ability for people to know where those issues are is not
happening fast enough for many people, with some 96 percent indicating that the issues
are being resolved too slowly.
How to gain better visibility?
What are the key changes that need to be addressed when monitoring hybrid IT absent
environments? People have challenges with discovery, understanding, and visualizing
what has actually been deployed, and how it is impacting the end-to-end business.
They have limited access to the cloud infrastructure, and things like inadequate security
monitoring or traditional monitoring agent difficulties, as well as monitoring lack of real-
time metrics to be able to properly understand what’s happening.
It shows some of the real challenges that people
are facing. And as the world shifts to being more
dependent on the services that they consume,
then traditional methods are not going to be
properly adapted to the new environment. Newer
solutions are needed. New ways of gaining
visibility – and the measuring availability and
performance are going to be needed.
I think what’s interesting in this part of the survey
is the indication that the cloud vendors themselves
are not providing this visibility. They are not
providing enough information for people to be able to properly understand how service
delivery might be impacting their own businesses. For instance, you might think that IT is
actually flying blind in the clouds as it were.
So, one of my next questions was, Across the different monitoring ideas or types, what’s
needed for the hybrid IT environment? What should people be focusing on? Security
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As the world shifts to being
more dependent on the
services that they consume,
then traditional methods are
not going to be properly
adapted to the new
environment. Newer solutions
are needed.

5. infrastructure, getting better visibility, and end-user experience monitoring, service
delivery monitoring and cloud costs – all had high ranking on what people believe they
need to be able to monitor. Whether you are a provider or a consumer, most people end
up being both. Monitoring is really key.
People say they really need to span
infrastructure monitoring, metric that
monitoring, and gain end-user security and
compliance. But even that’s not enough
because to properly govern the service
delivery, you are going to have to have an
eye on the costs -- the cost of what’s being
deployed -- and how can you optimize the
resources according to those costs. You
need that analysis whether you are a
consumer or the provider.
The last of our survey results shows the need for comprehensive enterprise monitoring.
Now, people need things such as high-availability, automation, the ability to cover all
types of data to find issues like root causes and issues, even from a predictive
perspective. Clearly, here people expect scalability, they expect to be able to use a big
data platform.
For consumers of cloud services, they should be measuring what they are receiving, and
capable of seeing what’s impacting the service delivery. No one is really so naive as to
say that infrastructure is somebody else’s problem. When it’s part of this service, equally
impacting the service that you are paying for, and that you are delivering to your
business users -- then you better have the means to be able to see where the weak links
are. It should be the minimum to seek, but there’s still happenings to prove to your
providers that they’re underperforming and renegotiate what you pay for.
Ultimately, when you are sticking such composite services together, IT needs to become
more of a service broker. We should be able to govern the aspects of detecting when the
service is degrading.
So when their service is more PaaS, then workers’ productivity is going to suffer and the
business will expect IT to have the means to reverse that quickly.
So that, Dana, is the set of the different results that we got out of this survey.
A new need for analytics
Gardner: Thank you, Ian. We’ll now go to Gary Brandt to learn
about the need for analytics and how cloud monitoring solutions
can be cobbled together anew to address these challenges.
Gary Brandt: Thanks, Dana. As the survey results were outlined
and as Ian described, there are many challenges and numerous
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Brandt
People say they really need to
span infrastructure monitoring,
metric that monitoring, and gain
end-user security and
compliance. But … to properly
govern the service delivery, you
are going to have to have an eye
on the costs.

6. types of monitoring for enterprise hybrid IT environments. With such variety and volume
of data from these different types of environments that gets generated in the complex
hybrid environments, humans simply can’t look at dashboards or use traditional tools
and make sense of the data efficiently. Nor can they take necessary actions required in a
timely manner, given the volume and the complexity of these environments.
So how do we deal with all of this? It’s where
analytics, advanced analytics via ML, really brings
in value. What’s needed is a set of automated
capabilities such as those described in Gartner’s
definition of AIOps and these include traditional
and streaming data management, log and wire
metrics, and document ingestion from many
different types of sources in these complex hybrid
environments.
Dealing with all this, trying to, when you are not quite sure where to look, when you have
all this information coming in, it requires some advanced analytics and some clever
artificial intelligence (AI)-driven algorithms just to make sense of it. This is what Gartner
is really trying to guide the market toward and show where the industry is moving. The
key capabilities that they speak about are analytics that allow for predictive capabilities
and the capability to find anomalies in vast amounts of data, and then try to pinpoint
where your root cause is, or at least eliminate the noise and get to focus on those areas.
We are making this Gartner report available for a limited time. What we have found also
is that people don’t have the time or often the skill set to deal with activities and they
focus on -- they need to focus on the business user and the target and the different
issues that come up in these hybrid environments and these AIOp capabilities that
Gartner speaks about are great.
But, without the automation to drive out the activities or the response that needs to
occur, it becomes a missing piece. So, we look at a survey -- some of our survey results
and what our respondents said, it was clear that upward of the high-90 percent are
clearly telling us that automation is considered highly critical. You need to see which
event or metric trend so clearly impacts on a business service and whether that service
pertains to a local, on-prem type of solution, or a remote solution in a cloud at some
place.
Automation is key, and that requires a degree of that service definition, dependency
mapping, which really should be automated. And to be declared more – just more easily
or more importantly to be kept up to date, you don’t need complex environments, things
are changing so rapidly and so quickly.
Sense and significance of all that data?
Micro Focus’ approach uses analytics to make sense of this vast amount of data that’s
coming in from these hybrid environments to drive automation. The automation of
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So how do we deal with all
of this? It’s where analytics,
advanced analytics via ML,
really brings in value.

7. discovery, monitoring, service analytics, they are really critical -- and must be applied
across hybrid IT against your resources and map them to your services that you define.
Those are the vast amounts of data that we just described. They come in the form of
logs and events and metrics, generated from lots of different sources in a hybrid
environment across cloud and on-prem. You have to begin to use analytics as Gartner
describes to make sense of that, and we do that in a variety of ways, where we use ML
to learn behavior, basically of your environment, in this hybrid world.
And we need to be able to suggest what the
most significant data is, what the significant
information is in your messages, to really try to
help find the needle in a haystack. When you
are trying to solve problems, we have
capabilities through analytics to provide
predictive learning to operators to give them
the chance to anticipate and to remediate
issues before they disrupt the services in a
company’s environment.
And then we take this further because we have the analytics capability that’s described
by Gartner and others. We couple that with the ability to execute different types of
automation as a means to let the operator, the operations team, have more time to
spend on what’s really impacting the business and getting to the issues quicker than
trying to spend time searching and sorting through that vast amount of data.
And we built this on different platforms. One of the key things that’s critical when you
have this hybrid environment is to have a common way, or an efficient way, to collect
information and to store information, and then use that data to provide access to
different functionality in your system. And we do that in the form of microservices in this
complex environment.
We like to refer to this as autonomous operations and it’s part of our OpsBridge solution,
which embodies a lot of different patented capabilities around AIOps. Harald is going to
speak to our OpsBridge solution in more detail.
Operations Bridge in more detail
Gardner: Thank you, Gary. Now that we know more about what users need and
consider essential, let’s explore a high-level look at where the solutions are going, how
to access and assemble the data, and what new analytics platforms can do.
We’ll now hear from Harald Burose, Director of Product Management at Micro Focus.
Harald Burose: When we listen carefully to the different problems that Ian was
highlighting, we actually have a lot of those problems addressed in the Operations
Bridge solution that we are currently bringing to market.
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We have capabilities through
analytics to provide predictive
learning to operators to give
them the chance to anticipate
and to remediate issues before
they disrupt the services in a
company’s environment.

8. All core use cases for Operations Bridge tie it to the underpinning of the Vertica big data
analytics platform. We’re consolidating all the different types of data that we are getting;
whether business transactions, IT infrastructure, application infrastructure, or business
services data -- all of that is actually moved into a single data repository and then
reduced in order to basically understand what the original root cause is.
And from there, these tools like the analytics that Gary described, not only identify the
root cause, but move to remediation, to fixing the problem using automation.
This all makes it easy for the stakeholders to understand what the status is and provide
the right dashboarding, reporting via the right interface to the right user across the full
hybrid cloud infrastructure.
As we saw, some 88 percent of our customers
are connecting their cloud infrastructure to their
on-premises infrastructure. We are providing the
ability to understand that connectivity through a
dynamically updated model, and to show how
these services are interconnecting -- independent
of the technology -- whether deployed in the
public cloud, a private cloud, or even in a
classical, non-cloud infrastructure. They can then
understand how they are connecting, and they
can use the toolset to navigate through it all, a
modern HTML5-based interface, to look at all the
data in one place.
They are able to consolidate more than 250 different technologies and information into a
single place: their log files, the events, metrics, topology -- everything together to
understand the health of their infrastructure. That is the key element that we drive with
the Operations Bridge.
Now, we have extended the capabilities further, specifically for the cloud. We basically
took the generic capability and made it work specifically for the different cloud stacks,
whether private cloud, your own stack implementations, a hyperconverged (HCI) stack,
like Nutanix, or a Docker container infrastructure that you bring up on a public cloud like
Azure, Amazon, or Google Cloud.
We are now automatically discovering and placing that all into the context of your
business service application by using the Automated Service Modeling part of the
Operations Bridge.
Now, once we actually integrate those toolsets, we tightly integrate them for native tools
on Amazon or for Docker tools, for example. You can include these tools, so you can
then automate processes from within our console.
Customers vote a top choice
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Some 88 percent of our
customers are connecting their
cloud infrastructure to their on-
premises infrastructure. We
provide the ability to
understand that connectivity
through a dynamically updated
model.

9. And, best of all, we have been getting positive feedback from the cloud monitoring
community, by the customers. And the feedback has helped earn us a Readers’ Choice
Award by the Cloud Computing Insider in 2017, by being ahead of the competition.
This success is not just about getting the data together, using ML to understand the
problem, and using our capabilities to connect these things together. At the end of the
day, you need to act on the activity.
Having a full-blown orchestration compatibility within OpsBridge provides more than
5,000 automated workflows, so you can automate different remediation tasks -- or
potentially point to future provisioning tasks that solve the problems of whatever you can
imagine. You can use this to not only identify the root cause, but you can automatically
kick off a workflow to address the specific problems.
If you don’t want to address a problem through the workflow, or cannot automatically
address it, you still have a rich set of integrated tools to manually address a problem.
Last, but not least, you need to keep your stakeholders up to date. They need to know,
anywhere that they go, that the services are working. Our real-time dashboard is very
open and can integrate with any type of data -- not just the operational data that we
collect and manage with the Operations Bridge, but also third-party data, such as
business data, video feeds, and sentiment data. This gets presented on a single visual
dashboard that quickly gives the stakeholders the information: Is my business service
actually running? Is it okay? Can I feel good about the business services that I am
offering to my internal as well as external customer-users?
And you can have this on a network operations center (NOC) wall, on your tablet, or
your phone -- wherever you’d like to have that type of dashboard. You can easily you
create those dashboards using Microsoft Office toolsets, and create graphical, very
appealing dashboards for your different stakeholders.
Gardner: Thank you, Harald. We are now going to go beyond just the telling, we are
going to do some showing. We have heard a lot about what’s possible. But now let’s
hear from an example in the field.
Multicloud monitoring in action
Next up is David Herrera, Cloud Service Manager at Banco
Sabadell in Barcelona. Let’s find out about this use case and their
use of Micro Focus’s OpsBridge solution.
David Herrera: Banco Sabadell is fourth largest Spanish banking
group. We had a big project to migrate several systems into the
cloud and we realized that we didn’t have any kind of visibility
about what was happening in the cloud.
We are working with private and public clouds and it’s quite
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Herrera

10. difficult to correlate the information in events and incidents. We need to aggregate this
information in just one dashboard. And for that, OpsBridge is a perfect solution for us.
We started to develop new functionalities on OpsBridge, to customize for our needs. We
had to cooperate with a project development team in order to achieve this.
The main benefit is that we have a detailed view about what is happening in the cloud. In
the dashboard we are able to show availability, number of resources that we are using --
almost in real time. Also, we are able to show what the cost is in real time of every
resource, and we can do even the projection of the cost of the items.
[And that’s for] every single item that we have in the cloud now, even across the private
and public cloud. The bank has invested a lot of money in this solution and we need to
show them that it’s really a good choice in economical terms to migrate several systems
to the cloud, and this tool will help us with this.
Our response time will be reduced dramatically because we are able to filter and find
what is happening, and call the right people to fix the problem quickly. The business
department will understand better what we are doing because they will be able to see all
the information, and also select information that we haven’t gathered. They will be more
aligned with our work and we can develop and deliver better solutions because also we
will understand them.
We were able to build a new monitoring system from scratch that doesn’t exist on the
market. Now, we are able to aggregate a lot of detailing information from different
clouds.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app. Download the
transcript. Sponsor: Micro Focus.
Transcript of a discussion exploring a recent survey of more than 500 enterprise cloud
professionals and their concerns, requirements, and demands for improving the monitoring,
management, and cost control of hybrid and multi-cloud deployments. Copyright Interarbor
Solutions, LLC, 2005-2018. All rights reserved.
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