While setting up and working with the eGroup roadshow team to deliver another excellent VMWare User Group (VMUG) in the Myrtle Beach area I was able to get a look at VMWare's acquisition of Integrian's Alive product and came away impressed.  This isn't just another monitoring suite.  Alive is a self-learning analytics software that aggregates data from ALL of the popular monitoring software suites (Keynote, Cacti, Nagios, Citrix, SAP, EX2, SNMP, Hyperic, Microsoft Systems Center... Full List below) as well as generic adapters for SQL, WMI, etc... for custom monitoring solutions integration.  Alive takes the information from all of these sources and learns the environment as it collects data.  By using Patented Performance Analytics and automated real time analysis Alive is able to identify the key metrics that lead to a application failure, system failure or performance issue as well as the conditions that cause the key metric to be considered outside of normal behavior.  This gives the systems and applications admins a automated adjusting threshold analytics system for proactive monitoring of all aspects of the datacenter.  The result of not just identifying the threshold exception and reporting but identifying the factors that lead up to the threshold exception is quicker root cause analysis of factors that lead up to a performance issue or failure as well as the ability to remediate them before the end user sees the impact.

Analytics tools such as VMWare Alive become even more business critical as business start builiding out their private clouds.  Moving traditional desktop workloads from the desktop machines and into the datacenter through traditional means such as Citrix as well as the new trends in Application Virtualization (ThinApp, Citrix Profiler, App-V) and virtual desktop initiatives (VMWare View).  As more applications that have a much higher end user visibility and complex delivery mechanisms for admins to use towards the goal of simplifying end user access and performance there is an increased need for measurable results and in depth look at the current state of applications and systems in the datacenter.

VMWare is running a <a href="http://www.vmware.com/landing_pages/vsphere-promotion/" target="_blank">promotion</a> for 50 FREE virtual machines with VMWare Alive VM for qualifying purchases/renewals of vSphere through March 1st. 
<p style="text-align: center"><a href="http://blogs.eGroup-us.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/Scoreboard1.jpg"><img class="size-full wp-image-3263 aligncenter" src="http://blogs.eGroup-us.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/Scoreboard1.jpg" alt="VMWare Alive Dashboard" width="600" height="411" /></a></p>
 

Stay tuned for more information on VMWare Alive.