Xangati Dashboards Identify IT Contention Issues

Debunking the Top Data Center Myths

When it comes to IT infrastructure, there has never been more interdependency between systems, resulting in increased levels of complexity that make IT more difficult to manage than ever.

Looking to give IT organizations more visibility and ultimately more control over that complexity, Xangati today announced an upgrade to its suite of IT performance management tools that adds executive dashboards that make it easier to identify the sources of IT contention issues both now and in the future.

Xangati CTO Jagan Jagannathan says that because of fears that contention issues will lead to a degradation in application performance, most IT organizations waste money overprovisioning their IT environments. The XSR11 upgrade helps IT organizations address that issue by providing continuous feedback to management dashboards in real time, says Jagannathan.

Jagannathan says being able to monitor IT environments that now consist of virtual and physical resources in real time is the difference between being able to make intelligent tradeoffs to meet application service level requirements and a comprehensive systems failure. By abstracting away many of the grungy details of IT, the XSR11 management tools provide more clarity concerning which applications are simultaneously contending to use the same network and systems resources that result in “contention storms” that can quickly overwhelm the IT environment, says Jagannathan.

While catastrophic failures of IT equipment are occurring with less frequency thanks in part to the inherent redundancy built into many IT environments, the performance of an application can suddenly degrade for no apparent reason. Figuring out the source of those problems can take days, sometimes even months, especially when they occur at irregular intervals. Making that even more challenging is the simple fact that no one knows for certain when an application may generate a sudden spike in demand for more capacity.

The good news is that, in general, IT is getting more resilient; the bad news is that optimizing application performance across all those resilient components has never been more challenging.