TRAC Research had the chance to interview Darin Bartik, Senior Director of Product Marketing at Quest Software about the key trends and challenges regarding managing application performance in virtual environments.

Here are some of the key insights that Darin shared during this podcast:

“The reason that most of IT organizations are not on the same page is that their priorities have been based on the old way of thinking about performance monitoring and management. This is based on the IT being pushed by the business and then struggling to keep up, so they end up being reactive many times and that reactivity has forced the need to get very broad coverage. What ended up happening here is that this broad coverage didn’t help domain specific technologists, so a lot more domain specific tools were purchased…. and all of this different data and different tools that people have has created all of this finger pointing and you have “war room” activities and never ending conference calls.“

“The fundamental challenge for managing application performance in virtual environments comes from a really good part of virtualization, which is both resource sharing and all of the efficiencies that come with it, but this breaks that physical link that was true forever, and all traditional management tools are now starting to lose visibility because these tools were built on the idea of the physical world…End-user organizations have to take the view of a service that they are delivering, which is something that is static. So if we take more of a service management approach and manage the application instead of the infrastructure pieces that will help maintain that visibility link all the way from where the end-user interacts to the virtual infrastructure.“

“Automation is something that customers are begging to ask about, especially in more mature environments and that’s what is really going to take things from more of a performance monitoring to a performance management paradigm. Instead of just monitoring what is going on and reacting to that manually, let the tool take an administrative action. Let it witness the event and instead of telling someone that something is wrong and giving some expert advice, actually take that expert advice and perform an action.”

“Virtualization was set to change everything and when it comes to managing performance it really does."

Click here to listen to the podcast