Splunk and CloudShare to Showcase the Splunk App for VMware Cloud Environments

Grazed from PRNewsWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Splunk Inc., the leading provider of software for real-time operational intelligence, and CloudShare, the leading provider of pre-production cloud for dev and test, demos and POCs, will take the stage together at next week’s VMworld® 2012 to discuss how the Splunk App for VMware is helping CloudShare gain deep insight into its infrastructure performance, customer trends, and business metrics.

The session titled, "How a Cloud Computing Provider Reached the Holy Grail of Visibility" will take place Wednesday, Aug. 29 from 4 – 5 p.m. (PT) at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. Leena Joshi, director of solutions marketing at Splunk, and Elad Gotfrid, director of IT at CloudShare, will share best practices on managing and monitoring CloudShare’s dynamic SaaS environment with Splunk and the Splunk App for VMware…

CloudShare uses Splunk software across their entire infrastructure for monitoring, troubleshooting, and solving customer service issues, as well as for operational intelligence about their business – understanding capacity usage per customer, conversion funnels, and more. As an early beta tester of the Splunk App for VMware, CloudShare has now adopted the application company-wide to help gain deep insight into the thousands of virtual machines supported by the company’s infrastructure. The Splunk App for VMware provides CloudShare added visibility into the detailed performance of its virtual infrastructure, helping it track stressed virtual machines and hosts to better balance capacity.

"At CloudShare we think of Splunk as our eyes and ears. Splunk software enables us to understand and oversee every aspect of our operations," said Gotfrid. "The key asset we achieve from Splunk software is the ability to correlate business data with performance metrics. Compiling data about our customers and understanding which resources are being utilized allows us to understand and plan our capacity based on clear trends we identify."

CloudShare uses the Splunk App for VMware to collect performance statistics, logs, and events from the virtualization layer and correlate the information with network, storage, OS and application events. With the extensive visibility provided by Splunk software, CloudShare is able to contextualize infrastructure data and track business metrics such as usage and resource costs per trial and business user. Dashboards created in Splunk and linked to operational data from physical and virtual sources help guide the whole organization from network operations and customer support to marketing, sales, and R&D. Additionally, to help fight fraud, CloudShare uses network device and firewall information gathered with Splunk software to create attack signatures that trigger automatic blocks or trigger alerts to network operations that are then further investigated.

"CloudShare is a great example of how operational intelligence can positively impact every part of a business, even in complex cloud computing environments," said Joshi. "The Splunk App for VMware unlocks the value of the virtualization layer data. It enables companies to put it in the context of machine data from all layers of their virtualized infrastructure such as host operating systems, applications, and the underlying server, storage, and network devices."

"VMware cloud infrastructure environments can benefit from big data technologies, such as Splunk," said Parag Patel, vice president, global strategic alliances, VMware. "With VMware cloud infrastructure and Splunk, cloud service providers can collect and harness critical operational data from all tiers of their virtualized infrastructure while leveraging the scalability VMware software provides for public and private clouds."

"Most management tools leave datacenter administrators in the blind when it comes to virtualization because of their focus on single-technology silos," said Dennis Drogseth, vice president of research, Enterprise Management Associates. "Splunk’s breadth and versatility combined with its ‘big data’ analytics capabilities—can provide role aware support for virtualization as it impacts both infrastructure performance and resiliency, and IT service delivery."

"Monitoring the dynamic nature of virtualization with tools designed for single-technology silos creates a significant challenge for administrators," said Dave Bartoletti, senior analyst, Forrester Research. "There is a growing need for solutions that provide cross-tier visibility to effectively troubleshoot, monitor and analyze data across silos and deliver real-time business insights and operational intelligence."

"Virtualization and the list of current vendor-specific tools can leave datacenter administrators blindsided with their focus on single technology silos," said Rachel Chalmers, vice president of research, 451 Research Group. "Splunk for VMware is a big data, cross-tier approach to tackling the visibility challenges introduced by virtualization."