CloudPhysics has released Exploration Mode, which is available as part of its award-winning analytics solution for VMware users. CloudPhysics' new Exploration Mode enables admins to identify the root causes of server issues, by easily and interactively displaying resource consumption patterns and environment changes over time. 

Infrastructure is increasingly complex, and change is constant — whether immediate, or slower, more insidious configuration drift. A recent CloudPhysics survey indicated that 68% of application disruptions are due to configuration issues, rather than software or hardware failures. Prior to Exploration Mode, when a change-driven problem surfaced in the infrastructure, IT admins were unable to "replay" the environment across time to correlate events or changes that may have caused the problem. 

With Exploration Mode, administrators can go back in time, correlating events, issues, and changes that are associated with any selected time range in the vSphere environment, making it possible for users to see exactly what transpired in the seconds, minutes or days leading up to an application performance or availability problem. 

"When issues emerge in a virtualized environment, it can be extremely difficult to zero in on the root cause because compute resources may be shared broadly across many workloads," said Chris Schin, vice president of product management at CloudPhysics. "With Exploration Mode, users have the ability to use CloudPhysics' Deep Infrastructure Inspection capabilities, examine their environment across time, zero in on a specific time frame, and view the behavior of server resources as the problem was surfacing."

Exploration Mode provides the ability to:

• Analyze changes over time, using time slices that allow users to zoom in or out on a time range of interest to evaluate correlations and identify the root causes of issues
• "Correlate in context" to troubleshoot application disruptions with data drawn from VM performance/resource consumption, change/event logs, configuration history and known issues associated with operational hazards and best practices

"In a virtual environment, infrastructure changes can be the cause of application disruption," said Ryan Burgess of BlueShore Financial "CloudPhysics Exploration Mode allows us to quickly zero in on environmental changes, when they happened and their impact, so we can immediately respond."

This article was originally posted “CloudPhysics Releases Exploration Mode” from Cloud Strategy Magazine.