We all like the idea of a single pane of glass system monitoring, but the reality is that often monitoring data is siloed away in a bunch of different tools that do not speak to each other, not even the same language. We end up with several single panes of glass, each dedicated to their own data. Often each team is only aware of their own data, with no ability to correlate data between different infrastructure and application layers. What we could use is a Rosetta Stone that allows translation between the various data languages in our enterprise and permits data to be ingested for analysis and delivery to our favorite pane of glass.
Blue Medora’s Bindplane is that Rosetta Stone, it ingests data from multiple sources and then makes that combined data available to a variety of different monitoring tools. The data sources might be your on-premises infrastructure from a variety of enterprise hardware and software vendors like HPE, VMware or SAP and cloud-native platforms providers like AWS, Azure, and Google as well as application platforms like Docker, MySQL, and Pivotal Cloud Foundry. Right now, there are over 150 integrations to get data into Blue Medora’s Bindplane. Bindplane can then work on the ingested data, create super-metrics and integrate relationship information. For example, ensure that the performance of a storage array is linked to the applications in VMs that reside on datastores hosted on that array. Then the combined and refined data is fed to a monitoring tool, such as vRealize Operations or NewRelic among others, where it is further analyzed and presented to IT teams who can use a rich set of data to resolve problems rapidly. All of this data consolidation and processing is offered as a cloud service, with data collection appliances in each data center, or cloud VPC. I understand that there will eventually be an on-premises version of Bindplane which will suit organizations with public cloud allergies.
I thought that Blue Medora was another management tool, that was before I heard from them at the Tech Field Day Extra at VMworld US 2018. It turns out Bindplane is the glue to stick your diverse sources of monitoring data together, so your monitoring tools get better data input to give you better insights. As more medium and large businesses realize just how much hybrid- and multi-cloud they really have in their IT we will see a substantial increase in the need for Bindplane to bring unity to our system monitoring data. I would be interested to see how well Bindplane works at delivering data to multiple management applications. NewRelic is suited to application teams while vRealize Operations is far better suited to infrastructure operations teams. It would be great if the same data could be fed from Bindplane to each of these consoles so that the different groups would see their own view of a consistent set of data.
Disclaimer: I saw Blue Medora present at the Tech Field Day Extra at VMworld USA 2018, my usual Tech Field Day disclaimer applies.
© 2018, Alastair. All rights reserved.
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