Performance management company Virtual Instruments released a new version of its application-centric infrastructure performance management (IPM) and analytics platform that integrates with Cisco. Version 5.6 of the VirtualWisdom platform integrates with Cisco SAN Telemetry Streaming and AppDynamics to give a more comprehensive view into infrastructures and applications.

Virtual Instruments has two products, VirtualWisdom, its monitoring product, and WorkloadWisdom, its load balancer. And while the VirtualWisdom platform does monitor applications, it does not consider itself to be an application performance (APM) company.

“APM typically has visibility down to the host, or the server that it’s running on, but there’s a lot of infrastructure behind that server that’s supporting it, providing the data that the application needs,” said Tim Van Ash, senior vice president of products at Virtual Instruments. “So by understanding how the application uses the infrastructure we can help APM be more effective by giving them that view of the backend of the infrastructure.”

The newest release of the monitoring platform primarily extends the major updates of version 5.4, released last December. With this version the company introduced the application-centric concept of its monitoring; added a storage port balancer with new analytics to manage across different storage arrays; and included intelligent runbooks, which walk end-users through diagnosing, triaging, and resolving network issues.

Version 5.6 added Cisco SAN telemetry screening; enhanced its NetFlow capability, which monitors conversations between applications; integrated with Cisco AppDynamics; introduced visualization into its investigation capabilities; and enhanced its dashboards.

VirtualWisdom allows enterprises to see all storage transactions and measure them down to the microsecond. Cisco's recently released telemetry screening capabilities provide telemetry and diagnostics data that are key to troubleshooting and can provide better insights into SAN fabrics.

With the SAN telemetry customers no longer have to install physical TAP and hardware probes to have visibility, as Virtual Wisdom eliminates the need for additional hardware in the infrastructure.

Integrating with AppDynamics allows VirtualWisdom to discover the applications from the AppDynamics controller. VirtualWisdom then pulls that context and automatically creates a custom monitoring policy for the infrastructure.

“This is all about threading common context to enable the teams and the tools to work more effectively together,“ said Van Ash.

VirtualWisdom 5.6 also includes new capabilities to balance workload infrastructure, which assesses infrastructure resources and provides re-balancing recommendations for ports or arrays which have become congested or overwhelmed.

Additionally, when an alert occurs, the platform automatically investigates and generates guidance and remediation procedures.

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