Authored by Ron Lifton, Director, Solutions Marketing, NETSCOUT and Juan Manuel Rey, Senior Program Manager, AVS Product Group, Microsoft
Cloud infrastructures are foundational elements for success in a digital world. For any organization to succeed, however, it must be able to accomplish digital transformation in a way that ensures a high-quality user experience before, during, and after cloud migration—while minimizing risks. Business continuity, service quality, and security cannot be compromised. Indeed, IDC recently stated during a FutureScape webinar that the emerging digital infrastructure ecosystem, increasingly built on a cloud foundation, focuses on ensuring ever-faster delivery of innovative software and consistent, ubiquitous, scalable operations across cloud, on-premises data center, and edge environments. Although these digital infrastructures enable flexible resources, they also amplify service delivery blind spots within a threat environment that keeps scaling. NETSCOUT and Microsoft support digital strategies to remove these barriers and accelerate migrating workloads to the cloud.
To help customers in this journey, Microsoft offers Azure VMware Solution, which is a first-party Azure service and VMware-validated solution that allows customers to seamlessly integrate their VMware on-premises environments with Azure and leverage any existing investments in VMware skills and tools. Azure VMware Solution allows customers to easily provision a private cloud in bare-metal dedicated servers with VMWare vCenter Server, vSAN, vSphere, and NSX-T as the foundation pillars.
The VMware NSX Data Center is a key element here, because it allows organizations to automate application and network deployment consistently and securely across the virtualized infrastructure. NSX provides simplified management, micro-segmentation security, provisioning agility, and improved data center economics. This advanced environment with complete lifecycle automation delivers on the promise of successful data center transformation with accelerated service velocity, enhanced security, and rapid disaster recovery.
Solving Fragmented Visibility
The hybrid cloud, multicloud, and VMware NSX network virtualization platforms have become a natural part of how organizations operate. But behind this digital transformation lies the reality that successfully migrating apps from a traditional on-prem environment to the cloud requires visibility into application dependencies and end-user experience across different domains. In other words, visibility without borders. Unfortunately, most businesses rely on a grab bag of application and network performance-monitoring tools that use fragmented, low-resolution data. This, in turn, obscures end-to-end infrastructure visibility, making it difficult for IT organizations to precisely identify the root cause of a performance issue. In fact, according to an independent research firm, 95 percent of surveyed IT organizations say a high volume of disparate data from siloed tools makes it challenging to manage application performance and security issues in increasingly complex infrastructures. What this means is technology teams need to “see it all” so the business does not “risk it all.” Simply put, they need a service assurance solution that provides end-to-end visibility that can scale across VMware ESX, NSX, and SD-WAN deployments, including Azure VMware Solution environments.
NETSCOUT for Azure VMware Solution
Keeping their business moving and growing on Azure requires companies to apply an innovative strategy for application performance monitoring and troubleshooting. For this to happen, organizations need end-to-end visibility and an analytics platform that provides continuous, unified, reliable data to identify potential risks and performance status of applications and workloads, regardless of whether they reside on physical servers, software, or public-cloud instances.
NETSCOUT fills this critical need. NETSCOUT has partnered with VMware to provide the most complete packet data visibility solution to gain visibility across your Azure and on-premises environment. To optimize the performance of applications and ensure a delightful user experience, it is essential to understand the interdependencies of the services and interactions with the broader IT infrastructure. NETSCOUT’s nGeniusONE Service Assurance platform delivers rich NETSCOUT Adaptive Service Intelligence (ASI) technology into Azure VMware Solution, as well as on-premises VMware and hybrid cloud and multicloud environments. Rather than looking at individual elements in isolation, smart data provided by NETSCOUT vSTREAM virtual appliances is consumed by the nGeniusONE Service Assurance platform to enable consistent views of service performance and smarter analytics. There is no need to stitch together low-resolution data from different tools and make sense out of it. Because every action and transaction across the hybrid cloud is based on packet data, NETSCOUT uses packet data as the single source of truth, and IT teams accelerate time to value when it is turned into smart data.
NetOps, SecOps, ITOps, and other IT teams that are collectively responsible for everything in Azure VMware Solution can collaborate via a complete overarching view into the performance characteristics of applications and user experience. NETSCOUT solutions let you migrate workloads to Azure with confidence, providing a foundation for common situational awareness by monitoring a variety of availability, reliability, responsiveness, and threat metrics—making them easily accessible in real time to the right team members with custom views relevant to their function.
As a certified Advanced VMware Technology Alliance Partner, NETSCOUT has extended its service assurance platform to the NSX environment and delivers actionable visibility so that you can take full advantage of Azure VMware Solution. NETSCOUT's solution enables IT teams to manage health, availability, security, and user-experience issues more effectively across their NSX data centers.
How It Works: vSTREAM in Action with nGeniusONE
To maintain the performance of applications, it is essential to be able to understand the interdependencies of the services across Azure VMware Solution and on-premises NSX data centers. vSTREAM virtual appliances generate key performance indicators (KPIs) that are consumed and viewed in nGeniusONE. All NETSCOUT ASI-based monitoring platforms are integrated with nGeniusONE to provide a common set of metadata analytics.
vSTREAM in combination with the nGeniusONE platform:
- Reports critical KPIs for user experience, application performance, and application and network errors
- Delivers service-dependency mapping that exposes the connectivity between applications, servers, and users
- Provides service-dashboard rollups of application performance
- Continues reporting on application behavior, regardless of virtual machine/container location or movement
- Provides continuous monitoring and trending of data in customizable reports for use by IT staff and business stakeholders
- Offers access to protocol-specific metadata and detailed transaction views of sessions
Learn more about NETSCOUT solutions for Azure by visiting our partner page.
Learn more about Azure VMware Solution by visiting Microsoft.