When it comes to IT services, business value and user satisfaction are both dependent upon the server, network, and applications all working together seamlessly.

Failure to adequately monitor each of these and their interactions, means that you could be flying blind – susceptible to degraded service levels.

While application and network monitoring receive a lot of the attention, it is important to also understand what’s going on with the server.

Virtualization changes the face of service delivery

The environment in which modern services run is complex. Superficially, it appears as though we’ve traveled back to the 1960s, with data centers again appearing like big monolithic constructs (whether cloud or internally hosted) with highly-virtualized server farms connecting through large core networks.

The emergence of virtualized clients (with most computing done remotely) takes the analogy a step further and makes it feel as if we are on the set of “Mad Men” with the old dumb terminals connected to the mainframe.

But that may be where the analogy ends. Today’s IT service delivery is almost never performed in a homogeneous vendor setting—from a hardware or software perspective. Likewise, the diversity of complex multi-tier applications and methods by which they are accessed continues to proliferate.

To learn more, download the white paper.

Thanks to Network Instruments for the article.