IT Troubleshooter | Harper Mann » Managing the Logic Layer is a Headache, Will it Become a Virtual Migraine?

December 05, 2005 | Comments: (0)

Managing the Logic Layer is a Headache, Will it Become a Virtual Migraine?

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As an industry, systems management has really grown up on physical infrastructure management, making sure that physical components are up and running. This has been no small task, with the explosion of firewalls, routers, commodity servers, devices on the "edge," and the many other subcomponents that make up the physical layer in today's enterprise datacenter.

But experts are starting to point out that the challenge of managing the logical infrastructure is now the new battle for IT professionals. From J2EE and LAMP application stacks, to the proliferation of open source, to new directions like SOA and virtualization -- the degree of complexity in the logical layer is exploding.

Think of how many different touch points your applications and services have within your infrastructure. IBM's own autonomic computing research points to 25-40 sources of data for the typical enterprise application. Now multiply each one of those sources by the number of load balanced physical devices and servers that produce IT data. No doubt the unending software sprawl of logical components and their dependencies make managing the physical stuff now look trivial. In fact, just two weeks ago IBM announced they have acquired Collation, a company to help them map all those interdependencies. See the InfoWorld story here.

Figuring out the actual runtime logic to troubleshoot systems, measure performance or whatever it is you're trying to do, is still a very human-intensive task performed. We utilize blunt instruments like grep and Perl and awk and sed, not modern kind of tools like you'd expect to find. And if you think its hard now, just wait for virtualization to arrive at a data center near you.

According to Jonathan Eunice, principal analyst at Illuminata:

"Virtualization is supposed to make things simpler-and it does. But along the way, it adds to the explosion of layers, components, and issues that IT managers and administrators have to deal with. The other big datacenter trends, service-oriented architecture (SOA) and modular infrastructure, are much the same. In the big picture, they're Big Wins. Indeed, Really Big Wins. But tactically, they bring in a lot of new stuff to absorb, understand, and integrate. There's a real problem of skills. Most shops don't have years of experience running IT in a virtualized, componentized, service-led way. And so tools and techniques that help "cut to the chase"-that is, reduce time-to-correct operations, and thus, time-to-value-are golden."

Thanks Jonathan for your thoughts.

Do you have a virtualization troubleshooting scenario to share? Write me at thebaum@splunk.com.

Posted by Michael Baum on December 5, 2005 05:00 AM

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