CITTIO to Advance the State of Cloud Computing

CITTIO®, the innovation leader in automated network and systems monitoring software, lays out its vision and roadmap for cloud monitoring today in order to accelerate its adoption by enterprises. CITTIO's vision is to provide enterprise application owners as well as cloud operators with the tools they need for selecting, benchmarking and monitoring the most eligible applications and systems for cloud computing. To that end, CITTIO has embarked on a two-pronged strategy. First the company is leading the development of deep instrumentation for the vast array of cloud components through the power of the open source community. Second it is developing a highly distributed version of its well-established enterprise management platform, WatchTower, to provide a seamless view of infrastructure and application health and audited service levels across the internal datacenter and remote cloud environments.

Cloud computing is heralded as a vibrant technology growth area with increased interest from corporate IT customers who stand to gain enormously from this new computing model. The advantages of cloud computing, which enables an application to be run on remote infrastructure delivered by a cloud provider, are many. Abstracting the infrastructure layer away from the application speeds up the pace at which enterprise IT managers can deploy new services to support business innovation. It also reduces the cost of overall application delivery as massively scalable infrastructure is made available on demand without the need for costly internal investments in provisioning for peak computing capacity. Further, cloud technologies enable enterprises to either automate or outsource many of the management tasks that were carried out by legions of IT staffers who managed and maintained physical hardware and systems in the datacenter.

However, key challenges exist for the broader adoption of cloud technologies by enterprises beyond pilot and marginal projects. For one, enterprises need tools to monitor and manage dynamic cloud infrastructures and applications in a reliable way. They need to be able to set SLAs for their providers, verify compliance and have strong visibility, just like they have with their internal or outsourced applications, systems and networks. Unfortunately, no standardized tools yet exist to monitor and manage the highly dynamic, virtualized and 'elastic' cloud environments.

"As the pressure mounts within enterprise IT organizations to meet more stringent budgets, IT professionals keep looking at new options to save costs. Yet the need to quickly respond to the changing business dynamics remains an important requirement as well. In the face of these dual challenges, cloud computing may be an attractive option, because of its intention to address them both," noted Cameron Haight, Research VP IT Operations at Gartner. "As with virtualization technology, IT organizations will need to assess the effectiveness of existing IT operations management tools to provide the requisite levels of end-to-end visibility and support. This assessment must go beyond just focusing on cloud computing in isolation and instead, look at the capability to manage it holistically as part of an enterprise's multi-sourcing services strategy," he added.

Given the vastness of cloud components, the newness of underlying technologies and the extremely fast pace of evolution, it is hard for commercial vendors to create management instrumentation that has broad addressability. CITTIO has therefore decided to lead the development of standards-based instrumentation for the cloud in the open source domain. By making key contributions early on with its internal resources and using the best selection of open source components and industry standards, CITTIO will make it easy for the open source community to come together on creating broad and deep instrumentation of cloud components. The details on the implementation and benefits of this open source initiative called Project Zeppelin, is covered in a separate release. This effort will allow other management vendors to take advantage of Zeppelin as well to innovate and deliver new management solutions.

Concomitantly, CITTIO is finalizing the development of a highly distributed fault and performance monitoring solution on top of its existing WatchTower platform to monitor the hundreds of thousands of instances and millions of metrics to be collected by Zeppelin agents. It will provide the reporting, analysis and operations support for both internal and remote cloud infrastructures. By enabling the monitoring of all components, from physical to virtual, local and remote, application to infrastructure -- CITTIO will provide a single pane of glass for complete monitoring and metering of IT services end-to-end from the datacenter to the cloud. In the process, WatchTower will also support new DMTF-supported management protocols. This is critical as current management protocols cannot securely monitor remote infrastructure over the public internet and neither can they capture the complexity of the dynamic and virtualized cloud components. This new architecture has been designed for scale and high flexibility by allowing remote monitoring in a WAN-friendly way. It supports overlapping IP addresses management and consolidation of events in a central console that can be either located within the enterprise perimeter or in the cloud.