Resource-intensive workloads are the lifeblood of the digital economy. Traditional applications running in virtual machines (VMs) and modern cloud native applications running in containerized ecosystems drive underlying virtualization clusters to their limits. Many IT professionals support these business-critical services with antiquated systems that cannot deliver the end-user response times that are required to meet service-level agreements (SLAs). Even if the infrastructure is meeting expectations, inflexible configurations often prevent easily scaling-up or scaling-out to meet projected performance and capacity demands in the future.
Incorrect and suboptimal infrastructure designs and configurations also lead to performance degradation over the life of IT systems. Failure to test and validate components properly with the correct combination of BIOS, firmware, and operating system driver revisions can significantly impact IOPS, throughput, latency, CPU utilization, and more. IT administrators must also perform maintenance by routinely applying hardware and software updates to keep their systems secure and running at peak performance and availability. However, this task is often neglected due to risky and time-consuming manual update processes.
Once precisely tuned and optimized, highly performant systems must be monitored carefully to ensure that they are meeting SLAs. Some IT operational tooling is complex and lacks the features and functionality that is required to address modernized cloud native applications, such as those running in Kubernetes clusters. These tools may not be updated frequently enough to keep up with the constant changes in enterprise IT environments.