As we continue to strike forward into a more virtualized world, the need for end-to-end visibility of our applications has elevated from a nice to have to a can't live without. Much like the movie "Inception", we are continuing to add layer upon layer of nesting to our data centers, burying the data deeper into the software stack. No longer can you simply trace a network cable by hand to a server to help figure out an issue on a network port - the server is more often than not a virtual machine sitting on a random blade within a mesh of chassis.
The monitoring shift is here, but are we all ready for it? From being focused on needles pointing to CPU and memory usage, power consumption, and disk capacity, to looking at data from a more application-centric standpoint. Things like jitter, latency, response time, sessions, and cluster utilization are now driving business objectives and IT budgets. The user experience is becoming more paramount than ever, and as IT professionals, we are expected to better understand and translate the application performance to a complex network of nested and virtualized hardware.
I'm curious: Have you made the shift from watching hardware "speeds and feeds" to monitoring the application holistically from all its multiple tiers?