Gartner® Market Guide for IT Infrastructure Monitoring Tools and What It Means for Broadcom’s DX Unified Infrastructure Management Customers

Market Direction

The increasing adoption of modern and cloud-native architectures is enabling enterprises with IT infrastructure that is more dynamic and ephemeral, and thus more resilient. This trend drives infrastructure monitoring tools to transition from simply “keeping the lights on” to providing advanced insights such as predictive analytics for infrastructure workload optimization. Infrastructure monitoring that was once art has become science.

For enterprises, your ITIM (IT infrastructure monitoring) solution should provide:

• Full-stack observability
• AI- and machine learning-driven AIOps capabilities
• Automated and dynamic management of infrastructure inventories.

We believe the 2021 Gartner® Market Guide for IT Infrastructure Monitoring Tools discusses the trends, how to select the right tool, and how to optimize value from it once you have it.

Key Features for Optimizing Value from Your ITIM Solution

In their report, Gartner mentions the must-have features for optimizing value from an infrastructure management solution. We believe that Broadcom’s DX Unified Infrastructure Management (DX UIM) solution not only supports these features today but provides our customers with the flexibility and extensibility required to scale as their needs evolve. Below is a summary of key features you should require in order to get the most value out of your ITIM solution:

• Contextualized data. IT ops teams need an ITIM solution that can provide in-context correlation of data. DX UIM customers can contextualize quality of service parameters and performance matrices for their infrastructure stack with Performance Report Designer, Metric Palette, and Service Level Reports functionality. These features provide custom, on-the-fly report creation and faster full-stack triage. DX UIM users can also create matrices and alerts based upon contextual logs for the technologies monitored using a Logmon probe.
• Dashboards tailored for the audience. ITIM solutions need to provide flexible and user-friendly dashboards by audience with:
  • Views of business impact
  • A service-level view for IT Operations
  • A granular view for IT Ops teams
    
    
  With DX UIM’s user management and role-based access, users can create tailored dashboards and reports for executives as well as IT operations teams. DX UIM’s data model is truly multi-tenant and enables custom views for key personas such as site reliability engineer (SRE), operator, server admin, cloud admin, and business users.
• Advanced analytics. Event correlation must be supplemented and will eventually be replaced by AIOps for intelligent, automated, and predictive incident management. DX UIM and our integrated DX Operational Intelligence solution use AI- and machine learning-driven observability to provide predictive capacity analytics, situation-based alarm analytics, and service topology-driven business service analytics.
• Integrations with ITOM tools. Modern ITIM solutions provide full integration and interoperability with ITOM tools. DX UIM is built for easy third-party integration and extension through its comprehensive set of well-published APIs and connectors, including those for ITSM and orchestration tools. DX UIM offers pre-built integrations across Broadcom’s full AIOps solution, including with DX Operational Intelligence, DX NetOps, DX APM, and our orchestration tools like Automic.
• Flexible configuration. Operations teams need granular monitoring and easy configuration; DX UIM provides dynamic discovery of the infrastructure environment in its entirety and provides the capability to filter out non-critical infrastructure components, enabling monitoring at scale.
• Hybrid environments. With today’s IT infrastructures relying on both on-premises and cloud environments, enterprises require a tool that provides visibility across these distributed infrastructures. With DX UIM, our customers can monitor mobile to mainframe and everything in between in a unified and standardized way.

Some Additional Thoughts

In addition to the key features mentioned by Gartner in the Market Guide, there are other critical requirements you should consider when evaluating ITIM solutions:

• Dynamic discovery. With modern data centers becoming more dynamic and ephemeral, infrastructure management tools must offer dynamic discovery. DX UIM’s zero-touch monitoring configuration service (MCS) does just that. MCS’s dynamic discovery capabilities help our customers efficiently scale with bulk deployment and configuration of probes and alarm profiles to manage ever-increasing infrastructure inventories.
• Scalability. A loosely coupled architecture and message bus is another key requirement that our customers depend upon with DX UIM. Without it, easy horizontally-scalable deployments across the globe would be impossible.
• Extensibility. With the ever-changing stack that now makes up the modern data center, our customers often require custom monitoring solutions for niche technologies. DX UIM provides this through probe SDKs, RestMon, and device self-certification over SNMP.
• Service level management. Specialist roles in the datacenter like server or storage admin are being reconfigured to IT service manager or the SRE responsible for full stack observability. Our customers don’t just need dashboarding by persona; they need service level management by persona.
  
  DX UIM provides this capability through service level management (SLM). SLM is an industry-standard framework that is used for the primary management of network and application services. With DX UIM, users create service-level agreements (SLAs) and their component service-level objectives (SLOs) and quality of service (QoS) constraints. SLM uses a hierarchical set of measurable criteria to monitor and ensure the validity of SLAs between customers and service providers.

With differentiated capabilities, the most scalable solution in the market, and the release of DX UIM 20.4, we are more confident than ever that DX UIM will continue to support our customers’ needs now and far into the future.

Read the Gartner Market Guide for IT infrastructure Monitoring Tools for more recommendations from Gartner.

Watch the DX UIM roadmap session, to find out more about Broadcom Software's ongoing investment in unifying the infrastructure management platform, providing full-stack observability, optimizing triage workflow, and integrating with the most comprehensive AIOps platform available today.

Footnotes:

Gartner, Market Guide for IT Infrastructure Monitoring Tools, Pankaj Prasad, Josh Chessman, Mrudula Bangera, Gregg Siegfried, 9th September 2021

Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s Research & Advisory organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.