While the layers of abstraction created in virtualized environments afford numerous advantages, they can also obscure how the virtual resources are best allocated and how physical resources are performing. This can make maintaining optimal application performance a never-ending exercise in trial-and-error.

This post highlights some of the challenges encountered when using traditional monitoring and analytics tools, and describes how machine learning, as a next-generation analytics platform, provides a better way to meet SLAs by finding and fixing issues before they become performance problems. A future post will describe how machine learning analytics can also be used to allocate resources for optimal performance and cost-saving efficiency.

Most IT departments identify performance problems with tools that monitor a variety of discrete events against preset thresholds. For example they set a specific threshold for CPU utilization. Whenever that threshold is exceeded, the tool fires off alerts. But the use of thresholds presents several challenges. They do not account for the interrelated nature of resources in virtualized environments, where a change to or in one can have a significant impact on another. Such interrelationships exist both within and across silos. Without a complete understanding of the environment across silos, users of threshold-based tools frequently discover that their attempts to solve a problem have simply moved it to a different silo.

Thresholds often generate "alert storms" of meaningless data and miss important correlations that might indicate a severe problem exists. They are ineffective in detecting the symptoms of subtle issues that may indicate a significant imminent problem such as "noisy neighbors" or datastore latency issues. These subtle issues may not exceed a threshold related to the root cause or may exceed a threshold in short, random intervals, producing alerts that are frequently lost amid the "noise" of alert storms.

Even the so-called dynamic thresholds cannot accommodate the constant change in dynamic environments and, as a result, require significant ongoing IT intervention. And finally, while they may alert IT to an issue, they rarely provide sufficiently actionable information for resolving it. The exponential growth in the size and complexity of virtual environments has outstripped the ability of IT staff to set, manage, and continuously adjust threshold-based tools effectively. The time for an automated solution has come.

Advanced machine learning-based analytics software overcomes these and other challenges by continuously learning the many complex behaviors and interactions among interrelated objects – CPU, storage, network, applications – across the infrastructure. Unlike threshold-based solutions, this growing knowledge enables machine learning-based IT analytics solutions to provide a highly accurate means of identifying the root cause(s) of performance problems and making specific recommendations for resolving them cost-effectively.

This ability to aggregate, normalize, and then correlate and analyze hundreds of thousands of data points from different monitoring and management systems enable machine learning analytics solutions to transform massive volumes of data into meaningful insights across applications, servers and hosts, and storage and network infrastructures.

As it gathers and analyzes this wealth of data, the MLA system learns what constitutes normal behaviors, and it is this baseline that gives the system the ability to detect anomalies and find root causes automatically.

In addition to identifying root causes, advance machine learning based analytics solutions are able to simulate and predict the impact of making certain changes in resources and their allocations, which can be particularly useful for optimizing resource utilization and planning for expansion. This capability can also be useful for assessing if there is adequate capacity to handle a partial or complete failover. And these are topics worthy of a deeper dive in a future post.

Jerry Melnick is President and CEO of SIOS Technology.