and CloudShare will take the stage together at next week’s VMworld 2012 to discuss how the Splunk App for VMware is helping CloudShare gain deep insight into its infrastructure performance, customer trends, and business metrics. The session, entitled “How a Cloud Computing Provider Reached the Holy Grail of Visibility” will take place Wednesday 29th August from 4.00 – 5.00 p.m. (PT) at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. Leena Joshi, director of solutions marketing at Splunk, and Elad Gotfrid, director of IT at CloudShare, will share best practices on managing and monitoring CloudShare’s dynamic SaaS environment with Splunk and the Splunk App for VMware.
CloudShare uses Splunk software across its entire infrastructure for monitoring, troubleshooting, and solving customer service issues, as well as for operational intelligence about its business – understanding capacity usage per customer, conversion funnels, and more. As an early beta tester of the Splunk App for VMware, CloudShare has now adopted the application company-wide to help gain deep insight into the thousands of virtual machines supported by the company’s infrastructure. The Splunk App for VMware provides CloudShare with added visibility into the detailed performance of its virtual infrastructure, helping it to track stressed virtual machines and hosts to balance capacity better.
“At CloudShare we think of Splunk as our eyes and ears. Splunk software enables us to understand and oversee every aspect of our operations,” said Gotfrid. “The key asset we achieve from Splunk software is the ability to correlate business data with performance metrics. Compiling data about our customers and understanding which resources are being utilised allows us to understand and plan our capacity, based on the clear trends we identify.”
CloudShare uses the Splunk App for VMware to collect performance statistics, logs, and events from the virtualisation layer and correlate the information with network, storage, OS and application events. With the extensive visibility provided by Splunk software, CloudShare is able to contextualise infrastructure data and track business metrics such as usage and resource costs per trial and business user. Dashboards created in Splunk and linked to operational data from physical and virtual sources help to guide the whole organisation, from network operations and customer support, to marketing, sales, and R&D. Additionally, to help fight fraud, CloudShare uses network device and firewall information gathered with Splunk software to create attack signatures that trigger automatic blocks, or trigger alerts to network operations that are then further investigated.
“CloudShare is a great example of how operational intelligence can positively impact every part of a business, even in complex cloud computing environments,” said Joshi. “The Splunk App for VMware unlocks the value of the virtualisation layer data. It enables companies to put it in the context of machine data from all layers of their virtualised infrastructure such as host operating systems, applications, and the underlying server, storage, and network devices.”
“VMware cloud infrastructure environments can benefit from big data technologies, such as Splunk,” said Parag Patel, vice president, global strategic alliances, VMware. “With VMware cloud infrastructure and Splunk, cloud service providers can collect and harness critical operational data from all tiers of their virtualised infrastructure while leveraging the scalability VMware software provides for public and private clouds.”