Monitoring-as-a-Service is a cloud-based offering provided by VMware Cloud Service Providers (VCSP), that enables organizations to take advantage of a service that monitors their IT cloud infrastructure, applications, and services proactively, without having to manage the underlying monitoring tools themselves. This VCSP solution allows businesses to gain insights into the performance, availability, and the health of their systems, while leveraging the scale and expertise of the VCSP.
Challenges Faced by Customers
For organizations not leveraging Monitoring-as-a-Service, the implications can be extensive, ranging from operational inefficiencies and increased costs to reputational harm and diminished customer satisfaction. It becomes imperative to gain visibility to maintain and optimize resources to run applications better. Embracing monitoring solutions can be a crucial step toward a more resilient and efficient IT environment. In the absence of which, organizations may find themselves vulnerable to unexpected failures and security breaches that could have been mitigated with proactive monitoring. As per the Flexera State of the Cloud report 2024, managing cloud spend, security and lack of expertise are the top cloud challenges faced by organizations. Monitoring solutions help minimize costs from reduced downtime by pre-empting bottlenecks, proactively monitor logs for security events or policy violations and reduce the need for manual updates and compensate for inevitable skill gaps.
Companies often use disparate tools for monitoring the health of their infrastructure. Additionally, the ever increasing volume of data generated can overwhelm traditional monitoring tools. Without the ability for capacity planning, organizations often overspend on hardware purchases based on inaccurate historical estimates. Visibility gaps make it harder for teams to identify performance issues and their root causes as services touch many parts of the infrastructure. As per the Forrester Total Economic Impact™ of VMware Cloud Foundation Operations 2024 report, organizations can reduce relative downtime by 5x and improve operational efficiency by more than 75% (Benefits over 3 years).
The Critical Importance of Monitoring-as-a-Service
By embracing comprehensive monitoring solutions from VCSPs, businesses can leverage predictive analytics for continuous operations management, compliance and intent-driven placement that helps optimize performance and costs. Without these safeguards in place, organizations could be vulnerable to unexpected failures and security breaches—issues that proactive monitoring could easily help mitigate.
The IDC Spotlight paper on IT Ops Modernization 2024, cited that the main factors that drive customers’ decisions when picking an observability tool, were superior application of AI, ease of use and the ability to customize. VMware Cloud Foundation’s cloud monitoring capabilities offer a single pane of glass view for monitoring across different ecosystems, along with AI based anomaly detection, and include the ability to create custom alerts relevant to an organization’s service. This can lead to a 75% improvement in operational efficiency, 20% reduction in time to resolve issues and 50% efficiency gain in team coordination, as per the Forrester Total Economic Impact™ of VMware Cloud Foundation Operations 2024 report.
Why Monitoring-as-a-Service is a Game Changer?
It empowers organizations to gain crucial insights into the performance, availability, and overall health of their systems, allowing for proactive management and swift responses to any emerging issues.
- Real-Time Insights at Your Fingertips: Monitoring-as-a-Service delivers continuous tracking and instant visibility into an organization’s cloud and IT environment, enabling them to detect and address potential problems before they escalate into major disruptions. They can get custom alerts to manage the health of their resources and services.
- Leverage Scalable Expertise: By partnering with you, a VCSP, businesses can gain access to a wealth of expertise and state-of-the-art technology without the overhead costs of maintaining these resources in-house. This not only saves them time but also allows their team to focus on strategic initiatives that drive business growth.
- Cost-Effective Monitoring Solutions: Monitoring-as-a-Service can operate on a flexible pay-as-you-go pricing model that aligns with business needs and budget, and many VCSPs will include this option as default for customer cloud services. Hence, customers can avoid hefty upfront investments in monitoring infrastructure and can scale effortlessly as their enterprise evolves.
- Enhanced Performance and Reliability: With powerful analytics and monitoring capabilities, organizations can ensure that their applications are running smoothly and efficiently. They can visualize ongoing health and trends with ready-to-go dashboards, reports, heat maps and charts. Improved performance translates directly to enhanced customer experiences and satisfaction.
- Seamless Integration: Monitoring-as-a-Service integrates effortlessly with existing workflows and tools, offering a cohesive technological ecosystem that boosts productivity and operational effectiveness.
How VMware Cloud Service Providers Can Leverage Monitoring-as-a-Service?
As a component of VMware Cloud Foundation, VCSPs gain access to our comprehensive monitoring solutions, which include VMware Cloud Foundation Operations that offers visibility across compute, storage, and network. Components of this service include VMware Cloud Foundation Operations (previously known as Aria Operations), VMware Cloud Foundation Operations for Logs (formerly Aria Operations for Logs), VMware Cloud Foundation Operations for Networks (formerly Aria Operations for Networks). As a VCSP, you can offer Monitoring as a self-service or a managed service.
VMware Cloud Foundation Operations
VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) Operations helps businesses achieve a more streamlined and cost-effective IT operation by maximizing VCF resource efficiency and proactively addressing potential problems by:
- Proactive Performance Management: AI-powered anomaly detection and predictive analytics prevent issues, reducing downtime and firefighting.
- Intelligent Resource Optimization: Rightsizing, reclamation, and placement recommendations optimize resource utilization and lower costs.
- Automated Remediation: Policy-driven automation streamlines troubleshooting and fixes, saving time and effort.
- Manage Cost Visibility: Track costs in the environment for better budget control and as a cloud service provider, help customers manage their cloud spend, which is the top most challenge faced today by any end customer.
Learn more here.
VMware Cloud Foundation Operations for Logs
Enables log management and analysis. By collecting logs from across the VCF infrastructure including servers, virtual machines, network devices, applications and operating systems, the solution helps turn massive amounts of unstructured log data into actionable insights for monitoring. Solving issues by utilizing predictive analytics, machine learning, and root-cause analysis tools across physical and virtual environments for faster problem resolution for your services. This makes it easier to search, retain, and analyze logs and identify compliance related incidents, anomalies, and security lags. It can proactively monitor logs for security events or policy violations. Learn more here.
VMware Cloud Foundation Operations for Networks
Networks are the backbone of any cloud and an essential tool for monitoring VCF-based clouds. Network Operations helps discover, optimize, verify, and troubleshoot application security and network connectivity issues. Providing network visibility, analytics to accelerated, policy driven (avoiding human error) network segmentation security, minimizes application migration risk, troubleshooting, and optimizes network performance and confidently manages and scales environments. Learn more here.
Get Access to the Go-To-Market Kit:
To support your efforts to drive awareness for your offerings as a VCSP, Broadcom has created a Monitoring-as-a-Service go-to-market kit that provides you a set of assets that you can customize with your own messaging, branding and the details of your solution offering. This kit will help you refine your outgoing messaging and tailor it for specific target audiences to support your marketing efforts with out-of-the-box assets for campaigns relevant to every stage of your customer’s journey. With these ready-to-use resources, you can launch your services quickly and effectively.
These assets include a messaging document, customer ebook, internal sales training whiteboard, a one pager, an infographic, a complete digital and social kit, an email nurture sequence, and a solution video. They describe the value proposition which will resonate with your customers, explain the value of the offer, what’s included, why customers need it, as well as a walk-through for an initial sales conversation and an overview video. As a Pinnacle or Premier partner in the Broadcom Advantage Partner Program, you can request access to our monitoring go-to-market kit to differentiate and monetize your solution.
