Netuitive, Inc., a leading provider of self-learning performance management software, announced its findings from a recent IT straw poll that pinpoints traditional monitoring systems as a major hurdle for companies moving toward a virtual infrastructure.

The unscientific poll reveals that as many as 45 percent of IT professionals may have little or no confidence in their current performance management tools' ability to monitor such an environment, which is bad news for the thousands of companies on the path to server virtualization.

Today the industry is starting to see more and more companies looking at virtualization technology. As companies begin to embrace virtualization they are afforded a level of freedom, choice, and flexibility previously unknown to them. These opportunities however bring about new complexities and challenges in the way of allocating server resources, managing performance, and isolating problems. According to nearly half of IT professionals polled in the survey, there is a strong feeling that traditional monitoring tools simply won't be able to deliver in a virtual environment.

According to Daniel Heimlich, vice president at Netuitive, one of the reasons for the general lack of faith in existing management tools is the high rate of false alerts. He attributes this to the fact that the current generation of monitoring software relies on static thresholds, manual rules, and scripts.

"Companies are already dealing with hundreds and thousands of false alerts daily in their physical server environments. So it's no wonder that users lack the confidence in these tools when it comes to virtualized infrastructures, which is even more variable and highly interdependent," said Heimlich. "Trying to understand the hundreds of simultaneously moving parts in a typical virtual deploymentùand their impact on one anotherùis humanly impossible."

Making the Impossible Possible

Netuitive SI for VMware, announced in March 2007, installs on the host server and integrates with VMware's VirtualCenter. The software monitors servers, virtual machines, and the applications that run on them to learn normal behavior for the entire environment as well as the relationships between each component. In this way, the software can intelligently identify any components that behave outside of the normal parameters, the company says.

Unlike existing infrastructure monitoring software which is set up with human created thresholds and plagued with false negatives, Netuitive SI for VMware self-learns and cross-correlates the performance behavior characteristics of the virtual infrastructure, rendering performance degradation forecasts up to two hours in advance, immediate pinpointing of problems, and proactive managing of system health, the company says.

About Netuitive, Inc.

Netuitive is a leading provider of self-learning performance management software. Netuitive's software solutions enable organizations to guarantee service levels and significantly lower IT operational costs, the company says. Netuitive software automatically analyzes and correlates all of an organization's performance monitoring data in real-time, requires no manual configuration or specialized programming, and delivers Trusted Alarmsùthe industry's most reliable indicators of impending service problems. Netuitive partners with leading systems and service management vendors, including IBM, BMC, NetIQ, HP, Microsoft, CA, and Vmware, and has Global 1000 customers, generally realizing a return on investment in less than two months. These include companies such as Dow Jones, BlueCross BlueShield, Kroger, Harley Davidson and Priceline.com. For more information, please visit www.netuitive.com.

About the Survey

The questions were asked in a poll of 85 IT professionals who attended a live vendor Webcast sponsored by Netuitive. The complete Webinar "The Hidden Cost of VM Management: How to Manage Performance in Constantly Changing Environments" is available for free by download at Webinar.