Our friends at Shopzilla talked about their application environment recently, and particularly around how they measure and visualize metrics from a wide variety of sources.  This goes under the general category of DevOps – bringing development and operations closer together, and giving operations engineers the highly configurable, agile tools that developers have been enjoying for some time. To realize the vision of DevOps, an organization must be able to collect metrics and events from a variety of sources, bring that data together in an intelligent way (correlate it), and then present it in the best possible way for each of the various audiences in the organization. And all these steps must occur in near real time–in other words, the application environment must be able to analyze a vast amount of data fast enough for developers, operations staff, and business stake-holders to take whatever action might be necessary to optimize IT operations.  No small feat – Juan Paul talked about half a dozen tools they use (including ClearStone) to manage this task.

So, we’ve been thinking here at Evident about an ambitious task – what if ClearStone could manage more of the DevOps problem?  It’s clear that we are already in use within the development and operations community when it comes to managing and monitoring Oracle Coherence – but that’s just the first step.  What about managing the application tier, other data caching/NoSQL environments, perhaps even database and system level metrics?  That is the direction that Evident is moving in – witness our expansion in DCP to support memcached, and others are coming soon.  Also, AppServer containers such as WebLogic, jBoss, Tomcat – out of the box capabilites to manage, monitor and instrument these containers in conjunction with the DCP layer.  Also, grid technologies such as Hadoop, GridGain, DataSynapse.

Do you have custom code or your own containers?  No problem, how about we give you a toolkit to bring those in yourself?  And management plug-ins so that operations can leverage their existing tools for managing their environment and providing more automated alerting and control to the production environment.

Ambitious it is, but the feedback we’re getting and progress we’re making has been very encouraging.  And we hear more people doing what Juan Paul and Shopzilla are doing, so we’re pleased with that path.

By Scott Barnett