In late October virtualization.info described how Fortisphere is slightly changing its go-to-market strategy, revamping its flagship product, now called Virtual Service Manager (VSM).
After just one month the company announces a new VSM feature called vRadar.
vRadar accesses the virtual infrastructure inventory that VSM offers and connects the elements in a logical map.
The administrator can interact with the elements in the map. Each one offers useful information about its health, the resources consumption and even the status of the processes that are part of a specific application.
To retrieve this data and understand the connection (and more importantly, the communication status)between elements, vRadar needs to deploy an agent inside every virtual machine in the virtual infrastructure.
At the moment Fortisphere offers agents for Windows, Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Cent OS Linux. Support for Novell SUSE Enterprise Linux is coming.
The agents are deployed and updated in a transparent way (no need for guest OS reboot) using the same APIs that VMware Update Manager (VUM) uses.
As the screenshot above suggests, the most helpful way to use vRadar is to check the application-centric version of the map. This may greatly reduce the amount of time administrators have to spend to troubleshoot the environment when a certain service stops to work.