Virtual Instruments to add cloud monitoring with Metricly

Storage performance monitoring tool provider Virtual Instruments has taken a step towards extending its capabilities to the cloud with the acquisition of cloud cost and optimisation provider Metricly.

Virtual’s aim is to incorporate Metricly’s capabilities into its portfolio to offer software-as-a-service (SaaS)-based infrastructure management across datacentre and cloud locations.

Metricly was formerly known as Netuitive, which made a name for itself using machine learning and AI to help analyse  IT operations. The Metricly platform helps customers – of which it has about 100 – to plan and optimise cloud workloads.

Metricly has a major focus on cost savings and resource inefficiencies in cloud usage and appears to be solely able to apply this to Amazon Web Services (AWS) environments to date.

A key aim for Metricly is to help cloud customers save money by identifying issues in the deployment of AWS compute instances and their CPU, memory usage, and so on, and make cost savings by doing so.

Also possible is proactive monitoring of compute resources to ensure workload efficiency during busy periods, for example.

It also offers the ability to spot under-utilised cloud resources and to fine-tune cloud instances within the bounds of customer service-level agreement (SLAs), with constant monitoring capability.

Virtual Instruments started out monitoring big-iron SAN infrastructures with physical taps into Fibre Channel fabrics that could interrogate latency, read, write and other key storage metrics.

That functionality still exists, but it has added network-attached storage and object storage monitoring, as well as some ability to measure performance in the AWS and Microsoft Azure clouds at the level of virtual machines but not underlying hardware.

Elsewhere, it gathers metrics such as bandwidth, port utilisation and health from networks and common compute-level measures such as CPU, memory, host bus adapter (HBA) and network interface card (NIC) utilisation from servers.

It says it measures about 300 metrics in total.