Jonah Kowall
Research Director
1 year with Gartner
17 years IT industry
Jonah Kowall is a Gartner research director in the IT Operations area. He focuses on application performance management, runbook automation, event correlation and management, and monitoring systems, as well as security aspects. Read Full Bio
by Jonah Kowall | February 16, 2012 | Submit a Comment
One of my main goals for research in 2012 is to help round out some of the areas in monitoring which don’t get enough published research or attention here at Gartner. I will be focusing on some vnedor landscapes which will allow us to publish some more actionable advice to those clients looking to invest in various monitoring technologies. This last note was published regarding the pervasive issue that many enterprises which have larger infrastructures have event overload issues. The way that some of these issues are being combated are with more advanced analytic techniques to help deal with this massive stream of alarm and event data. This note touches on the progression of ECA from it’s initial days, as it matured, and now how we solve the larger more complex problems when it comes to event management.
Subscribers can read the summary or research : How Enterprises Can Avoid Event Management Overload http://www.gartner.com/resId=1924914
Category: ECA IT Operations Monitoring Tags:
by Jonah Kowall | January 27, 2012 | Comments Off
Last week I published a note with my colleague Tomas Murphy who covers the Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) technologies, the note was about the intersection of Application Performance Monitoring(APM) and ALM. Although most of the APM buyers and end users I speak with come from an IT Operations or even an application support type role, I do speak to development organizations and quality assurance departments looking at these tools. When it comes to these organizational areas and even somewhat with application support the fit between the application lifecycle and proper measurement of performance before and after the release process is critical. This note talks about this intersection and why its critical, especially as we move towards agile processes and the implementation of DevOps within the release and support processes.
Have a look at the research:
Leverage Your Application Performance Monitoring Through the Application Life Cycle
Upcoming research will include how to dig out of event overload (ECA), as well as a vendor landscape for Network Performance Monitoring (NPM) and traffic aggregation vendors.
Category: APM DevOps IT Operations Monitoring Tags:
by Jonah Kowall | January 12, 2012 | 2 Comments
As many IT organizations go through the adventure of Application Performance Monitoring (APM), they have to start small and think big. There is immense value in understanding the end-user experience (EUM) of your users as they access applications. What was once done with simple synthetic or robotic monitoring has graduated to understand the user fully, not just from a network perspective, but also from a device or access point perspective. I have published a research note titled “End-User Experience Monitoring in APM: Past, Present and Future” which discusses this critical dimension of APM. There is discussion of where we came from, and where we are headed. There are some technical aspects of browser monitoring which are discussed including emerging standards. Most IT organizations are still implementing EUM, and many that have had EUM tools have started to think and implement tools to cover some of the other dimensions of APM.
Happy belated new year, and I wish you all a fantastic 2012.
Feel free to follow me on Twitter : @jkowall
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by Jonah Kowall | December 23, 2011 | 2 Comments
Before I sign off for a few days of vacation Will Cappelli and I did manage to get an interesting research note published, which we have been working on for the last month or longer. This note outlines several vendors or “innovators” which were not in the APM Magic Quadrant this year for not meeting specific criteria elements when the survey was sent. Some of these vendors would be included if we were gathering the research now, and had the same criteria. For the APM MQ for 2012, the criteria and the market have shifted, so it’s hard to say which vendors would be included for next year.
This note covers several vendors and explains the approach, strengths, and cautions for each vendor. It is a short but interesting read, and some of the approaches these vendors are taking are unique, and don’t fit into the Gartner APM model. Some of these approaches may be a great fit for you particular needs. This is why you are always best off speaking to a Gartner analyst who can take the knowledge and apply it to your particular situation and requirements.
The following vendors are covered in this research : Splunk, Netuitive, New Relic, BlueStripe, AppDynamics, ITRS Group, and ExtraHop Networks.
Once again you can find this research here :
APM Innovators: Driving APM Technology and Delivery Evolution – http://www.gartner.com/resId=1882117
Happy holidays and a happy new year to you all.
Category: APM Analytics Big Data IT Operations Logfile Monitoring OLM SaaS Tags:
by Jonah Kowall | December 13, 2011 | Comments Off
Will Cappelli and I have published a series of notes which should be of interest to anyone buying monitoring technologies. We are all keeping an eye on the major uptick we are seeing in those that are interested in various monitoring technologies which are hosted externally. We call these solutions Monitoring as a service (MaaS), and specifically Application Performance Monitoring as a service (APMaaS). The reason for this shift is that people are generally sick of the complex maintenance and management of their monitoring technologies. They would like to get something new, but also want something easier to implement, manage, and finally replace with the next new thing. There are some IT organizations which keep software for a very long time, and others who need the latest and greatest to help them solve problems as quickly as possible.
We have done a 3 part series which was published yesterday, here is an outline of the note and how they gel together:
Follow These Guidelines When Choosing SaaS Monitoring Technology - http://www.gartner.com/resId=1873021
This note explains what to look out for in the design, functionality, reasons, and gives a great set of 10 guidelines to look out for when selecting MaaS technologies.
If you are looking at APMaaS Will has put together a great overview of those technologies and the shifts we are seeing in the market. These include much more advanced features than were recently “the norm” of APM offerings in the cloud. You can read more on that note below.
Prepare for the Changing World of APM as a Service – http://www.gartner.com/resId=1872720
Finally clients come to Gartner to get advise on who I should be looking at? Who may best fit my size, maturity, and requirements for a solution. We provide the best actionable research possible for our clients, but at the same time the research is not customized to a single constituent. We have provided a landscape of the vendors we see the most in the market, both in terms of Gartner client inquiry as well as those companies who are pushing the envelope on what you can do and deliver as a service. Kudos to those who have made this list of 21 vendors.
Vendor Landscape for Application Performance Monitoring and Monitoring as a Service – http://www.gartner.com/resId=1873022
I am hoping to update this document yearly based on what we see in the market. The current breakdown of this note is as follows based on the technologies the vendor fills:
- Infrastructure monitoring — These solutions encompass one or more components of a modern infrastructure. The components may be physical or virtual in nature. They include multiple of the following technologies:
- Network
- Systems
- Storage
- Data center environmental and physical security systems
- Log file monitoring
- Multidimensional APM — These complex APM solutions allow for the monitoring of multiple defined dimensions for APM (see “Magic Quadrant for Application Performance Monitoring”).
- Web-focused APM — This enables the ability to look at a single dimension of the APM model.
Looking forward to hearing your feedback, this research was a lot of work 
Category: APM IT Operations Logfile Monitoring SaaS Tags:
by Jonah Kowall | December 11, 2011 | 1 Comment
This was my first data center show, and it was very busy compared to IOM, for those of you who haven’t attended a Gartner conference here is a rundown.
You have a lot of sessions based on tracks, a show floor with over 100 vendors, and the opportunities to have a face to face discussions with analysts. The analyst’s time is booked in 30 minute slots, similar to a phone inquiry at Gartner. You can book them in advance or do it at the show, the popular analysts sell out quite quickly. I was sold out on day 1 in the early afternoon.
As an analyst I cover a lot of vendors who were attending or had a presence, many of them book these slots. I had about a 60% end user to 40% vendor mix. Going through my calendar (since its hard to recall the numbers) I had over 45 of these meetings, led a roundtable, 3 presentations, and of course breakfast, lunch, dinner, and post dinner meetings most of the days. You can imagine after 4 days of 16-20 hour days we are wiped out.
In my presentations there was a lot of heavy APM content, and most of the audience polling that occurred showed a heavy interest in APM. I was surprised in my discussions how many people wanted to talk about component monitoring, which seemed like a higher percentage than I am used to normally.
Many people were interested in “good enough” and open source technologies. This goes back to people using very old technologies, but having limited budgets to get some good component monitoring in place. The biggest hurdle here for people to understand is that there are limited options when it comes to understanding topology and being able to do real event management. This came up very often, and I hope that it was helpful to go through a strategic discussion with the clients. The monitoring strategy and architecture is critical to building an effective long term monitoring tool set and avoiding wasting time or funding.
Special thanks to those who attended, but an extra thank you to the vendors, the many I spoke to were all very impressed with the quality and caliber of attendees. Two vendors I work with who attended, but did not have a show floor presence made it clear that they needed to change that for 2012. There are a lot of people who make these events possible, and a special thank you to those who help coordinate our hectic meeting schedules, and keep things running smoothly, you are the unsung heros for us analysts!
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by Jonah Kowall | December 10, 2011 | 2 Comments
I am alive at home after a great show, and my first presentations as a Gartner analyst. I will be posting more in depth this weekend on the conference, vibe, and some interesting discussions I had while at the conference.
Category: Uncategorized Tags:
by Jonah Kowall | November 28, 2011 | Comments Off
I have co-authored two notes with my colleague Cameron Haight who focuses on DevOps and general cloud operations topics at Gartner. We have authored two notes around DevOps and Monitoring, the first note being mostly Cameron’s ideas and execution is named DevOps and Monitoring: New Rules for New Environments which covers the differences in how and what we monitor in dynamic organizations practicing DevOps. The research touches on the storage and analysis of that collected data, as well as 10 rules of dealing with these new environments. Many of these rules make a lot of sense for those organization, and are core to effectively monitoring these capabilities. As a companion note we published guidelines around the best practices for tools and components which need special monitoring technologies applied to them. DevOps and Monitoring: New Tools for New Environments covers commercial and open source tools used to monitor these components. There is focus paid to languages typically used, which are not common in enterprise application portfolios as well as the componentry that makes up a typical Big Data system.
Looking to get research out this week on the SaaS market, as well as the APM innovators note. These have been held up due to the number of vendors in these research items and our ongoing work to ensure factual accuracy when we are reviewing a vendor’s offering.
I look forward to seeing many of you at the Gartner Data Center conference in Las Vegas next week. The London Data Center conference kicked off today with record attendance!
Category: Big Data DevOps IT Operations Logfile Monitoring SaaS Tags:
by Jonah Kowall | November 1, 2011 | 2 Comments
Late last night the NCCM Marketscope was published. This research is something Deb Curtis and I have been working on over the last few months. In case you need a little background, ideally these products facilitate these essential functions:
- Discover, backup and restore network device configurations
- Provision new network devices
- Distribute software updates
- Make configuration changes
- Detect and alert on changes
- Perform a differential audit between configuration versions
- Establish and enforce compliance with network device configuration policies
- Provide role-based access to network devices and configuration functions
- Report on all aspects of network device configuration and change management
Some of the vendors support more complex languages, syntax checking, device modeling, and also multi-vendor support. Over the last several years consolidation has occurred, and we have had some new entrants into the market. Here is a summary of the changes in this market since the last publication in 2010:
Four vendors were added since the previous NCCM MarketScope:
- CA Technologies entered the market through an OEM relationship with Infoblox.
- Ipswitch released its WhatsConfigured product after the required ship date of the previous MarketScope.
- NetBrain Technologies has emerged as a new alternative in the market.
- Quest Software entered the market through its acquisition of the network management company PacketTrap.
Four vendors were removed since the previous NCCM MarketScope:
- LogLogic’s Security Change Manager product, originally from the SolSoft acquisition, is no longer generally available.
- Netcordia’s acquisition by Infoblox resulted in a change of focus toward RTI automation and away from a pure NCCM positioning. Infoblox has established an alternate route to market for Netcordia’s NCCM product through a commercial relationship with CA Technologies, which has been added to this MarketScope.
- Pari Networks was acquired by Cisco, which already appears in this MarketScope.
- Uplogix offers a number of NCCM capabilities; however, its focus is to augment centralized management products (including NCCM) with what it calls “Local Management” via direct device access through the console port.
From personal implementations, these products can make major change in the way the network is managed and controlled, especially when you are dealing with networks consisting of large numbers of devices. Keeping consistency is always a struggle, and these products can make that job significantly easier than trying to do so manually.
The link to this newly public research is here : http://www.gartner.com/resId=1836014
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by Jonah Kowall | October 25, 2011 | Comments Off
A couple weeks aback I attended the AMQP launch in NYC. Was nice to have so many participants from financial services, technology firms, research companies, and other types of businesses who rely on message based middleware. I was only able to spend a few hours at the conference but it was interesting see how important middleware is for so many technologies and infrastructures. Standardizing the way that this communication occurs is critical to being able to monitor these messages effectively, which is what I am most interested in. I learned quite a bit about non-traditional uses for message queue platforms in everything from mobile phones, orchestration platforms, and the key technology enabling cloud computing component interoperability. Glad I was able to be present at the event.
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