Jonah Kowall
Research Director
1 year with Gartner
17 years IT industry
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.
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by Jonah Kowall | November 28, 2011 | Submit a Comment
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:
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:
Four vendors were removed since the previous NCCM MarketScope:
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 | Submit a Comment
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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by Jonah Kowall | September 23, 2011 | Submit a Comment
The day is upon us, we have released the Application Performance Monitoring Magic Quadrant a little on the late side, but due to the large number of additional vendors there was added complication involved. The discussion around this research in quite extensive before we even get into the vendor evaluation. Due to the length of time it takes to create such comprehensive research the market is often moving faster than our methodology allows for us to. One way that we combat this issue is by writing research after the publication of such a Magic Quadrant that allows us to bring up other players in a market that we often hear about and discuss who for various reasons are not allowed to be included in the research. In the case of the APM Magic Quadrant this was often due to company size, customer count, or geographic limitations. We expect to get some additional research about some of these companies out there as soon as possible.
The next set of research I am working on is related to both APM and Monitoring in general, but delivered as a service. The current shape of this research is looking like 3 distinct publications, released together. The first will be an overview of the monitoring as a service market, the second will be APM as a service, and the final will be a vendor landscape of the players in both related markets. Will Cappelli is also working on this research with me, and we are deep in the process of putting this together.
Other than these plans, much of my short term time will be taken with travel, preparation of presentations for the upcoming Gartner Data Center Conference which looks to be an excellent set of speakers, topics, and of course attendees!
I will be attending the launch of the newly standardized messaging protocol known as Advanced Message Queue Protocol (AMQP) which should be an interesting gathering of people who are concerned with the integration and standardization of messaging and middleware. Of course my personal interest is the quality and delivery of messages!
Until next time, I wish you all best of luck in delivering high performance 
Category: APM Monitoring SaaS Tags:
by Jonah Kowall | September 12, 2011 | 3 Comments
Two notes on the open source monitoring I was mentioning were published last week. The first is a overview of open source monitoring called Open-Source Monitoring: The Free Way it covers various open source technologies, hidden costs involved in open source, and options available to users looking at open source monitoring. The other note titled Open-Source Monitoring: Commercial Offerings covers ways that you can license software based on open source monitoring solutions while having more effective support, development, and viability.
I am working on SaaS monitoring solutions research, there will also be a companion note around APM SaaS. I am also working on geting the NCCM (Network configuration and change management) Marketscope out the door, along with the highly anticipated Magic Quadrant for APM (Application Performance Monitoring).
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by Jonah Kowall | August 19, 2011 | 1 Comment
This week I spent a few hours at the Splunk user conference, and many more hours speaking to customers in San Francisco. it was interesting to see people using such an open ended indexing and visualization platform to solve many business issues from operations, security, business reporting, customer facing reporting at SaaS providers, and other interesting use cases. The scale and scope of some of these projects is impressive ranging up to indexing over 20TB of log data per day.
The open nature of the platform allows for some interesting implementation and use cases, but also removes its focus towards a single particular market segment. The creativity and excitement of this user community is impressive and fascinating. One of the demos that I saw showed how splunk could be used for transaction tracing (similar to an APM use case), web analytics, advertising conversion, and realtime monitoring use cases. At Gartner alone we include them in the SIEM Magic Quadrant, as well as in an Operational Logfile Management (OLM) research. I look forward to tracking them, and working with them in the future.
Category: Uncategorized Tags:
by Jonah Kowall | August 5, 2011 | 14 Comments
Many of the clients I speak with on a regular basis want to simplify their monitoring technologies. It’s too time consuming, error prone, and complex to run much of the software deployed currently. Many of them want to outsource the management, some of them want SaaS models, and others want appliance or simple monitoring systems. Obviously you make sacrifices when you take this approach, but does it really affect downtime? Leveraging agentless monitoring is a good way to increase coverage and reduce complexity involved in agent management. In many cases, and on critical systems agents are required. This is something that is discussed in a note which was published a few days ago: How to Augment APM with conventional monitoring
Customer demand is changing a lot of portfolios inside companies, and vendors are responding. I am seeing smaller vendors go up against large incumbent solutions in a more regular manner. I believe this trend will continue, and one of my upcoming research notes on SaaS monitoring solutions will provide a good overview of the options if you want to have control, but simplify the technology and implementation.
Alongside this trend there is a strengthening interest in open source monitoring tools, saving cost, and simplifying management of the tools. The ease of open source is somewhat of a misnomer, which is why I am close to publishing 2 notes on open source and commercial open source options.
Category: ECA IT Operations Tags:
by Jonah Kowall | July 19, 2011 | Submit a Comment
It’s that time of year that we update many of the Hype Cycles that Gartner releases on a yearly basis, I wanted to point out some of the interesting updates to the ones I participate in that were published in the last week.
The Hype Cycle for Real-Time Infrastructure was published last week and includes some new technologies which allow for dynamic cloud infrastructures to be built and managed. These added technologies allow for hybrid cloud creation, management, and enhancements around networking. There have also been some renaming of technologies based on the way they are currently being applied to create and manage these infrastructures.
Slightly closer to home we have also recently released the Hype Cycle for IT Operations Management which has some changes for 2011 as well. Some additions are around power management, APM (which is a consolidation of several disparate technologies in prior years), financial management, social media, and process frameworks. We have changed technology names regarding ITIL, Behavior Learning Engines, and IT Process Automation.
Thanks to Donna Scott on coordinating the Real-Time Infrastructure publication and Milind Govekar and Patricia Adams on the IT Operations Management publication. The process of creating and publishing these documents involves a lot of work from the entire team, good job to you all.
Category: Hype Cycle Tags:
by Jonah Kowall | July 6, 2011 | 2 Comments
There are ongoing discussions around how we can leverage log data collected for one process or analysis across many tools which want to consume and analyze this data. The log data could come from network devices, servers, applications, or other controllers used in the datacenter. These log sources need to be parsed, analyzed, correlated, and reported upon by multiple tools. Often having a simple way to ingest and share this data between IT Operations, Security Operations, Development, Application Support, and Quality Assurance provides a big productivity boost during troubleshooting, testing, and understanding the overall application health.
Myself and Mark Nicolett have recently published a note on the differences and similarities between the use cases for traditional operations and security operations : http://www.gartner.com/resId=1737914
The APM toolkit for RFP has also been published, which is useful for those investigating APM solutions or those who are beginning a RFP process : http://www.gartner.com/resId=1729222
