AppFormix Unveils Continuous Infrastructure Monitoring Software

Looking to help IT organizations get ahead of what will almost certainly be large amounts of Docker container sprawl, AppFormix has emerged from stealth with namesake IT infrastructure monitoring software that keeps track of both virtual machines and Docker containers.

Fresh off of raising $7 million in additional funding, AppFormix CEO Sumeet Singh says the company’s tool is designed to continuously monitor how any piece of IT infrastructure is specifically being used on premise and in the cloud

“IT organizations are going to need granular, real-time control of their data centers,” says Singh. “They need to see, for example, what kind of I/O access a specific virtual machine is getting.”

While developers have flocked to Docker containers as a simpler alternative to provision applications, IT operations teams will soon be confronted with Docker containers running on both physical and virtual servers. In the instance of a physical server there may be as many as 100 Docker containers running in a physical server, which today compares to maybe 20 to 25 virtual servers. Managing all those Docker containers from an IT operations perspective is likely to be a major challenge for most IT organizations.

Of course, at present most IT organizations are running Docker containers on top of virtual machines or in Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) environments because of both security concerns and the simple fact they don’t have any tools to manage them.

Compatible with OpenStack, Kubernetes and Mesos management frameworks for orchestrating virtual machines and containers, Singh says AppFormix makes use of REST application programming interfaces (APIs) to provide the visibility into next generation data center environments that IT organizations are going to need to adjust to constantly changing application requirements. The end result, says Singh, will be data center environments where IT contention issues will be more problematic than ever.

With or without the permission of IT operations teams, developers are voting with their feet in large number to embrace Docker containers. However, none of that means that the huge numbers of applications currently running on virtual machines is going to go away anytime soon.

IT organizations will obviously need to be able to respond to this changing application landscape by either embracing new tools or waiting for the existing tools they have to be upgraded to support containers running on both virtual and physical servers.

Currently in beta, Singh says the AppFormix tool itself is scheduled to be available in the third quarter.