Arkin IT Monitoring Tool Understands Plain English

Fresh off raising another $15 million in funding, Arkin this week announced general availability of a tool that enables IT administrators to launch queries in English to discover what components are actually running inside their data center.

Deployable on-premise or invoked as a Software-as-a-Service application, the company’s head of marketing Mahesh Kumar explains, the Arkin Visibility Platform makes use of a Google-style search engine to make possible to discover all the virtual and physical infrastructure elements of a data center.

As an IT monitoring tool, it enables IT administrators to more easily collaborate across increasingly complex software-defined data center environments.

Rather than requiring a specialist to monitor IT environments, the tool is designed to make it possible for the average IT administrator to comprehend IT environments that get more complex with each passing day.

“IT operations have not been able to keep pace with modern IT environments,” says Kumar. “Our approach lets IT administrators create dashboards on the fly.”

That capability, says Kumar, is provided by an analytics engine embedded within the Arkin Visibility Platform. Admins can launch multiple types of queries once the overall environment is indexed.

Unlike legacy IT monitoring tools, the founders of the company had the luxury of designing a tool from the ground up to be more accessible to the average IT operations manager.

The visibility provided by the Arkin IT monitoring tools plays into a debate over the level of sophistication required to manage a modern data center environment. As data centers become more instrumented than ever IT, administrators have more access to machine data than ever before.

If the process of correlating all that data can be simplified to the point where the average admin can discover the root cause of an issue than, in theory, IT organizations should need fewer server, storage, and networking specialists.

The one thing that is clear is that most IT organizations can’t afford to keep throwing labor at IT environments that become more complex to manage as they increasingly scale. As such, there’s no doubt that many of the processes will need to become increasingly automated.

The only challenge, of course, is that IT organizations can’t automate what they don’t actually see or know about in the first place.