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Operational intelligence can positively impact every part of a business, even in complex cloud computing environments. To gain such an advantage, companies must first unlock the value of virtualization layer data by putting it in the context of machine data from all layers of the infrastructure such as host operating systems, applications, and the underlying server, storage, and network devices.

CloudShare, a provider of pre-production cloud for dev and test, demos and proof of concepts, uses Splunk software across their entire infrastructure for monitoring, troubleshooting, and solving customer service issues, as well as for operational intelligence about their business - understanding capacity usage per customer, conversion funnels, and more.

As an early beta tester of the Splunk App for VMware, CloudShare has adopted the application company-wide to help gain deep insight into the thousands of virtual machines supported by the company's infrastructure. The Splunk App for VMware provides CloudShare added visibility into the detailed performance of its virtual infrastructure, helping it track stressed virtual machines and hosts to better balance capacity.

"We think of Splunk as our eyes and ears," said Elad Gotfrid, director of IT at CloudShare. "Splunk software enables us to understand and oversee every aspect of our operations. The key asset we achieve from Splunk software is the ability to correlate business data with performance metrics. Compiling data about our customers and understanding which resources are being utilized allows us to understand and plan our capacity based on clear trends we identify."

"Monitoring the dynamic nature of virtualization with tools designed for single-technology silos creates a significant challenge for administrators," said Dave Bartoletti, senior analyst, Forrester Research. "There is a growing need for solutions that provide cross-tier visibility to effectively troubleshoot, monitor and analyze data across silos and deliver real-time business insights and operational intelligence."

"Most management tools leave datacenter administrators in the blind when it comes to virtualization because of their focus on single-technology silos," said Dennis Drogseth, vice president of research of Enterprise Management Associates, who believes that a solution with breadth and versatility combined with big data analytics capabilities can provide role aware support for virtualization as it impacts both infrastructure performance and resiliency, and IT service delivery.

"Virtualization and the list of current vendor-specific tools can leave datacenter administrators blindsided with their focus on single technology silos," said Rachel Chalmers, vice president of research, 451 Research Group. "Splunk for VMware is a big data, cross-tier approach to tackling the visibility challenges introduced by virtualization."

CloudShare uses the Splunk App for VMware to collect performance statistics, logs and events from the virtualization layer and correlate the information with network, storage, OS and application events. This enables CloudShare to contextualize infrastructure data and track business metrics such as usage and resource costs per trial and business user.

Dashboards created in Splunk and linked to operational data from physical and virtual sources help guide the whole organization from network operations and customer support to marketing, sales, and R&D. Additionally, CloudShare uses network device and firewall information gathered with Splunk software to create attack signatures that trigger automatic blocks or trigger alerts to network operations that are then further investigated.

Splunk and CloudShare shared best practices on managing and monitoring the latter's dynamic SaaS environment and discussed how Splunk App for VMware offers deep insight into CloudShare's infrastructure performance, customer trends, and business metrics at VMworld2012.