Quest Software Takes on Container Management

Quest Software today launched Foglight Container Management, an analytics application that provides both real-time and historical analysis of both container environments and the host infrastructure they run on.

Adrian Moir, lead technology evangelist for Quest Software, says this latest offering extends the reach of the company’s portfolio of management applications into the realm of containers for the first time.

Foglight Container Management identifies issues such as performance bottlenecks, failed containers and problems that may arise between container orchestration platforms and the underlying infrastructure they are deployed on.

As part of that effort, Foglight Container Management makes use of remote application programming interfaces (APIs) to collect inventory, infrastructure, operating system, host, cluster, node, pod, orchestration software and hypervisor data.

Foglight Container Management also provides access to a container heat map to identify what container platforms are consuming the most infrastructure resources. IT teams can also make use of a Container Scatterplot to pivot Docker hosts, clusters and containers across any collected metric in three different dimensions.

When using it in conjunction with Foglight for Virtualization software, administrators also can capture accurate performance metrics for both virtual machines and containers to help them manage container environments alongside virtual machines running legacy applications.

Moir says that while there are other container analytics applications, they don’t capture the scope of the context provided by the Foglight Container Management application, which is capable of providing context that spans both the containers themselves and the infrastructure they are deployed on. That capability is especially critical in troubleshooting containerized applications with organizations that have embraced DevOps processes, he notes.

No matter the level of DevOps maturity, as containers become more prevalent across the enterprise it is clear IT operations teams will become even more challenged than they already are. Not only are containers going to be distributed across multiple clouds and on-premises IT environments made up of virtual machines and bare-metal servers, those containers tend to be more ephemeral in nature. Developers often rip and replace containers to add new functionality multiple times a week. Coping with that level of change will require IT teams to have access to more advanced analytics applications to understand what’s happening in real time as well as over the life of a containerized application. In fact, in the absence of tools such as Foglight Containerization Management, some organizations may tend to limit the number of containerized applications they otherwise might deploy in a production environment.

In fact, 451 research estimates the application container market will generate more than $4.3 billion in revenue in 2022. But when custom containerized applications are added to that list, the number of packaged and custom applications being deployed may far exceed expectations. So whether IT operations teams like it or not, it’s now more a question of when versus if containers will achieve critical mass in the enterprise.

Mike Vizard

Mike Vizard is a seasoned IT journalist with over 25 years of experience. He also contributed to IT Business Edge, Channel Insider, Baseline and a variety of other IT titles. Previously, Vizard was the editorial director for Ziff-Davis Enterprise as well as Editor-in-Chief for CRN and InfoWorld.

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