Why we started building Tuuring
- General
Every company has a history with how things started and what it has become. I am going to explain what started this journey we are on with our team and our customers.
Expanding insights into digital performance
Over the years I have spent a lot of time as an IT-consultant and enterprise architect, designing infrastructures such as enterprise networks and datacenters. While designing these environments managing an acceptable price versus performance ratio has always been on my mind. In the past few years, my time has been solely spent on actual performance consultancy, supporting organizations with resolving performance issues or managing performance through digital transitions. These projects mainly involved datacenter infrastructures, cloud platforms and digital workspace solutions such as physical endpoints and virtual desktops. What became apparent over time is that we still have a major disconnect between everything more infrastructure-related and the applications we consume with it. This disconnect includes the performance impact each part of an enterprise workload has on other parts of the chain.
Practical disconnect example
To clarify what this means I will give a real example. One of my assignments was to help a healthcare company to analyze performance issues with a hosted application that was accessed by their virtual desktops. At random intervals, the application would respond very slowly to certain users but would remain normal to other users. After extensive analysis of all infrastructure, parts involved the key outcome was that we ruled out everything infrastructure related, so it must be the application itself. Obviously, this wasn’t a very satisfying answer but because we lacked insights into the application and its software components it was all we could do. Cases like this led me to believe there had to be a way that would help solve other cases.
Building bridges
Frequently we spoke to others who faced similar issues. Sometimes this was the other way around as they were facing software-related performance issues that were most likely caused by faulty infrastructure but which was very hard to prove. We started designing a solution that would bring together core performance information from various parts of the stack such as cloud platform, hypervisor, operating system, databases, web servers and application monitors. This would enable us to better understand the performance impact across the various knowledge domains and existing silo’s within IT organizations. We would call this building bridges between the isles of infrastructure and applications.
Holistic approach
We understood from the start that we needed a platform that would be powerful enough to collect both structured and unstructured data and deliver versatile searching capabilities through large amounts of data. We also started to document the data we needed to collect from various sources and what they meant for individual performance specialists as subject matter experts for their part of the chain. This led to a holistic approach to how we can determine and understand the performance of complete workloads, from the lowest levels of infrastructure all the way up to the most functional levels of an application. With defining these datasets and adding artificial intelligence-based analyses to them we started adding our own knowledge for use cases we ran into, creating integrated performance views and a repository of root causes for issues we encountered.
Expanding the platform
Through time we have extended a lot of functionality of the platform by developing data connectors for all types of sources and adding our knowledge into the platform analyses. Besides the data platform, we have also created a multi-tenant interface to visualize our data and present it to both technical and non-technical members of organizations. We are constantly looking to improve what we do and how we do it while working with our valued customers to improve the performance of the workloads they manage with our solution.
Interested to know more?
If the case described in this blog sounds familiar and if you experience similar performance-related issues don’t hesitate to contact us. Please read here about the capabilities of our platform and how it can benefit your organization by leveraging existing performance data into actionable insights.