There is no shortage of vendors promising to centralize the work of IT professionals in a “single pane of glass”, but reality rarely lives up to the hype, especially when it comes to data center monitoring software. Organizations have to use a multitude of different tools in order to keep track of their virtualized infrastructure that a startup called Uila Inc. now hopes to replace.

Its namesake monitoring platform hit general availability today after a limited trial run that attracted several customers including GDS Services Ltd, the Chinese cloud provider that hosts Alibaba and Baidu. Deploying Uila involves installing a lightweight monitoring agent on every host in the target data center that runs as a virtual machine no different than the workloads it’s monitoring. The instance plugs into the virtual switch supporting the machine to check how fast the other tenants respond to requests and measure the amount of bandwidth consumed in the process.

The information is transmitted to a central repository based on Hadoop that customers can either deploy behind the firewall or in the cloud. After ingestion, the performance of each workload is mapped out to operational information from the underlying hardware in order to produce what Uila describes as a complete view of infrastructure usage. The results are then displayed in a visual dashboard designed to help quickly identify when something goes wrong in a data center. The platform places a particular emphasis on complex problems on that affect multiple layers of the technology stack.

In a theoretical scenario where a database suddenly stops serving queries, Uila could automatically determine whether the problem lies with the server on it’s running, the corporate network or simply poor configuration. The software is thereby able to spare administrators the hassle of manually connecting the dots among the error alerts generated in the wake of such an outage, a chore that is not only tedious but time-consuming as well. The resulting productivity boost can help greatly speed the troubleshooting process, which ultimately enables end-users to resume their work faster.

Image via Geralt