Uila Adds End-User Monitoring
A year after unveiling its first software release, Santa Clara, Calif.-based startup Uila Inc. on Tuesday connected the application-aware infrastructure performance monitoring dots by bringing end users into the process.
Designed for datacenters running mission-critical applications, Uila (pronounced wee-la) relies on small virtual machines on physical hosts to listen to network traffic and send metadata to a controller on-premises or in the cloud. With intelligence allowing it to auto-discover more than 4,000 applications, the company's tool aims to create a performance dashboard for the entire stack, including application response times for compute, storage and the network.
The new end-user component helps with one of the main use cases of the whole toolset -- quick troubleshooting for IT operations staff in complex environments.
"When the end user complains, you don't know where to start," said Uila CEO Chia-Chee Kuan in an interview. "This is not a new problem, it's just made worse by everything being highly virtualized, plus cloud, as well. Applications are getting a lot more complicated than before with multi-tier, and it's not only just within your datacenter. A lot of times the application pulls in data from the Internet, as well -- for example Salesforce integration for some business applications."
The new end-user experience monitoring provides proactive alerts that would ideally identify and allow IT operations teams to address performance degradation before the user notices. Per-client transaction histories help IT dig into the root causes of issues. Additionally, IP addresses can retroactively be grouped into sites, allowing IT to define, visualize and compare application performance at different locations even after a performance issue arises.
With a $5 million Series A funding round completed in mid-March, the 4-year-old company thus far has raised $8.3 million to enter a crowded field. Yet Kuan positions Uila as a key complement to existing enterprise performance management tools for datacenters, applications, virtual infrastructure and the network.
"How we're different from them is we add application visibility and bridge the virtualization and physical and networking into their tools' visibility. We don't want to replace them. You use us as a catch-all solution. We catch everything in troubleshooting, and a lot of times we show exactly the root cause," he said.
With about two dozen named customers and 10,000 production application servers under monitoring, Uila plans to use its new funding for continued product development and reseller recruitment.
Posted by Scott Bekker on April 04, 2017