Tech Field Day 13 Preview: Uila

As part two of my Tech Field Day preview I wanted to spotlight Uila, Inc (pronounced wee-lah). Uila Inc released Uila, a root cause analysis and network monitoring solution. Their solution was announced in February 2016 as a way to address a black hole in data center management tools.

As virtualization has grown in prevalence and importance a new challenge has surfaced. When a virtualized application performs poorly there is no longer one tool to narrow it down. When the application stack operated in a silo the network tool, infrastructure tool, and storage tool could reasonably narrow down a root cause. Now that there is a virtualization engineer role the silos start to break away. The visualization of any one tool starts to develop a lack of visibility, aka a “black hole”.

Ulia is a solution that tries to fill in the network visibility hole. It analyzes the virtual network down to the packet level in real time, identifies traffic down to the application layer, and identifies latency in the virtual network. It visualizes what’s going on and tracks down Root Cause. Uila’s major differentiator is their visualization into the applications themselves. It creates a real time application map and helps analyze performance problems between those applications. I haven’t ever seen another product with that capability so I am excited to dig into it and peek under the hood.

I think that Uila is a very strong tool that could have a place in organizations in many sizes and industry. I look forward to talking with their engineers and learning more details about the product. I have a strong background with vRealize Operations so I can’t wait to see what this solution can add to the virtualization monitoring toolkit. To learn more you can visit their website at www.uila.com