Microsoft launches Operations Management Suite to deal with infrastructure across clouds

Microsoft today announced at its Ignite enterprise-oriented conference Operations Management Suite, a new piece of cloud-based software for keeping track of server infrastructure across multiple clouds and in companies’ on-premises data centers.

Operations Management Suite includes log analytics, automation for operations, replication, and even security monitoring.

“The suite enables the management of any instance in any cloud,” Mike Schutz, general manager of product marketing at Microsoft’s Server and Tools division, told VentureBeat in an interview.

It’s just the right sort of product for Microsoft — with its respectable footprint in enterprise data centers and its increasingly prominent public cloud — to provide.

Other major cloud providers, like Amazon Web Services and Google, have been just starting to take steps in their hybrid cloud strategies, while Microsoft is going from the data center outward. VMware, another trusted vendor of enterprise software for managing infrastructure in data centers, has its own cloud, but it’s not nearly as formidable as that of Microsoft, to say nothing of Amazon Web Services.

The product becomes generally available today. Until now the Operational Insights component for log analytics has been in preview, Schutz said. The service comes with a rich business-intelligence dashboard interface, Schutz said, and it allows users to drill down to specific incidents, across Windows or Linux server instances.

Support for replication of VMware-based virtual machines through the Azure Site Recovery cloud service is available in preview as part of the new Operations Management Suite, too.

Other companies have issued tools for managing infrastructure in various clouds — which makes sense if you’re not the leader of the cloud market. Dell and HP come to mind. But Microsoft’s approach does stand out.

“I think from a broad-based standpoint, we feel that in customers’ journey to the cloud, hybrid is really what makes our approach unique, and so all the investments we’re making are to make our customers data centers and the servers that they run be the edge of our cloud,” Schutz said. “It blurs the line between private cloud and public cloud.”

Read Microsoft’s blog post on the news to learn more about Operations Management Suite.