Platform9 Private Cloud Director Proactive Operations

This Platform9 presentation at Cloud Field Day 21 focuses on their approach to proactive operations and support, particularly in the context of day-two operations after a cloud migration. Chris Jones emphasized how Platform9 flips the traditional support model by proactively monitoring customer environments 24/7 and reaching out to them when issues arise, rather than waiting for customers to submit support tickets. This proactive approach accounts for a significant portion of their support load, with 65% of tickets being generated by Platform9’s monitoring systems. The company uses a centralized management plane, which integrates with various enterprise monitoring tools like Datadog, Splunk, and Grafana, allowing customers to maintain their existing observability stacks while benefiting from Platform9’s oversight.

The discussion also touched on the challenges of self-hosted environments, where customers may not have the same level of integration with Platform9’s management plane. In these cases, Platform9 provides templates and guidance for integrating with third-party monitoring tools, but customers are responsible for configuring their own log aggregation and monitoring systems. The team acknowledged that while they could offer more operational tools as a service, their current focus is on core virtualization and Kubernetes management, leaving observability to specialized vendors like Datadog. The conversation highlighted the importance of meeting enterprise customers where they are, especially those transitioning from VMware environments, which often come with pre-packaged monitoring solutions like vRealize Operations.

Finally, the presentation covered Platform9’s upgrade strategy and migration capabilities. The company offers a structured upgrade process with one major release and three minor releases per year, allowing customers to schedule upgrades at their convenience. They also provide a “Canary Environment” for testing upgrades before applying them to production. The session concluded with a demonstration of a successful live migration from VMware to Platform9’s environment using their open-source tool, VJLBric, which converts VMware VMDK disks to a raw format for more efficient operation. The tool currently supports VMware as the source and OpenStack as the destination, with potential for future expansion based on customer needs.