Fortune 500 companies trust Pepperdata to maximize the power of their big data stacks, generate value by improving the performance of their business applications, and drive business growth by optimizing their cloud spend.
However, the simplicity of the tool often hides the complexity of managing your big data application performance. Week in, week out, we are inundated with questions about what Pepperdata does, and how the product can help companies.
Gathered here are the six most common questions we receive, together with some concise but complete answers.
1. What is Pepperdata? What does your product do, and how can it help me?
Pepperdata is a big data performance management suite that automatically optimizes system resources based on infrastructure metrics gathered and analyzed in real-time. The suite gives organizations a comprehensive picture of their big data stacks (both on-premises or in the cloud), processes, nodes, and jobs, resulting in a correlated understanding of their workloads and infrastructure. This provides enterprises with complete, superior visibility and insight into their big data stack, allowing them to manage performance and run more applications while keeping their big data and cloud costs at a minimum.
2. What is observability, and how does Pepperdata provide it?
Observability is the ability to automatically derive actionable insights from performance metrics, logs, and event data. Observability allows DevOps and IT teams to collect real-time data from different sources within their big data infrastructure. This data includes performance monitoring metrics and logs, and it helps teams build a complete, detailed view of their big data stacks and IT environments when an error or system issue occurs. More importantly, observability determines the “why” of an error or issue. With observability, incidents are drastically shortened, reducing their impact on the overall IT infrastructure.
With Pepperdata, IT teams and DevOps can achieve observability through continuous and automated monitoring and intelligent dynamic reliability analysis of logs, metrics, and traces. This leads to the optimal performance of big data stacks and IT infrastructures, whether on premises or in the cloud, as Pepperdata delivers the real-time visibility that is crucial for troubleshooting, debugging, planning, and automated optimization.
3. I already use Autoscaling from my cloud provider. What does Pepperdata offer that they don’t?
The problem with autoscaling using your vendor’s default cloud configurations is that resources may be overprovisioned, resulting in underutilized resources and a big waste of money. That’s where our managed autoscaling comes in.
The Pepperdata Managed Autoscaling feature addresses this problem, By utilizing artificial intelligence and machine learning, Pepperdata gathers information from all of your applications and analyzes the real-time resource usage metrics. The solution then finds the most optimal scaling configurations and implements them automatically. The result? Optimized utilization of memory, CPU, and I/O resources on big data clusters while reducing wasted resources.
4. My cloud bills are much bigger than I anticipated; can you help me lower them?
Many enterprises that have shifted to the cloud have found themselves stunned upon receiving their cloud bill. More than 80% of organizations spend more than their allocated cloud budget, despite the cloud’s promise of reduced operational costs.
The problem stems directly from the fact that IT operations and DevOps teams lack visibility into their cloud stack. Without full-stack visibility, enterprises struggle with cloud spend optimization. In the OpEx model of the cloud, spend can rapidly spiral out of control. This is why optimization tools are so crucial: Without them, it is very hard to optimize application performance, meet SLAs, discover inefficiencies in your infrastructure, and reduce mean time to repair (MTTR).
Powered by machine learning and AI, the Pepperdata Spotlight products deliver full, real-time visibility into organizations’ cloud and on-premises infrastructure—hardware and applications included. The Spotlight solutions are coupled with active resource management provided by Pepperdata Capacity Optimizer which automatically recaptures wasted capacity from existing resources and adds tasks to those servers. Managed autoscaling ensures every node is completely utilized prior to adding more nodes. Thus, waste is eliminated and cloud spend optimization is attained. No more sticker shock.
5. Is Pepperdata an APM company?
Yes and no. Part of what we do is a form of APM. We monitor, and monitoring answers the “when” of big data analytics. Monitoring collects metrics and logs that provide information on whether the system is working, and it lets you know when something went wrong.
However, central to Pepperdata is the power of observability. Observability gives the “why.” Observability is not a feature of traditional APM. However, the dynamic reliability analysis of logs, metrics, and traces, coupled with continuous monitoring, drastically shortens the duration and reduces the impact of incidents.
The Pepperdata platform also offers automated optimization, meaning that optimal configurations are instantly discovered and applied, and the right amount of resources are allocated and deployed when needed at the infrastructure level.
In short, Pepperdata provides APM, and then a lot more on top.
6. Can I try the product and see how much it will save me before I buy? How difficult is the install technically?
Yes. We offer a free trial so users can experience firsthand how Pepperdata can impact their bills. The install is straightforward, and all demos include a dedicated support agent to walk you through the process.
Got more questions? Download our Pepperdata Product Guide for more information.