Continuous Optimization for Containerized Environments

1. Data Extraction

Densify collects workload metrics from containerized environments natively through Prometheus. Other monitoring technologies can also be leveraged as a primary or supplementary source of metrics.

Densify’s plugin architecture supports many different monitoring tools out of the box, and can easily expand to support other external sources.

2. Resource Optimization Analysis

Densify will analyze the collected workload metrics and configuration metadata against your configured business and technical constraints and policies to generate a set of recommendations to optimize the analyzed containers.

3. Parameter Repository Synchronization

Densify is pre-integrated with various parameter repositories to help facilitate and simplify DevOps integration. Parameter repositories, as defined by best practices, should be leveraged as a mechanism to store transient variables used in technologies that support declarative input, such as infrastructure as code, configuration management, and others.

Parameters are created and updated in the following scenarios when new insights are generated by Densify. Insights are delivered to your parameter repository of choice:

• AWS Parameter Store
• Azure Key Vault
• Amazon DynamoDB
• and more

4. ITSM Collaboration

Densify will interact with application stakeholders like Engineering and line of business operators through ITSM solutions such as ServiceNow, Jira Service Desk, and other similar tools.

Your change management construct is opened to manage the acquisition of the proper execution approvals. Work order management is processed through the same ITSM solution, or AWS Systems Manager OpsCenter. Densify’s solution integrates through the native APIs available within your preferred ITSM platform.

Alarms and notifications are delivered to application stakeholders through collaboration services like Slack and Microsoft Teams. Users can activate this service by registering their applications.

5. Maintenance

Maintenance windows are scheduled by Operations as part of the work order. These windows can be programmed to automatically execute the necessary steps, or can be used to manage the manual execution of the work.

6. Infrastructure Deployment

The infrastructure as code technology being used to manage this phase of the DevOps pipeline typically has native capability to pull recommendations from popular parameter repos such as AWS Parameter Store and Azure Key Vault. Densify provides a plugin for these deployment technologies to simplify the integration process. Once installed, your infrastructure as code technology will issue lookup commands to the plugin, which will interact with your parameter repo to extract the needed insights.

7. Reporting

Standard, interactive, web-based dashboards are made available directly through Densify. These dashboards provide various views of optimization details and billing analysis. All your derived, analyzed, and raw data is synchronized from Densify to an offline reporting database in near real time. From this reporting database, two services are offered:

1. An optional reporting as a service (RaaS) offering for custom reporting and dashboard requirements
2. Third party business intelligence (BI) tools such as Tableau and Jaspersoft can be integrated to help support your in-house reporting and data science teams

8. Notifications

Notifications can be delivered by Densify through a multitude of popular services and channels, including Slack, Microsoft Teams, email, and text message on the occurrence of events including:

• New insight availability
• Approval progress
• Maintenance window activity