Customer Success Story

Rackspace Monitors and Improves Its Private Cloud Services with AppFormix

As more customers transitioned their applications to OpenStack private clouds, Rackspace needed real-time monitoring and analytics to improve application performance and cloud scale.

The largest public managed cloud provider in the world, Rackspace has expertise across VMware, Microsoft Azure, and Amazon Web Services. It runs the largest OpenStack private cloud, and has amassed more than 1 billion server hours of operations for OpenStack clouds.

Company	Rackspace
Industry	Cloud Provider
Region	Americas

"The monitoring system we used was a canary in a coal mine, but it didn’t provide our operators with insight into the cloud—how is the cloud performing, how are services performing, proactive capacity planning, and where are the hotspots in the cloud. We had a gap in service."

Bryan Thompson Senior Director and General Manager of OpenStack Private Cloud, Rackspace

Business Challenge

Rackspace needed a tool that would provide analytics and real-time monitoring of application performance across its physical infrastructure, OpenStack, and workloads. As more customers transitioned their applications to its OpenStack cloud service, Rackspace needed to pinpoint hotspots, services not performing as expected, and affected parties.

Technology Solution

After exhaustively evaluating and testing third-party tools, Rackspace chose AppFormix for real-time monitoring and analytics to improve application performance and scale its OpenStack private clouds. With AppFormix, Rackspace created an intent-driven cloud that could visualize, analyze, and automate applications and resources. Machine learning provides deep insights into application performance and infrastructure elements.

Business Results

AppFormix enabled Rackspace to improve capacity planning by identifying underused, monopolized, and abandoned cloud resources. The tool is helping Rackspace improve its offerings and add market-differentiating private cloud monitoring services for enterprise customers. The new service will enable Rackspace customers to directly monitor their OpenStack private cloud using AppFormix.

"Our customers are trying to find the right balance between having enough capacity to deal with growth and the new things they’re trying to do, but also use their resources as effectively as possible. AppFormix gives us that ability and gives our customers good insight into how and where to strike that balance."

Bryan Thompson Senior Director and General Manager of OpenStack Private Cloud, Rackspace