Maestro is Watching: Infrastructure Insights

Having the detailed information about virtual infrastructure "as is" is not enough for effective infrastructure management, financial governance, security assessment, and remediation.

In fact, a team can use the raw data, but if it comes to large cross-cloud infrastructures, processing it would take lots of time and effort.

This is where automated and ML-empowered analytics comes to the stage. Maestro incorporates an effective approach that lets the user benefit from the analytics and recommendation mechanisms offered by the public cloud providers themselves, as well as from Maestro own tools.

The outcome of the analysis are recommendations that can be used to improve virtual infrastructures in different dimensions. 

The user can take not a resource-, but a recommendation-oriented view on the infrastructure, with different types of recommendations being addressed to the users with different roles and goals. 

For example, security insights are addressed to security experts,  performance – for production support experts, while general ones, or best practices – to the resource owners.

We improved Maestro to allow easily adding custom engines. All recommendations are gathered, processed and delivered to users in a unified way – on the dashboard, management page, and in emails.

• The Dashboard provides the aggregated risk factor information - the summarizes status based on all findings per specific resource.  It allows quick assessment of the infrastructure state and detection of the most critical issues to be fixed.
  
  
• The Management tab, with its new Insights  gives more details on per-resource issues, that can be sorted and filtered by severity and insight source.
  
  
• The Content View of the Management tab gives the full information about the insights generated for a selected resource, allows to fix the issue by calling a respective wizard or tool, or ignore the recommendation in case it is not applicable in the specific case.

The approach has already proven to be useful and effective, as it gives a unified entry point for performance, costs, security and best practices recommendations across all clouds, provides recommendations and remediation mechanism. 

Still, there are no limits for perfection, and we are already have a roadmap for recommendations and risk factor assessment improvements, to make the mechanism more flexible and adjustable to specific infrastructures lifecycle and workloads.