Software AG Optimize for Infrastructure Reviews

Software AG Optimize for Infrastructure, traditionally, has been on-premise. Of course, it can be deployed alongside in the cloud as well, but essentially it's a managed platform. This means that customers might put it in their own data centers where they have servers: integration servers or SAP servers. They would deploy it right next to the infrastructure and applications in the data center that they own. They can deploy Software AG Optimize for Infrastructure to monitor all infrastructures and applications. That's what it's primarily used for.

Similarly, if you have the infrastructure in AWS where you just subscribed virtual machines from AWS, and you are managing the applications yourself (which means you install the databases or other applications including Software AG's own middleware applications), then you can definitely put Software AG Optimize for Infrastructure in the AWS right next to those components. You can leverage this solution this way primarily for monitoring the infrastructure and the application instances for:

• Run time and optimization
• Thread counts
• CPU usage
• Memory usage
• Read I/Os

All these are directly monitored. You can set up alerts and things like that in this tool so that the platform automatically monitors and alerts. It's primarily used for support teams in IT: the infrastructure support and the application support teams.

When we talk about application monitoring, it's not only the application run-time engine but what else can the tools monitor, that is, whether they can monitor:

• Thread counts
• Persistence skews and things like that
• Messaging

A lot of these parameters are relevant and typically what you choose. Software AG Optimize for Infrastructure is chosen for a lot of the middleware environments to monitor:

• Middleware engines
• Middleware messaging queues
• Middleware engine threads
• Memory usage
• CPU usage

So it's more predominantly used to monitor middleware environments. I mean definitely Software AG's own middleware environments, but other middleware environments as well.

The infrastructure monitoring features are the most valuable. The primary purpose of Software AG Optimize for Infrastructure is to automate the aspects of monitoring various infrastructure and applications. They will definitely automate an alert automatically, but a lot of such tools differ from each other on aspects of various low-level components that they can monitor. 

Sometimes Software AG Optimize for Infrastructure goes through an upgrade cycle of four years to get to the next version. Some of the utilities need to be definitely advanced as well so that migration to the latest version is even smoother and easier. That could probably be the only improvements that they can look at.

I definitely think that their cloud version capabilities are still nascent. They need to evolve into offering similar capabilities to the cloud infrastructure as well. That is not specifically SaaS but any managed infrastructure that customers would subscribe to in AWS, Azure, and other public clouds. How to employ Software AG Optimize for Infrastructure and also to see if it can be subscribed as a service from Software AG would be the ideal next steps for this solution to evolve into.

We have been using Software AG Optimize for Infrastructure for more than 10 years. We are not direct users. Some of our clients use this solution.

It is quite stable. Most of the Software AG products are well-designed. They have very less failure points, and they are quite stable. Even if there are certain issues, I think the Software AG Optimize for Infrastructure has been out there for quite many years, and it has matured to a stable state right now.

It is definitely scalable. I've seen scenarios where it is monitoring hundreds of servers and infrastructures. It can definitely scale to very large quantities of asset monitoring.

They're fair. When we run into issues, we can quickly raise a ticket and escalate it. We usually get a response within the same day and a sort of resolution quickly after. This solution has already matured very well. Usually, it is more on the implementation side where the issues are found, not so much in the underlying technology.

Comparatively, the initial setup is straightforward. In general, the infrastructure monitoring setup is complex because you would have a centralized place (kind of a server) that gathers all the insight and metrics. You would also have satellite agents that need to be installed on every infrastructure and application to be monitored. So overall, if you have a very large environment and you need to monitor hundreds of things, obviously, the setup will be complex in terms of the initial setup of the agents itself. However, after the agents and all the infrastructure to be monitored have been deployed and set up, the actual configuration of insights and the actual setup of alerting upon those insights are fairly easy to do. That's the easy part.

It's a powerful tool. It can be employed in many scenarios, but it's really well suited for those customers who already have Software AG infrastructure and Software AG middleware. It is definitely a must-have tool for such setups. It kind of alleviates all the complexity in the IT support and service teams, and it will make their life easier. It will definitely increase their productivity.

I would rate Software AG Optimize for Infrastructure an eight out of ten.