SIOS Technology Corp. is giving system administrators in big SQL Server shops reason to smile in release 3.7 of its SIOS iQ machine learning analytics software for managing VMware Inc. environments.

SIOS iQ is an agentless machine learning analytics platform for IT operations information and issue resolution. The addition of SQL Server support comes through integration with SQL Sentry LLC’s SQL Sentry Performance Advisor. This permits IT staff to identify and resolve the root causes of performance issues based on analysis of both the VMware infrastructure and the SQL Server application environment.

“As part of the vision of product we have always intended to add more insight to correlate how applications relates to infrastructure,” said Jerry Melnick, CEO of SIOS.

Other advances enable users to accurately predict and forecast performance and capacity utilization; identify and resize under- and over-provisioned VMs and reduce storage use by identifying rogue virtual machine disks (VMDKs). New information visualization features enable administrators to instantly see the health of operations across their infrastructure.

SIOS claims the integration with SQL Sentry Performance Advisor permits administrators to link in context from a SQL performance alert within SIOS iQ to SQL Sentry for application-level diagnosis. SQL Sentry database performance and custom events for SQL Server are presented in SIOS iQ and correlated to anomalous behavior across compute, storage, network and application, the company said.

“It eliminates round-robin finger pointing among all of the parties,” Melnick said. “You can identify a SQL issue, understand how it’s being impacted by the infrastructure and understand more about what’s going on in the SQL environment.” Most performance monitors only see the infrastructure layer, he added.

Visualization enhancements (above) give visibility into VMware Distributed Resource Scheduling (DRS) and VM Turbo Resource Scheduling to anticipate future resource issues. Machine learning capabilities provide for performance forecasting to identify anomalies, workload impact and root cause and to provide guided remediation for up to seven days in the future.

“It’s not a simple case of watching a VM or app steadily consumer more disk or bandwidth and drawing a straight line to figure out where it’ll be,” Melnick said. “This is about forecasting machine behaviors over time. It’s about patterns.”

The user interface shows the environment by vSphere clusters. Administrators can select which cluster to view in the SIOS dashboard and either examine all environments together or isolate the view to an individual cluster. Large red blocks show which environments are under greatest stress. “This can be across thousands of VMs and hundreds of hosts to give you a dense view of the status,” Melnick said. “You can press into any one of these and it will bring up a detailed list. You’ll also see the topologies of each issue – the exact picture of objects and relationships and how they’re behaving.”

SIOS ias already looking ahead to version 3.8, which will be available at the end of July. That release will add cluster topology views, the ability to identify rogue VMDKs and consolidated reporting on undersized and over-sized VMs, SnapShot sprawl and rogue VMDKs.

SIOS iQ is a host-license based product that is sold as either a renewable subscription for a list price of $100 per month per host on an annual basis or as a perpetual license for $1,600 per host plus $400 per year for update and maintenance.