If we look historically, the way IT shops have been managing their infrastructure is by demarcating. We find people within enterprises who manage only particular domains like database, networks, etc. with sophisticated tools.
Now when you talk of a business transaction; the complexity comes in because this transaction touches every component of the IT infrastructure. Since all these people have specific domain knowledge, they can’t see beyond their specific areas and hence fail to know the performance of the transaction beyond their respective domains.
Let’s assume that you want to buy an online air ticket from an airline.  You go to the site and key in the details of your itinerary. Now suppose the information that you need fails to show up even after you have tried a couple of times because of a poor performance issue at the carrier’s end. What would you do? Move to a different airline carrier.
At this moment, organisations have a problem in managing the complexity that exists in their IT infrastructure and understanding performance of the applications and transactions within this infrastructure.
Virtualisation and Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) add greater complexity to the IT infrastructure. With virtualisation, there is a lack of clear visibility as there are fewer assets hosting a large number of applications that are utilised more. So when you move applications into a virtual environment, there could be more problems due to lack of visibility and there is also a lack of skills in managing such an environment. So now as there are lot more applications sitting on fewer assets, the risk is a lot higher.
Though virtualisation allows users to efficiently use less assets, it increases complexity as users would not be able to determine the cause for performance issues unless they have the right tools for the same. n
—As told to Ashwani Mishra.