QUEST: Search-Driven Management of Cloud-Scale Data Centers

Enterprises today increasingly rely on IT for their day-to-day processes. Newer application types (such as web, mobile, social, and big data applications) and the advent of public cloud computing have further increased the role of IT in enterprises. The result is that a typical enterprise data center today can have thousands of workloads spanning tens of thousands of nodes and hundreds of thousands of virtual machines. This makes day-to-day IT management tasks challenging for enterprise IT administrators, since they need to manage multiple types of hardware and software entities that can interact with each other in complex ways, and can span private data centers and public clouds. The problem is made worse by the management interfaces of current data center solutions, which work poorly at such a large scale, as they are navigational in nature and require administrators to learn a variety of tools and their myriad workflows. This can result in administrators spending too much time learning the tools and understanding when to use which tool, otherwise, they run the risk of making costly mistakes. In this paper we present the design and implementation of QUEST, a search-driven data center management system that provides an easy-to-use interface to search for data center entities, get information about them, and perform actions on them, all from a single pane of glass. QUEST allows administrators to express their intent through a semi-structured query language, and interfaces with multiple management components behind the scenes to return the most relevant information, this eliminates the need for administrators having to learn and remember the workflows of multiple data center management interfaces. We built QUEST [1] as a part of the Nutanix data center management solution [2] and it is currently used by 25% of Nutanix's customers [3] to manage tens of thousands of nodes. Initial customer feedback is positive and validates our hypothesis that search-based management interfaces are superior to traditional navigational interfaces in reducing administrator burden and making them more effective. Our evaluation shows that QUEST can support interactive use in real data centers, and a case study with a real customer performance trouble ticket shows that QUEST can reduce the number of steps by 6× compared to state-of-the-art management tools in troubleshooting scenarios.