The Three Perspectives of Cloud Monitoring

For long, cloud performance management and monitoring has been an overloaded term. Many refer to this term as the ability to collect metrics from public cloud providers like Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure. At eG Innovations, we believe that there is a whole lot more to cloud performance management. We believe cloud performance management can encompass three different perspectives:

  • From the cloud – the Deployment perspective:  This perspective focuses on where the performance management and monitoring is being delivered from. Whether you are deploying applications and infrastructure on-premises, in a private cloud, or in the public cloud, or in a hybrid manner, you may be interested in monitoring the applications and infrastructure from the cloud – as a cloud-based service. This is performance management delivered “FROM” the cloud.Organizations turn to this model to benefit from the advantages that cloud computing offers. You can get the service going right-away, without any upfront hardware or software investment. And you do not have any software or hardware to maintain on an on-going basis.If you are experiencing performance problems with your critical applications and you need an instant solution, performance management FROM the cloud is an ideal solution for you! A pay-per-use service model allows you to turn on/off the service as you require.

    Monitoring of the cloud

    Performance Management From The Cloud

    The eG Enterprise Cloud service provides exactly this. Servers, applications, devices hosted in on-premises networks or in the cloud can be monitored using this service.

  • Of the Cloud – the Cloud Consumer perspective:  This perspective focuses on what the performance management and monitoring is providing. If you have deployed applications in the cloud – either private or public cloud, you need to know how well these applications are performing. If there is a slowdown, you need to know where is the problem – in the cloud, in your application, in the database server, or in the network?You may even have applications where some components are hosted in the public cloud, and others are in your private network. You need to have a way to be able to quickly correlate between the performance of your application components, the network, the public cloud infrastructure and be able to pin-point the root-cause of the problem. This is performance management “OF” the cloud.Ideally, you would like to have a common management console from where you can see the performance of your on-premises applications and your cloud hosted applications.

    Monitoring for the cloud

    Performance management of the cloud

  • For the Cloud – The Cloud Service Provider perspective:   If you are a (public or private) cloud service provider, the cloud is a service you are delivering to your customers. Therefore, your first concern is – Can people access my service? Is the self service portal up? Can users see their VMs? Can users connect to their VMs? If not, you need to be able to determine why the problem is happening – is it the web front-end? is it due to the virtualization platform? is it due to the SAN? etc.The action you take depends on what you diagnose as being the root-cause of the problem. Besides problem diagnosis, you are also interested in understanding how you can get more returns out of your current cloud investments. For instance, you want to be able to see how to balance load across your servers to serve a maximum number of users and how you can optimize the capacity of the infrastructure without sacrificing on performance. You need performance management “FOR” the cloud.

    Monitoring for the cloud

    Performance Management For the Cloud

    Of course, as a service provider, you are also looking for opportunities to deliver value-added services to your customers. Offering performance management as a service to your customers, so they can monitor, diagnose and get reports on the applications they have hosted in the cloud is one such service. Not only is this a value-add for your customers, it can even reduce the number of support calls your helpdesk gets. If you can educate your customers to look for specific patterns that indicate whether it is a problem with your cloud service or not, you can get them to call your helpdesk only if a problem pertains to your cloud service. In all other cases, they must diagnose what is happening with their applications!

Each of the three perspectives of cloud performance management and monitoring has their unique needs. eG Enterprise is a unique solution that can address all three perspectives of cloud performance management and monitoring: FROM the cloud, OF the cloud and FOR the cloud!

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