Introduction
Organizations are becoming increasingly interested in leveraging cloud
computing services to improve flexibility and scalability of the IT services delivered
to end-users. However, organizations using cloud computing services face the
following challenge: decreased visibility into the performance of services
being delivered to their end-users.
Many cloud providers offer dashboards for tracking availability of their
services as well as alerting capabilities for identifying service outages in a
timely manner, but these capabilities are not sufficient for end-users who need
to have a full control of the performance of cloud services in use. More importantly,
organizations cannot rely on monitoring capabilities offered by their cloud
service providers, and they need to deploy third-party solutions that allow
them to monitor the performance and levels of SLA achievements of cloud
services.
Overview of Cloud Computing
The term Cloud Computing stands for a type of service that allows
organizations to deliver business-critical applications to their employees, customers,
and partners over the Internet. End-users are able to access this data using a
web browser, while organizations are able to improve flexibility and
scalability of IT services and pay only for computing resources that they
actually use.
There are three types of cloud computing services: public, private, and
hybrid.
Public cloud computing services are hosted by third-party service
providers, such as Amazon, Google, Rackspace, GoGrid, and VMWare and allow
organizations to use externally hosted computing resources while paying only
for computing resources that they actually use. This method of cloud computing
fits the most common definition of cloud services, and it is most appealing
especially for small and medium sized organizations.
Private cloud services are hosted by end-user organizations themselves
to support their internal needs and allow their business users to access
business-critical data services over the Internet. Even though this type of
cloud computing does not completely fall under a traditional definition of
cloud computing (computing resources are not hosted and managed by third-party
providers), private cloud services are getting a lot of traction from end-user
organizations. Deployment of these services does not require an involvement
from external providers, but private cloud services are still helping
organizations to achieve the majority of promised benefits of cloud computing.
Hybrid cloud computing services represent a combination of IT services
that are based on hosting computing resources for supporting business-critical
applications both in the cloud and in the externally managed data centers. This
allows organizations to keep internal control over computing resources while
complimenting these resources with the cloud capacity that users can access
over the Internet.
Top Management Challenges
Inability to identify applications that could be seamlessly moved to
the cloud
Before making decisions about applications that should be moved to the
cloud environment, organizations should make a calculation about IT and
business benefits that they can achieve from this action. Additionally,
organizations should have capabilities in place to test whether the cloud
infrastructure they are using can support applications that are being
transferred to the cloud.
Unfortunately, many organizations do not have technology capabilities
that would allow them to conduct this type of testing and, therefore, they are forced to make adjustments to
available capacity as they experience problems with quality of service.
This type of challenge prevents organizations from
achieving one of their top goals for managing the performance of
business-critical applications: prevent performance issues from occurring
before end-users are impacted.
Inability to make educated decisions about adding or terminating
cloud resources
Deploying cloud computing services changes the way
organizations go about managing their computing resources, as it gives them
more flexibility in using available capacity in the way that is the most cost
effective. Instead of making costly investments in new hardware when they need
additional capacity, organizations have the ability to increase and decrease
cloud resources used as the demand changes. In order to take a full advantage
of this capability, organizations need to have full visibility into how their
existing resources are being used in both internal and external environments.
Organizations need to have capabilities for
monitoring usage of the cloud resources that would also alert them when they
need additional resources and about applications for which these additional
resources are needed. These monitoring capabilities include tools for
monitoring CPU usage per computing resource, ratios between systems activity
and user activity, and CPU usage from specific job tasks. Also, organizations
should have capabilities for predictive analytics that allow them to capture
trending data on memory utilization and file system growth, so they can plan
needed changes to computing resources before they encounter service
availability issues. Not having these capabilities in place prevents organizations
from taking timely actions for optimizing cloud resources in use to meet
changes in business demand.
Inability to monitor performance of applications that use a hybrid
cloud approach
Organizations using cloud computing services need to
have visibility not only into the performance of applications that have moved
to the cloud, but also into the different computing resources on which these
applications depend. Typically, organizations find it easier to monitor the
performance of applications that are hosted at a single server as opposed to
the performance of composite applications that are pulling computing resources
from different sources. This issue becomes even more complex if computing
resources are hosted outside of corporate firewalls, and organizations do not
have a full control and visibility into the performance of these applications.
As mentioned earlier, organizations sometimes use a
hybrid model for deploying cloud computing, which presents end-user organizations
with the challenge of monitoring usage of resources that are hosted and managed
both externally and internally and are being used by the same application.
Improving scalability of the infrastructure creates heterogeneous
environments that are difficult to manage
Even
though organizations can achieve significant cost savings and increased
flexibility of management by moving their business-critical applications into
the cloud, this also creates a new environment that is fairly complex to
monitor and manage. As a result, traditional IT management tools are not as
effective in these environments as they are in managing the performance of
internally hosted applications. This creates the challenge of finding a balance
between scalability and flexibility of computing resources and
Capabilities Needed
Tools for measuring the impact of rules for assigning cloud
resources on quality of end-user experience
One of the key benefits of cloud computing services
is flexibility of assigning resources needed to support demand from business
users. In order to achieve this benefit, many organizations deploying cloud
computing services are defining rules for assigning cloud resources to each of
their critical IT services and applications. However, the effectiveness of
these policies depends on the visibility that organizations have into how cloud
resources are being used. Organizations that have technology tools in place to
monitor how changes in policies that control allocation of cloud computing
resources impact the performance of business-critical applications, as measured
from end-users’ perspective, are more likely to reap the full benefits from the
deployment of cloud computing.
Ability to compare cloud service delivery to performance of the
internal environment
Organizations can garner the full benefits of cloud
computing services only if they can ensure that the performance of these services
as experienced by business users is at optimal level. The best way for
organizations to evaluate the performance of these services is to compare them
to the performance of those services hosted and managed internally.
Having technology capabilities that allow
organizations to measure key performance indicators (KPI) for application
performance in both cloud and internal environments allows organizations to
define proper benchmarks for evaluating performance of cloud services and make
better decisions about value received from making changes in their IT
management strategies.
An independent tool for monitoring/validating performance of a
heterogeneous set of applications in the cloud
As organizations deploying cloud computing services
trust third-party providers to deliver quality of service that would be acceptable
to the end-users, they need to have technology tools in place to enable them to
keep their service providers “honest” and have capabilities for monitoring
levels of SLA achievements that go beyond monitoring capabilities provided by
cloud vendors. As a part of their agreements with providers of public cloud
services, organizations are requesting guarantees for levels of performance
that service providers are expected to deliver. However, in order to ensure
that these service levels are met, organizations need to have independent
monitoring tools in place that allow them to monitor not only actual levels of
performance as experienced by business users, but also enable them to conduct
root cause analysis of problems as they occur. These monitoring tools include
capabilities for monitoring application response times, service availability, page
load times, and ability monitor traffic during peak times.
For organizations that want to receive the full value
of cloud computing services it is critical to be able to understand if any
performance issues that they experience are caused by their cloud service
providers, network issues, or the design of the application itself.
Ability to monitor cloud applications alongside with internal IT
systems
The
majority of organizations deploying cloud computing services are selecting the
hybrid model, which means that they are moving some of their applications into
the cloud while other applications are still being hosted on internally managed
servers and delivered over the corporate network. That requires that these
organizations have two different sets of capabilities, one for monitor
performance of applications hosted outside of their
corporate firewalls and one for those hosted in their data centers. It is hence
important for the monitoring tool to support integrating data from possibly two
restrictive networks that form part of the data center.
Having this capability in place allows organizations
to ensure optimal levels of performance of business-critical applications
regardless of hosting method and in the process make their IT Operations more
productive.
Business Benefits
Organizations that are using the right mix of
technology solutions for monitoring the performance of applications in the
cloud are more likely to enjoy the following business benefits:
• Prevention and resolution of performance issues
in timely manner. Organizations that have
visibility into resource utilization in the cloud are more likely to make
educated and timely decisions about resource allocation and, therefore, to
prevent performance problems before they impact their business users.
• Ability to support changes in business demand. Full visibility into the performance of cloud
services allows organizations to unlock the benefits of cloud computing,
especially when it comes to improved flexibility of IT management.
Organizations that have end-to-end visibility into the performance of cloud
services and their internal infrastructure are able to make better decisions
about adding or subtracting resources to support changes in business demand,
which allows them to ensure a high level of quality of end-user experience at
optimal cost.
• Ability to optimize spending decisions. Organizations deploying independent tools for
monitoring performance, SLA achievements, and usage of cloud services are more
likely to be able to make educated decisions about the return they are getting
from their investment in cloud services.
Recommendations for action
In order to have full visibility into the performance
of cloud services, organizations should consider taking the following actions:
• Deploy independent tools for monitoring and
validating the performance of cloud services
• Deploy tools for measuring the impact of rules for
assigning cloud resources based on quality of end-user experience
• Develop the ability to compare cloud service delivery
to performance of the internal environment
• Make sure your monitoring tool supports a hybrid
deployment architecture
ManageEngine Applications
Manager’s Capabilities
ManageEngine provides capabilities that allow organizations to
make educated decisions about parts of the enterprise infrastructure that
should be moved into the Cloud by providing performance reports . There is
out-of-the-box support for monitoring application servers, database servers,
servers and web servers. The support for packaged applications like Exchange,
SAP and Oracle E-Business Suite further helps IT Managers to make informed
decisions. Additionally, ManageEngine Applications Manager allows organizations
to monitor levels of SLA achievements for cloud services and to be able to
troubleshoot and resolve problems with application performance regardless of
the hosting and delivery method (Internet and/or corporate networks).
The distributed architecture facilitates monitoring applications
in the cloud and those present inside the corporate datacenter from the same
console.
