“gotchas” In Monitoring In The Cloud

By Author: Joseph Mathew
Total Articles: 11
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Many IT organizations are migrating some of their applications to the cloud to become more agile, alleviate operational complexity and spend less time managing infrastructure and servers. However one question that these organizations often fail to ask is, “How will we monitor these applications once we deploy them to the cloud?” Here are a few “gotchas” about application monitoring in the cloud that are good for any IT manager to know.

1. Lack of End User or Business Context - With apps running in the cloud, monitoring infrastructure metrics indicates very little about your end-user experience,or the performance of your apps or business running in the cloud. End users experience business transactions so make sure your monitoring gives you this visibility.

2. Node Churn - How well does your monitoring solution deal with node churn – the provisioning and de-provisioning of servers and application nodes? The monitoring solution has to work in dynamic, virtual and elastic environment where change is constant, otherwise you’ll ...
... end up with blind spots in your application and monitoring. Many of the current monitoring solutions today are unable to monitor and adapt to dynamic cloud infrastructure changes, requiring manual intervention by operations so new nodes can be registered and monitored.

3. Agent-less is Tough in the Cloud - You may not have any major issues with installing a packet sniffer or network-monitoring appliance in your own private cloud or data-center, but you won’t be able to place these kinds of devices in PaaS or IaaS environments to monitor your application performance. Monitoring agents in comparison can easily be embedded or piggy-backed as part of an application deployment in the cloud. Agent-less may not be a option when trying to monitor many cloud applications.

4. High Network Bandwidth Costs - Cloud providers typically charge per gigabyte of inbound and outbound traffic. If your cloud application has 100 nodes and your collecting megabytes of performance data every minute, all of that data has to be communicated outside of the cloud to your monitoring solution’s management server, which can be on-premise or in another cloud. Monitoring what’s relevant in your application versus monitoring everything means you’ll avoid exorbitant cloud usage bandwidth costs for transferring monitoring data.

5. Getting visibility into custom services – This doesn’t apply to all clouds, but some PaaS vendors will provide custom cloud application services that you can’t get visibility into with all application performance monitoring tools. Make sure your APM tool is compatible with (or even integrated with) your cloud vendor before you start your migration.

If you keep these gotchas in mind, monitoring in the cloud should be a snap. Just be cautious and educated in your search for a monitoring tool, and you’ll never have to worry about visibility or performance in the cloud.