Monitor public cloud infrastructure and its services

In this article, we will introduce the monitoring challenges that the cloud environment may bring to our readers. We will also discuss with you the key methods that need to be adopted by the organization to promote the greatest service in the cloud. Level, efficiency and flexibility.

The temptation to accelerate innovation, reduce costs, and increase agility and agility has led many current corporate executives to choose to migrate their enterprise-organized applications to a public cloud environment. However, whether or not the enterprise organization can achieve these advantages as much as possible will be determined by the existing monitoring capabilities of the company. In this article, we will introduce the monitoring challenges that the cloud environment may bring to our readers. We will also discuss with you the key methods that need to be adopted by the organization to promote the greatest service in the cloud. Level, efficiency and flexibility.

Overview

When business organizations seek to gain competitiveness in the current application economy environment, many business organizations increasingly rely on public cloud services. Organizations can now reliably use cloud products to provide a variety of infrastructure services, including computing, storage, and applications. The following is the reason why a series of cloud services have emerged and quickly become an attractive alternative.

First, agility and agility promote innovation

In the current environment of application economics, application innovation cannot be faster anymore. Enterprise customers and end users urgently need more powerful features and better experiences.

Given that corporate leaders are trying to accelerate their new innovative services to market, they must get rid of traditional IT methods. When they need to expand their IT capacity, they can no longer wait patiently for lengthy procurement, testing, and deployment cycles.

By running workloads in a public cloud environment, organizations can achieve significant agility improvements. They can expand their capacity more quickly and easily, so they can immediately adapt to new applications and services. If demand falls, they can also immediately reduce their occupied space.

New servers or services can be provided on demand, which means that corporate staff time is no longer spent on procurement and installation. By leveraging the cloud environment, employees within the company can spend more time and energy putting new application-centric innovations on the market and can bring these innovations to market faster.

Second, operational efficiency and budget flexibility

Given the increasingly fierce competition among companies in the market, organizations of all sizes face the pressure to use resources in the most effective way. Often, they cannot afford the cyclical large capital expenditures needed to expand their infrastructure capacity; they also cannot afford to reallocate and redistribute infrastructure resources to cope with the costs and disruptions associated with changing market conditions.

Cloud-based infrastructure services provide a compelling way to mitigate this challenge. By leveraging on-demand elastic cloud services, organizations can get rid of the large upfront capital expenditures associated with their on-premises infrastructure and instead use pay-as-you-go services generated by the business budget. This also allows business organizations to be able to reprioritize IT resources based on changes in business objectives.

Key monitoring challenges for public clouds

As business organizations migrate increasingly important business services to the public cloud environment, it is critical to ensure that their customers and users have an optimized experience. However, tracking progress and managing performance and service levels when running applications in a public cloud can present IT organizations with many challenges.

I. Lack of comprehensive, actionable insights into cloud services and their operational processes

When corporate organizations migrate workloads to the cloud environment, their IT teams typically start by leveraging their cloud service provider's monitoring tools. Typically, the cloud service provider's monitoring product is not a dedicated monitoring solution. These tools lack many of the features that administrators need to actively manage the performance and service levels of workloads and processes running in the cloud.

When using a public cloud service, business organizations often register specific infrastructure products such as computing, storage, and so on. Cloud service provider tools only provide monitoring indicators for these resources, resulting in only very narrow visibility. For example, a tool will tell you that the CPU utilization is 60%, but it will not provide any details about which process or service is responsible for the utilization.

In addition, many of these tools limit the IT team's ability to perform historical performance analysis and future capacity planning. These tools usually provide only preliminary reports and only allow customers to retain monitoring data in a short period of time. As a result, retailers that rely on cloud service provider monitoring tools will have difficulty tracking seasonal trends because they cannot assess annual statistics.

Fundamentally, cloud service provider tools lack the ability to effectively monitor service levels. Therefore, it is difficult to effectively measure the performance of cloud services for SLAs and make service providers responsible for the level of service provided.

Second, insights into the migration life cycle are limited

As business organizations migrate applications and workloads to the cloud, they need to ensure that these migrations occur reliably. For this reason, it is very important to effectively track the performance of workloads in development and production. By doing so, employees can be most effective in ensuring that no errors or performance problems occur. Ultimately, they need to be able to compare the performance metrics of the pre-production and post-production phases so that they can continue to optimize service levels and achieve the maximum benefit from the cloud.

Third, the complexity of multi-monitoring tools for cloud and hybrid IT environments has increased

Although the adoption of cloud services is growing rapidly, the reality is that most business organizations today adopt a hybrid approach, with some workloads running in the cloud, and others running in an on-premises deployment environment. Workload. When the corporate IT team relies on cloud service provider-specific monitoring technologies, the reality is that the number of tools and associated challenges will increase. Enterprise customers' IT teams will need to continue to use their existing on-premises tools. After all, they have invested a lot of time in these tools to purchase, configure and manage. The adoption of specific tools for cloud service providers represents the need for employees to learn, use, and manage other related elements.

The fact that the complexity is further exacerbated is that most business organizations will eventually use cloud services from multiple service providers. The reality is that each application has its own unique requirements, and each cloud service provider's product has its own unique advantages and disadvantages. Therefore, for each different cloud service, the organization may need to add a unique mix of monitoring tools. The net result is that, in addition to the dozens of tools they may already have to monitor their on-premises technology, a business organization may eventually need to use monitoring tools from multiple cloud service providers.

With the continuous increase in the number of tools, the company's administrative burden and costs will also increase. In addition, when something goes wrong, staff will have to spend a lot of time moving from one tool to another and participate in cross-functional team meetings to isolate the root cause of the problem in a distributed environment.

IV. Utilization Insights Insights Limited

When using cloud services, businesses pay for the cost according to their capacity capabilities. However, due to cumbersome and limited monitoring tools, it is difficult to track and fully understand current and ongoing resource utilization. As a result, business organizations risk the expense of capacity capabilities that they do not need, which reduces some of the potential rewards that may be realized by migrating to cloud services. In addition, business organizations need to analyze historical data in order to better plan for future capacity capabilities and budgets, and provide infrastructure teams with an infrastructure perspective to improve application performance.

V. Lack of end-to-end user experience monitoring

Due to the limited number of point tools used, the IT team of enterprise customers lacks insight into one of the most important aspects: the quality of the end-user experience. Point tools provide monitoring of specific infrastructure elements, but they do not provide the ability to track performance and availability from a user's perspective, nor can they be used to measure the end-to-end response time of transactions across multiple distributed infrastructures and services. .

Ultimately, the IT team may see a good performance of the various infrastructure elements from the available monitoring indicators, but in reality users may still feel that performance is slow, or they may not be able to complete the required transactions at all. This lack of visibility will expose companies to lengthy and expensive performance and availability issues.

Key components to optimize public cloud infrastructure performance

First, get actionable insights for tracking results

In general, point tools or tools from cloud providers will provide many indicators, but these indicators are difficult to understand, it is difficult to provide a set of precise analysis insights, and can not be normalized. They lack the viable insights needed to optimize performance and solve problems faster. As a result, corporate customers need to ensure that they use operational metrics to provide real insight into your cloud infrastructure and learn how to use them.

Second, monitor the operation of applications and services in the cloud to detect problems more quickly

When business organizations sign up for public cloud services, they usually order specific system or infrastructure services such as servers, storage, databases, and so on. Although tools from cloud service providers will provide monitoring details for these infrastructure elements, they will not provide any visibility into the performance of the applications or processes running on these elements. These tools may only show CPU utilization of 60%, but it is not clear which process is responsible for which specific workload. And the corporate team needs this visibility to understand and optimize performance in a comprehensive way.

Third, establish a unified view of cloud and enterprise on-premise infrastructure to accelerate average repair time

The reality is that most business organizations are running workloads in on-premise and cloud-based environments. It is crucial to have a unified view when managing the internal source IT environment. While public cloud services provide significant differences in the degree of actual control over servers and other infrastructure elements, the reality is that having a unified view is equally important. When the IT team fully understands all the features and utilization of its infrastructure, it can facilitate them to solve problems faster.

Fourth, tracking end-to-end user experience to ensure service reliability

Today, some of the distributed environments may support interactions when a bank's client logs into a mobile-phone-side application to check her account. The user can log on to a web server hosted in the environment of a public cloud service provider, and then the certificate can be verified by the local server, and then can be performed in sequence on the backend system hosted in the second cloud provider's facility Access call for account details. Crucially, IT teams can track these multi-step transactions from end to end and accurately measure which experience the user is receiving.

V. Let enterprise IT team know about intelligent alarm

The cloud environment is highly resilient, and computing resources are constantly being transferred and processed, which can cause serious damage to the team based on basic monitoring tools.

Enterprise IT teams need to be able to set intelligent, dynamically updated thresholds so that they can ensure that accurate questions about the problem are obtained when needed, without being bothered by false and redundant alerts. By leveraging sophisticated time-out threshold analysis, IT teams can identify real, persistent performance problems and eliminate false alarms associated with occasional spikes. Timeout threshold analysis automatically identifies potential threats to performance degradation and issues early warnings so that administrators can respond before internal and external users are affected.

The advanced platform can provide a list of priority lists that represent the conditions that administrators should be aware of. They can also prioritize these problem items before they are expected to occur, prompting them to first pay attention to the immediate problems. In addition, the monitoring platform needs to provide integrated integration with service desk solutions so that when a problem occurs, the IT team can automatically open a list of services containing all the relevant details about the problem.

Six, establish a rapid, template-based monitoring deployment

One of the major advantages of cloud environments is their agility. However, the dynamic, elastic nature of the cloud environment presents some challenges to the enterprise IT team. Given that virtualized, on-demand resources are constantly being turned on and off to accommodate changing workloads, monitoring also needs to start and stop on a continuous basis.

In order to effectively and efficiently monitor these environments, the IT team needs to minimize or eliminate manual manual operations. In order to achieve these goals, the IT team needs to establish templates for monitoring specific categories of technologies and apply these templates as much as possible using automation. Use monitoring throughout the migration cycle

As business organizations migrate applications from the enterprise's on-premises infrastructure to the cloud, they will need to use monitoring to ensure that no service-level disruptions are triggered. To achieve the most effective management of service levels during the transition period, the IT team should adopt the following methods:

It is critical to establish monitoring of services immediately when migrating to a new cloud environment because this is the most likely configuration and other migration-related issues.

Developing dashboards and reports to provide pre-granular comparisons before new deployments are implemented is critical to discovering trends that may indicate performance and availability issues.

Comprehensive monitoring of services, whether running in the initial on-premises deployment or after migration to the cloud environment. These monitoring metrics provide an unparalleled front-to-back comparison of end-user service levels so that IT teams can most effectively ensure that cloud migration does not result in any performance degradation. Figure D. Many companies rely on multipoint monitoring tools to manage cloud and hybrid IT environments

VII. Actively monitor cloud utilization

Many decision makers eventually choose to migrate to the cloud because of the cost savings and the budget flexibility. However, once in the cloud, IT teams need to actively manage capacity to ensure maximum cost savings within the initial and long-term time frames. To achieve these goals, consider:

Historical trend reports and dashboards. With these views, analysts can track long-term utilization trends and assess annual comparisons. These views are particularly important for organizations that must adapt to seasonal and dramatic fluctuations in usage trends.

Intelligent thresholds for cost and utilization data. By creating intelligent, time-out threshold alerts, IT teams can ensure that they are notified before over-provisioning of resources, thereby more actively managing service levels and capacity. In addition, through intelligent thresholding, IT teams can continue to ensure that they have access to underutilized resources and continue to aggressively reduce expenses.

in conclusion

Although the benefits of the implementation of cloud services can indeed be significant, for many organizations, some of the returns may be difficult for them to manage. Monitoring capabilities will play a crucial role in whether organizations can achieve maximum business benefits from cloud deployments. Only with strong unified monitoring, can the enterprise organization effectively track and manage the level of service received by users, and enable the business to make full use of the advantages of cost savings and agility provided by cloud products.