Thoughts on Cloud Performance Monitoring

Cloud computing is taking over the IT world, there is no doubt about it.  IDC predicts that over the next five years spending on public IT cloud services will increase from $21.5 billion in 2010 to $72.9 billion in 2015.  This translates into one of every seven dollars spent on packaged software, servers and storage in 2015 to be related to the public cloud.

This proves that the cloud is serious business.  And the cloud is all about leveraging resources, to ensure their best possible distribution and use, which brings about those well known advantages: cost, efficiency and flexibility.  But in order to make sure all resources are put to best use, the ability to monitor cloud computing systems and services is essential.

There are two aspects of cloud performance monitoring to be considered.

• Cloud performance monitoring for users
• Cloud performance monitoring for development

Recognizing their importance for businesses, technologies for the monitoring of IT cloud resources for enterprises have started to emerge since 2009.  The well publicized cloud services outages and disruptions this year have further highlighted the necessity for effective cloud monitoring solutions that need to be focused on business needs, proactive and in real time.

For development teams, effective cloud performance monitoring of the cloud systems is equally important, allowing them to solve critical problems before they impact service delivery. There are a few features a good cloud monitoring product for developers should have:

• Easy and rapid install
• Provide in depth performance details
• Provide actionable analytics in real time (seconds, or less)
• Leverage rapid deployment
• Speed and scalability
• Real-time visualization with in-depth analytics and alerting
• Support all types of cloud environments
• Provide a wholistic view of the system.

To use the words of Scott Johnson, CEO of CopperEgg and someone who knows quite a bit about building solutions for developers by developers,   “the key is providing easy-to-use products that enable development teams to focus on building valuable applications in the cloud instead of having to spend large amounts of time worrying about the infrastructure being used to support them.”

And I would like to add the extensive use of cloud performance monitoring solutions to the other changes in the software industry  I explored in previous articles like More Thoughts on how is Cloud Computing Changing the Software Industry.  Because as the environment is becoming more complex, development teams need access to more comprehensive products in order to control it.

Photo source: https://www.sxc.hu/photo/1280927.