Cloud computing is disrupting the technology and IT markets. The cloud enables any business, small or large, to operate like a full-blown enterprise. Cloud technology offers affordable solutions transforming businesses to become more agile and responsive to industry changes, increases their collaborative opportunities, and extends the current computation capacity.
While cloud computing has become a viable solution to many, it’s not flawless. Today, the cloud data is dynamic. Businesses can no longer release an app without continuously monitoring and analysing its behaviour. Like many other technologies, cloud deployment requires ongoing monitoring to ensure optimal performance at all times. Cloud monitoring tools offer visibility to uncover the potential problems enabling users to make real-time changes to prevent customers from being impacted.
Importance of Monitoring
Performance analytics are important for any business operating in the cloud. The information captured in monitoring can serve as the core basis for decision making and provides insight on better understanding how an app is utilising resources. Additionally, certain cloud monitoring tools can anticipate cloud outages by identifying unusual behaviours and alert the IT team to respond in a timely manner.
The generic cloud monitoring tools included by providers are often too generic to meet the needs of each specific business. To uncover business truths, the ideal solution is for businesses to invest in creating a tailor monitoring system to validate product offerings and to distill the most critical information for specific business needs.
Several factors affect cloud computing performance
One of the most important characteristics of the cloud is its scalability. While scalability is critical, unless businesses are actively monitoring their provisioned systems closely, they may be underutilising the full capacity of the cloud. A system that is over-provisioned can be a drain on system resources and a significant waste of company money. Alternatively, a system that is under-provisioned, is directly contributing to poor performance. In either case, since all users are sharing the same level of resources, there is always potential for server bottlenecks.
As cloud computing increases to conquer the future of how businesses operate, it is essential that companies maximise the functionality of the cloud by closely monitoring leveraging the valuable information generated.
With so many options, why is monitoring still an issue?
The information aggregated from cloud monitoring is often overwhelming to IT teams. Monitoring tools provide analytic solutions but are only direct results of what the cloud actually provides. A dashboard of only the most important performance statistics are necessary and provide actionable solutions in the dynamic cloud environment. The limitations in the monitoring system often fails to provide the most essential information for each business.
Failure management and performance optimisation techniques need scalable and intelligent methods to analyse the large amounts of monitoring data, and to apply smart optimisations to mitigate problems and ensure dynamic resource management in the presence of frequent component failures. At this level of scale, different system components operate at multiple time scales, further adding to the management challenges.
At the core of the overflow of alerts, lay core business truths. Unfortunately, businesses operating in the cloud are overwhelmed by the alerts and are not refining this critical information to make informed business decisions.
Ensure success without budget headaches
Businesses should monitor their cloud environments to ensure they address any issues that could be detrimental to operations. Because many factors can affect cloud performance, it is essential for companies to begin maximising the full capabilities of cloud server monitoring solutions.
Companies need to filter the high volume of data into one a single high quality dashboard that provides the most critical information for their cloud system. Cloud monitoring with the most core information will provide the business with a realistic view into the many parameters that affect the health and availability of the cloud system.
Today, companies invest significant resources into IT infrastructure, it would be irresponsible to not maintain and monitor its progress. Granted, the cloud may not be as expensive as many other viable options, integrating cloud technology means embracing all of its capacities along with its challenges. Cloud computing indeed offers many benefits and monitoring the is an essential aspect in maintaining proper balance and optimal performance.
I would add that ideally it will be great that if possible all part of the organisation will meet and create a “formula” that will ingrate few parameters into a single number that above threshold it is OK and less need to be checked.
As always, technology is constantly changing. The sole trend that remains constant is the need for effective monitoring of the specific technology. As cloud computing increases to conquer the future of how businesses operate, it is essential that companies maximise the functionality of the cloud by closely monitoring leveraging the valuable information generated. The organisations monitoring their cloud by customising the information to meet their needs, will successfully manage their services in the most cost-effective manner while providing the highest level of system performance.
The cloud is widely regarded as a disruptive technology, business shouldn’t simply accept the challenges of overwhelming data or inability to filter the alerts that are the guiding factor to potential disruptions that can harm performance. Pairing cloud computing with cloud server monitoring that is tailored to a company’s needs, isn’t just effective, it’s essential.