Cloud computing tools choose files: monitoring and management tools

If you embrace the IT industry's trends—from hosting, sharing resources to clients, servers, dedicated resources, back to today's low-cost hardware, shared resources—you know that all systems behave differently. This relies on a virtualized environment that does not exist on the client or server. The fuzzy boundaries of this dependency force IT staff to adjust their approach to monitoring and managing the environment.

IT companies often fail to properly use the monitoring tools of the virtualized environment. There is a trend to continue to use the same monitoring tools that were used in traditional data centers, but these tools are not sufficient to monitor traffic between virtual servers. Local communication between virtual servers can be largely unmonitored; traffic through the virtual switch is partially invisible because this portion of the traffic is not routed.

To ensure an optimal cloud computing application experience, administrators must monitor virtual traffic between virtual machines. Here are some applicable cloud computing monitoring tools:

• NetQoS Service Automation, acquired by CA Technologies in 2009, provides network software for performance management and response time analysis. The tool troubleshoots performance issues with web applications and plans for changing and managing service levels.

• Hyperic HQ open source software monitors the virtualized infrastructure and automatically discovers, monitors, and manages software services. The tool also monitors servers, databases, authentication systems, and other components that contain data centers. SpringSource acquired Hyperic in 2009, and VMware acquired SpringSource in the same year. 

• Even though open source software is a flag of the cloud computing market, Hyperic HQ is the only product listed here that provides open source cloud computing software. However, there are several companies such as Eucalyptus Systems, OpenNebula, and OpenStack, as well as other open source hypervisors that target cloud environments such as KVM and Citrix XenServer.

• New Relic real-user monitoring focuses on application performance monitoring so that cloud administrators can view the conditions in the environment.

• SolarWinds is a complete set of tools for monitoring network, storage, applications, servers, and virtualization performance. This tool provides the ability to view CPU, memory, and network conditions in a virtual environment. The tool suite monitors the cloud stack from top to bottom through the device.

• The AccelOps APM monitoring tool captures and analyzes information related to the network infrastructure. Cloud administrators can use AccelOp to access data such as status, events, trends, and configurations for networks, network devices, systems, applications, and virtual environments. Administrators can also set up alerts to notify them of performance or memory allocation issues.

• In addition to virtualized environments based on VMware ESX, VMware vSphere, Microsoft Hyper-V, and Citrix XenServer, Nimsoft Private Cloud Monitor monitors servers, network devices, databases, and applications. CA Technologies acquired Nimsoft in 2010.

Avoid errors in cloud computing tools

Most of the tools listed here are relatively new, so they are only tested in production. When choosing your cloud computing tool, be sure to check the vendor reference. If a vendor does not list customer references, be careful.

When comparing and selecting cloud computing tools, you should also pay special attention to companies that have already been acquired or companies that are candidates for acquisition, in order to prevent a dilemma. This dilemma often occurs when the products of an acquired company are bundled into a larger product suite and are no longer sold separately.

Some organizations are creating clouds without first considering the need for application migration, automation, and monitoring. Without the tools to consider these features, it is difficult for enterprises to realize the more important benefits of cloud computing—agility, flexibility, lower cost, and scalability.