Cloud Performance management tools: The Eye of the cloud

Various new cloud performance management tools and technologies will make the visibility of applications in the cloud environment clearer.

1 milliseconds is just a short moment. But if you're a SaaS provider, with thousands of databases running more than 2 billion SQL queries a day, it's very valuable to provide 10TB of SQL data. Performance is also critical to visibility-especially when your system is connected to other providers ' systems in the cloud.

This is exactly what concur technology has been doing, and it is processing more than 50 billion dollars of travel and expense reports in the cloud each year. About 4 years ago, the company began encountering a transmission stumble between the middle tier and the database layer.

"Once millions of calls occur, the problem is that these calls could be between 30 servers in one tier and 30 servers on the other," explains John Tharp, Chief software engineer at concur. "To get visibility, three different levels of people--network DBAs, network engineers, and application engineers--work together." "Concur has found a performance management tool with a monitoring view that can help it teams locate problems quickly, which is critical to the company's competitiveness."

In the cloud, performance and visibility have become a primary concern for users. Large companies have migrated many of their familiar workloads into the cloud. But when more mission-critical systems plan to migrate to the cloud, it becomes increasingly important to track application visibility and performance management tools in the cloud when a large number of cloud applications are provided by a single provider.

According to IDC, investment in public and private cloud services, as well as investment in building these services, will reach $60 billion trillion this year, and corporate cloud strategy will shift from infrastructure to application platforms.

As a result, the need for tools that can improve visibility in the cloud is growing. IDC predicts that spending on cloud management software will increase by 62% this year.

"The higher the visibility, the better the enterprise can optimize the decision to use the cloud," said Dennis Drogseth, vice president of ESG, an IT consulting firm.

One of the biggest pain points facing many companies adopting cloud computing today is to decide which environment is best for applications that run at a peak, says Dennis Callagham, an analyst at 451 study. "The enterprise has no good visibility, so there is no way to make a decision about how the business will affect the migration of a particular application into the cloud," he added. "There is no set of objective criteria that can help companies pick the best performance management tools in a mixed cloud environment." ”

But here are some guidelines that we can offer to help organizations choose tools that can improve visibility, view and manage systems in the cloud.

Are new applications still available?

First, you have to decide whether to move an existing application or a new application into the cloud, says Dave Bartoletti, a Forrester analyst.

"If you put an existing application into the cloud, can you measure its performance?" For now, there's really no way to assess how much visibility the cloud can provide, "Bartoletti said.

He recommends that you first look for existing performance management tools that are suitable for migration applications, and then ask your cloud provider if they can provide any performance management capabilities that can be integrated with these tools. "Otherwise, you'll have to use two different tools to delay the project," Bartoletti said.

If you build a new application in the cloud, you can consider performance management issues during construction, he said. You can ask what performance metrics you need to track.

"Before you choose a tool, you need to know what visibility you need." Is the response time of the application, the round trip of the entire transaction, the daily traffic received, or what else? What is the amount of data download/upload you see? These are the first metrics to be considered, "Bartoletti said. Then talk to the cloud provider and ask if it can provide greater visibility to these metrics as much as possible.

Building a mixed cloud

Businesses that have both local and cloud applications need to get a higher degree of visibility from the cloud provider. "In this case, the enterprise needs to see what APIs their performance management tools provide." Because you need to download performance management information to your existing system and feed it to your local application, "Bartoletti said.

Many cloud providers can provide visibility and monitoring capabilities for their services, but industry watchers believe it is better to deploy Third-party tools, which results in more accurate performance. If the manufacturer has an internal system for monitoring performance, Bartoletti said, "It may be difficult to verify the reliability of the performance indicators." "Although you don't have visibility into the performance of data uploads and downloads," he added, "You should be able to verify peak performance and see how your application operates at different times of the day." ”

Third-party tools will help verify that the load type described by the cloud provider is visible. It will really try to match your existing workload to the type of load the cloud provider offers. This is part of the process of buying cloud services.

If one application is partially local and the other part is in the cloud, it is important to have some key performance indicators on the ground and in the cloud to match. "If you're already using a performance management tool locally, what key metrics does it need to track?" This is exactly what you want to say to the cloud provider, ' you must at least allow me to have local visibility to my all-day load pattern, such as traffic, storage, and so on, and I have to be able to observe at a specific granularity, and whether you track every 5 minutes or 30 minutes, ' Bartoletti says.

(Responsible editor: The good of the Legacy)