In the application economy, organizations are increasingly embracing cloud services—computing models that are essential in providing organizations with the agility and efficiency they need to compete.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure are the most popular and most common public cloud platforms. They can provide rapid computing power, storage and or an entire infrastructure as a service on demand.

While they provide several benefits in terms of cost and agility, these platforms need to be monitored and managed just like other business services – with proven IT operations and procedures – so that you maximize their potential for your applications and business.

Adopt a rapid, standardized approach to monitoring configuration

Traditionally, there was an accepted process cost associated with adding monitoring to the IT infrastructure. In the cloud computing paradigm, that accepted cost is no longer sustainable. You need to be able to quickly discover, configure and deploy monitoring for your cloud resources. In addition, having a unified monitoring tool set for your on-premise and cloud infrastructure boosts staff productivity as they won’t waste time learning or managing multiple tools.

Gather holistic and actionable insights

The public cloud shouldn’t be a “black box”. You should gather and report on a comprehensive set of performance metrics that provide the visibility you need to proactively ensure reliability of cloud resources. Too many times organization don’t go beyond the basic metrics built into the platforms. But to be effective, the data, reports and alarms need to be actionable and relevant so that your teams are not running in circles, chasing false alarms.

Track your cloud’s performance from an application’s perspective

You might have some applications that are completely cloud-based and some that only use one or two of elements such as web or database servers. Irrespective, you should aim to create an application-centric view of your infrastructure. It allows you to track and optimize performance of each component, be it cloud or on premise. Through this view you can also build a case on how cloud benefits the performance of your applications and justify moving even more components to the cloud.

Be proactive in performance management

Proactively tracking performance of your cloud resources – leveraging trends reporting, correlation analysis and advance thresholds – allows you to identify issues before user experience suffers. Plus, with these insights you have better visibility into cloud resource utilization so you can better control costs.

How much of the “public” cloud do you use? Does your public cloud technology monitoring strategy cover the four steps mentioned above? What else should organizations consider?

The app economy changes everything. Is your IT monitoring approach ready for this new reality? Take this 5 minute assessment to find out.

The post Is your public cloud keeping its promise? appeared first on Highlight.

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view. Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.