5 Public Cloud Monitoring Challenges You Need to Overcome

Lured by opportunities to speed innovation, reduce costs and enhance agility, many business executives are opting to move their applications into public cloud environments. Whether or not organizations realize these advantages to the fullest extent possible will in part be dictated by the cloud monitoring capabilities in place. Below are some of the key monitoring challenges that cloud environments can pose and the approaches that can help organizations maximum service levels, efficiency and agility in the cloud.

Lack of Holistic, Actionable Insights Into Cloud Services and Processes

Typically, cloud vendors’ monitoring offerings aren’t purpose-built monitoring solutions. These tools lack many of the capabilities administrators need to proactively manage performance and service levels of workloads and processes running in the cloud. These tools would only deliver monitoring metrics for these resources, resulting in very narrow visibility. For example, a tool would tell you that CPU utilization is 60 percent, but it wouldn’t provide any details about which processes or services are responsible for this utilization rate. That information is critical to finding the root cause of issues and avoid disruptions.

Limited Insights Into Migration Lifecycles

 As organizations move applications and workloads to the cloud, they need to ensure that these migrations happen reliably. To do so, it is important to effectively track performance of workloads in development and production. By doing so, staff can most effectively ensure that no errors or performance issues arise. Eventually, they need to be able to compare pre and post-production performance metrics so they can continue to optimize service levels and realize maximum benefits from the cloud.

Exacerbated Complexity of Multiple Monitoring Tools for Cloud and Hybrid IT Environments

 In spite of the rapid growth in cloud services adoption, the reality is that most organizations today are taking a hybrid approach, running some workloads in the cloud and others in internal on-premises environments. As cloud and new technology adoption grows, the number of tools being adopted also grows. As the number of tools employed proliferates, so do the administrative burdens and costs. Further, when an issue arises, staff will have to spend a lot of time moving from tool to tool and participating in cross functional team meetings in order to isolate the cause of the issue.

Limited Utilization Insights

When leveraging cloud services, businesses pay for capacity as they go. However, with cumbersome, limited monitoring tools, it can be difficult to track and fully understand current and ongoing resource utilization. As a result, organizations run the risk of spending on capacity they don’t need, which diminishes some of the potential returns that can be realized by moving to the cloud. In addition, organizations need to analyze historical data to better plan for future capacity and budgets and to provide infrastructure perspectives to development teams so they can improve application performance.

Lack of End-to-End User Experience Monitoring

With limited point tools, IT teams lack insights into the one aspect that matters the most: the quality of the end user’s experience. Point tools deliver monitoring of specific infrastructure elements but they don’t provide capabilities for tracking performance and availability from the user’s perspective, or for measuring the end-to-end response times of a transaction that spans a number of distributed infrastructures and services.

Can you relate to some of these cloud monitoring challenges? Here is a recent whitepaper that provides more detailed tips on overcoming these challenges.