What is your cloud monitoring strategy? After all, a whopping 93% of organizations in 2015 are running applications in the cloud or experimenting with infrastructure-as-a-service, while 82% of enterprises have a hybrid cloud strategy, up from 74% in 2014 (Source: RightScale 2015 survey).
As you grow, and join the ranks of these enterprises moving to the cloud, or leveraging cloud-based applications, there is one thing that you should not forget. Regardless of where your applications are hosted, your users will hold IT responsible for their user experience! To ensure smooth operations and user satisfaction, you need to monitor cloud-based applications from a user perspective, just like any other application in your portfolio. Here are some quick tips to jump start your cloud monitoring efforts.
1. Prioritize your cloud-based applications. With an increasing number of employees bypassing IT and going rogue to the cloud, it is the wild, wild, west out there. From accounting, invoicing, HR, CRM, email or collaboration tools, the list of applications your employees rely on is long! Since you can’t monitor it all at once, identify those critical applications that must perform well in order to run your business (e.g. internal applications migrated to the cloud, cloud-based CRM, ERP, EHR systems), and monitor these cloud-based applications first.
2. Identify critical transactions to monitor. Put on your “think from a user perspective hat” and map out common functions used by your power users (those driving the most productivity or revenue). Or better yet, schedule a meeting with business stakeholders to identify critical functionality from their perspective. For example, if you are monitoring a healthcare portal, outline critical transactions to monitor such as:
- For a doctor- Opening a patient record, logging recent activity, updating prescription details
- For a patient- Logging in, reading a doctor email, searching for care
All of these functions should be proactively monitored on a 24x7x365 basis (check out CitraTest APM!) to identify early problematic trends before your users are impacted. After all, a cloud migration project introduces risks of performance degradation (e.g. noisy cloud neighbors in a multi-tenancy deployment resulting on “stolen CPU”, or processes that are not written to effectively use memory, which could overload the allocated memory in an Amazon EC2 instance).
With CitraTest APM you can continuously execute synthetic transactions, taking response time measurements along the way to quickly identify problematic trends. By automating the driving of ANY application — just like a real user – and visually examining the desktop and responding to changes, typing on a keyboard or on a mobile device or driving the mouse, CitraTest APM ensures that all critical aspects of an application are available and working effectively, alerting you in real-time at the first sign of trouble.
3. Decide polling frequencies and alerting policies. A good rule of thumb is to monitor key transactions more frequently (e.g. being able to send a sales proposal is more critical than reporting on sales pipeline) to identify performance degradation signs earlier, and define who should be alerted in the event of warning/critical threshold violations. With CitraTest APM, you can configure the number of response time violations that will trigger an alert to eliminate false positives, easily schedule monitoring tests or disable alerting on scheduled maintenance periods. You are in control of your monitoring!
4. Define custom reports Since different metrics are important for different stakeholders, take the time to map out role-based reports with custom information for each team (per application, per transaction, per functionality, etc.), and automatically distribute reports on an on-going basis (daily, weekly or monthly basis) to keep everybody informed and aligned.
5. Centralize IT response procedures and workflow. Don’t treat cloud-based application monitoring as a separate beast! After all, you are responsible for user experience for all applications hosted on your datacenter or in the cloud, so you want to add cloud monitoring to your existing IT monitoring framework to increase efficiency. Plus you want to use the same APM monitoring solution for all the applications you own and/or support.
Are you ready to boost performance for your cloud-based applications and find performance problems before your users do?
Check out CitraTest APM and CitraTest Mobile
Good luck with monitoring cloud-based applications!