data centers and cloud are undoubtedly an integral part of business continuity strategies of companies to run operations with a distributed workforce amid the lockdown successfully.
The Covid-19 outbreak and the resultant work from home policies have pushed businesses across globe increase in adoption of cloud infrastructure services up by 80%.
Managing the entire suite of enterprise technology is not easy for businesses that have several vendors on board.
With the advent of cloud and onsite infrastructure, it has become critical for each business to figure out how to optimally manage both the facets of its technology.
Now that the businesses are accelerating adoption of cloud technologies, a new cohort of problems has emerged:
- Cloud Architecture are completely different compared to on prem- Onsite infrastructure monitoring systems have been around for a while. However, integrating the complexity of cloud architecture onto the same platform is a major challenge for businesses.
- Lack of Access & Control – The argument of public vs. private cloud eventually pans out into a problem of control and accessibility. Most businesses do not possess access to the entire infrastructure and its individual elements. This creates severe opacity in evaluating systemic performance and understanding the underlying issues. Plus, most businesses don’t have access to their individual performance as a tenant in a cloud with multiple tenants.
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Inability to predict impact of cloud infrastructure downtime on other applications and infrastructure
This disparity can create severe inefficiencies in the monitoring system.
What the scaled enterprise owners and operates need, is an integrated system that can bridge the data disparity gap.
Essentially, one platform should garner the insights for both the cloud and the on-premises infrastructure.
It should help the IT managers and operators get the baseline, automated alerts on threshold breach, comprehensive monitoring, and automated reporting on the entire system.
By having an integrated monitoring system in place, businesses can perform effective correlation studies whenever a problem or issue is discovered.
When you are selecting the network monitoring tool that can integrate both the facets, make sure you can source insights from the cloud API and the onsite infrastructure using protocols like SNMP and IP SLA or other standard protocols.
Once you have established the sources, here are the metrics you can focus on:
- Data transmission across the network interface, measured in bytes or other units.
- Timeline-based CPU Utilization in line with the billing period. This metric will also help you get clarity on the credit balance and use, along with accrued charges spread over the billing timeline.
- System Integrity KPIs will let you know if the system instance, customer instance or system has failed.
- Finally, the Storage KPIs that help you understand the breadth and depth of data used per written operation in a billing period.
Key Benefits of Having an Integrated Monitoring tool for Cloud and Onsite Infrastructure
The focus is not just on having a federated platform that can pull data from different systems managed by different vendors.
The aim here is to find value in the integrated and unified analysis of this data that makes each stream of data comparable with another category, even if they don’t directly relate.
If implemented with the right platform in place, the proposition can yield outstanding results for the IT Network Manager in the form of:
Comprehensive Visibility of the Entire IT Infrastructure
This will help you have a clear idea of the big-picture.
Monitoring capabilities which allow you to effectively monitor cloud based resources along with your on-premise networks can highlight the bottlenecks, larger trends, and strategic initiatives you should be planning for.
Single Dashboard for All Insights
The power of having one dashboard is that it allows you to take a deeper look at even the smallest elements in the system, Monitoring can be effective only when it is efficient.
Shorter Turnaround Cycles and Controlled Downtimes
Eventually, all of this helps you have shorter Mean Time to Repair and help you get the system running in no time.
Drill down into each and every transaction, extract critical code level details to resolve performance issues for your distributed cloud applications.
Better Capacity planning & forecasting
Optimize your team and resources rather than having two sperate teams and multiple tools.
Helps IT teams with better capacity planning and forecasting
Federated Cloud and Onsite System Monitoring in Action
Recently, an established mobile carrier decided to move some of its non-critical applications to the cloud offered by a major technology conglomerate.
The decision made financial sense, as the IT Team often complained that it was spending a ton of resources in just managing and maintaining ancillary services whenever it released a new update or patch.
Hence, the management team decided to make a list of priority and critical applications and started the migration process for all the other ones.
After some time, the management decided to take a comprehensive look and perform an impact-analysis study of the decision.
To its utter surprise, the management team got to know that the IT Team had next to no visibility on the health of the cloud applications.
The IT Leadership stated that the Cloud API was good enough to provide reports on the cloud and its applications.
However, the team was also responsible for evaluating the critical onsite systems, and it was becoming difficult to maintain monitoring of two other uncorrelated systems.
The management team wanted comprehensive data from both sides in the right context.
Hence, it decided to integrate a federated network system that could consider the data from both cloud and onsite infrastructure and help the IT Team get comparable data for both the fronts.
The team could now Manage, optimize and resolve issues at every layer of cloud infrastructure right up to the end user experience to get unmatched visibility
In Conclusion
An integrated monitoring system that can plough insights from both the cloud and the onsite infrastructure of data centers can be an asset for any enterprise with different vendors on-board.
Generally, having multiple dashboards that just report the data from one source can create inefficiencies in monitoring.
A unified system should take the right data from the right sources and bring it all together to understandable insights, presented in the right context, and covering the enterprise-standard KPIs.
Motadata is a virtual appliance based platform that evaluates, monitors, and manages business-critical on prem and cloud-based (public and private) services, applications, and infrastructure from a Single UI.
Motadata’s cloud monitoring solution provides a complete picture of the overall health of your cloud environment including all the nodes, users, and transactions from one dashboard.
To know how we can help you write to us sales@motadata.com
FAQs:
Separate monitoring can lead to data silos, inconsistent performance metrics, delayed issue resolution, and a lack of holistic insight into system performance.
Key metrics include CPU usage, memory utilization, network latency, application performance, and availability of services in both environments.
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