Moving toward hybrid cloud solutions requires companies’ IT departments to adopt a more complex way of running their processes. The combinations of Clouds and on-premises software offer endless choices for managing workloads. But at the same time, transitioning to the cloud can cause sprawl from the unsanctioned nature of cloud-based services. To optimize the work of all your applications, you need the right solutions and toolsets. Check out this article to discover new ways to overcome the challenges around hybrid cloud performance management.
Monitoring Engineer – a New Kind of Job
In the experimentation spirit of high-performance cloud computing, organizations are developing the concept of putting someone in charge of all the monitoring. That person owns application monitoring in the business and is usually called a monitoring engineer. This position is a proactive and innovative way to align business and IT goals. The thing is that metrics have traditionally been serving the goals of applications and not necessarily the whole company. Hybrid cloud performance monitoring is different. The monitoring engineer is responsible for providing quick and focused answers to management. At the same time, monitoring does not revolve anymore around resources. It’s centered around applications and services.
Once you’ve found the perfect monitoring engineer, it’s time to standardize languages, processes, and overall management. If you’re dealing with hybrid cloud performance management of either the infrastructure or applications resources, standardization is a must.
Application Performance Monitoring (APM)
Cloud application performance monitoring has emerged from measuring application performance and availability. The monitoring engineer needs to know about applications’ operational deployments, configurations, and the overall app environment. But the cool thing is that the engineer is not required to know everything about the application’s code. That means pretty much anyone who has experience with either on-premise software or the private cloud environment is suitable for the tasks. All they need is a supportive structure from the management, focus, and time. The specific APM skills will come through work experience.
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Generating Cloud Performance Metrics That Work for Your Business
With APM, tech pros have a new tool to generate metrics. And this time, the metrics and the data are focused on business, making them much more relevant. So what are the measurements that matter the most? We can divide them into two classes:
- Availability management checks the resources’ availability to applications. Plus, it monitors possible errors and ensures the technology stack resources keep running.
- Application performance checks users’ experiences with the applications’ response times. It also measures the amount of business-related work done in specific periods.
This approach to on-premises and cloud performance metrics is not only beneficial for your business goals. It also improves the customer experience and makes your systems able to handle peaks in demand in the most cost-effective way possible. The bottom line is that these metrics give us an understanding of the performance of applications from the users’ perspective. And guess what? It’s good for your revenue and overall business to pay more attention to the people using your apps and websites.
More Benefits of APM
APM is also an excellent method for identifying the infrastructure elements you need to enable the apps to provide excellent service. Whether your business is an online casino with games like Explodiac or an Ecommerce venture selling bicycle parts, simple infrastructure monitoring is not giving you all the answers. It can only make conclusions about app performance based on the rates of technology resource usage.
Hybrid Cloud’s Security
When talking about hybrid Google cloud storage performance, we can’t forget about security. Cloud sprawl that drags down your systems’ efficiency also increases the security risks. And unfortunately, the combination of on-premise servers and cloud solutions only complicates the issues. There are more workload owners than ever, and all of their apps and devices need to get monitored. Let’s take a look at a modern holistic solution that enables you to see the entire hybrid environment and manage security proactively.
Cloud Sprawl Management: 4 Steps
If you want to manage the risks caused by cloud sprawl successfully, you need to use a cloud-native solution. Here are four steps of an integrated method for sprawl control:
- Always backup your data to recover from a wipeout.
- Use machine learning and built-in analytics for insights about everything happening in your hybrid environment in real-time.
- Set Up Security Guardrails. Policy-based management is the best approach to build accountability.
- Implement automated policies to make regular updates and configurations.
Using these four steps gives you valuable insights that enable you to fix the problems quicker.
Conclusion
Cloud computing innovates your company and helps to reduce overall costs. At the same time, you can keep some of your workloads on local servers for increased security. Adopting the hybrid cloud model enables you to get the best of both worlds. And using the tips from this article allows you to handle cloud sprawl and other possible challenges along the way. It’s your business, and it’s time to upgrade it.
Which cloud application for performance monitoring are you using in your organization? Let us know in the comments.