What Not to Do Translates into What to Do in Cloud Computing
When it comes to the topic of the Cloud, I’m always reading something about how to do this or that: “7 steps to the perfect cloud” or “Build your dream cloud.” But rarely do I come across advice on what not to do in cloud computing. But just because I rarely see those types of articles or advice, doesn’t mean they don’t exist.
A recent NetworkWorld article, however, provided “a few rules for what not to do with your cloud computing efforts,” and I found several of them particularly enlightening on how to measure end-user and other success metrics. I’ll share a couple of them here and why I think they underscore the value of monitoring services:
Avoid Excessive Centralizing
– While accessing IT services in data centers around the world is the main idea of cloud computing and virtualization, it’s extremely important to be on top of the pace and progress of end-user response times. You don’t want to see too much lag time between when a user presses a key and a response from a server. The user experience has to be fast because it’s so important to cloud computing projects. If you’re migrating to the cloud, you may want to pick a provider that spreads user access nodes around the edge of its network–close to concentrations of end users. This is a great argument for employing monitoring services for cloud platforms and transactions.
Don’t Measure the Way you did before
– Make sure you’re correctly measuring service-level agreements (SLAs) with cloud providers. It used to be that agreements built on IT-centric metrics for cloud-based apps such as IPPM guidelines worked. But now more and more cloud customers want to measure by Quality of Experience (QOE), a metric of how well an application performs from the end user’s perspective. That may be better for IT, too, because IT itself will be the customer in many cloud relationships.
Again, that’s another great reason for considering monitoring services, such as Monitis, this time to make sure your provider is living up to terms of your SLA.