Monitis: Cloud Monitoring Blog

2020. I’ll have slowed down a bit physically, and hopefully I’ll be a bit wiser about life, but by then, one thing’s for sure – accessing software via cloud computing, versus the desktop, will be the standard.

This is the finding of a new survey by the Pew Research Center. The organization asked IT pros and other stakeholders around the world questions about technology, and the vast majority of respondents, nearly three-quarters, said that by 2010, most people will not use software on a general-purpose PC to do their work. Instead, they predict that application developers will develop for smart phones and other companies that provide Internet-based applications, rather than PC operating systems.

But just as we’re seeing today, 2020’s computing infrastructure will include a mix of private clouds, public clouds and internal servers.

Despite the sunny outlook, the availability of broadband, the ability of diverse systems to work together, security, privacy and quality of service were all issues that those polled cited. Others polled worried that vesting the majority of their data in a few large companies that constitute most of the cloud, such as Google, would limit the openness, innovation and creativity of the Internet.

Ten years from now, I have no doubt that doing business on the cloud will be more common than it is today – and that it’ll even be preferable (even in a hybrid environment). But what I’m even more sure of is how the need for monitoring of cloud-based apps and services will continue and grow. As more companies put their faith in cloud providers, they’ll also recognize the need to make sure those providers deliver.

I read about the new Harvey Nash CIO Survey 2010 in which there were some stark differences in the findings for European and American CIOs. One big dividing line was that even though U.S. CIOs are paid a lot more and have more responsibility, they are less satisfied with their jobs than the CIOs across the Atlantic. German and Scandinavian CIOs scored much higher on job satisfaction.

Before I even got into the article, which was an interview with Harvey Nash, the survey project leader, I knew the explanation behind that finding: 2009 was a rough year, and American CIOs had their budgets cut – yet were asked to do a lot more. Who could blame them for being dissatisfied?

But what struck me most of all about the survey results was that European CIOs were less likely to use SaaS and cloud services than their Yankee cousins. I say it struck me because the Europeans, on many fronts, often embrace technology faster than Americans and deploy it for the public good, for example, hi-speed trains and smart credit cards.

According to Nash, one explanation is that folks who were experimenting with this model aren’t shifting their entire infrastructures to the cloud. U.S. CIOs, although nervous about the Cloud in the beginning, have come to accept it. “We spoke to more small and mid-cap CIOs in the U.S., and many of them were more open to it than the larger companies,” Nash said.

That could have a lot to do with the U.S. emerging from the recession faster than, say, the U.K. and continental Europe. In his survey, Nash asked companies, “How are you approaching the new year?” and found that “the further you went across Europe to the East, the less likely the CIOs were to be using SaaS. But having said that, I don’t think it means they are not doing it, they are just doing it at a more cautious rate.”

Although I have no doubt German, French and English IT executives will eventually embrace the Cloud on a more robust level, I think Euro CIOs are plenty concerned about cloud security, just as their American counterparts were and continue to be.

One way to deal with those concerns is to approach the Cloud in stages – leave sensitive data and super-important apps on your internal server. Another way is to use SaaS (I know, I know, if you Europeans aren’t ready for SaaS, that’s OK.) and cloud-based monitoring solutions to make sure your data is safe and apps are running smoothly.

There are always options!

The Google I/O Conference in San Francisco rendered a surprise announcement today that I think will benefit companies who want a more productive and flexible cloud experience. That’ll draw more companies to the cloud and in turn benefit the entire industry.

Google and VMware, the industry’s big name in virtualization and cloud infrastructure, will collaborate to make solutions for enterprise software developers to build, deploy and manage applications in the cloud – in whatever form, public, private or hybrid. The plan is to work together on technology and expertise that will accelerate adoption of cloud computing.

“Companies are actively looking to move toward cloud computing. They are certainly attracted by the economic advantages associated with cloud, but increasingly are focused on the business agility and innovation promised by cloud computing,” said Paul Maritz, president and CEO of VMware, in a story that I read on MarketWatch. “VMware and Google are aligning to reassure our mutual customers and the Java community that choice and portability are of utmost importance to both companies. We will work to ensure that modern applications can run smoothly within the firewalls of a company’s datacenter or out in the public cloud environment.”

What this alliance means is that cloud applications, at least through the projects worked on by VMware and Google, will become more productive, portable, and flexible. And Java developers will have more power to build rich web applications, use Google and VMware performance tools on cloud apps, and deployments of Spring Java applications on Google App Engine.

“Developers are looking for faster ways to build and run great web applications, and businesses want platforms that are open and flexible,” said Vic Gundotra, Google vice president of developer platforms. “By working with VMware to bring cloud portability to the enterprise, we are making it easy for developers to deploy rich Java applications in the environments of their choice.”

To top it all off, Spring, Google App Engine, and SpringSource Tool Suite Google is announcing support for Spring Java apps on Google App Engine to make it easy to build, run, and manage applications for the cloud, and to make them portable across clouds, too.

This is great news for companies that use cloud apps with Java, and even better news is now they can independently monitor those Java-based apps via Monitis’s cloud-based Java monitoring tool. Monitis’s Cloud-based Application Monitoring Tool provides monitoring, troubleshooting, root cause diagnosis, plus pro-active planning tools such as load generators, scalability analysis, resource usage analysis and more.  Specifically, the Java Applicaton Monitoring tool:

• Monitors every metric, log, and configuration for all JMX resources in your inventory
• Identifies problem resources
• Controls all JMX resources on-demand
• Sends alerts on any measurement, log, or security event in your JMX environment
• Integrates fully into Monitis’ award-winning internal and external monitoring suite.

On June 15, the world will get to buy Microsoft’s Office 2010 productivity suite. Yes, there are a lot of improvements to the package, which includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook. I read somewhere that there’s more than 100 upgrades from the 2007 version.

But the biggest buzz about Office 2010 is the cloud computing option – which Microsoft has developed to compete with the growingly popular cloud-based Google Apps (Now boasting 25 million users!).

Microsoft hopes current users of Office will upgrade because of Web Apps, a cloud-based platform that is designed to integrate with Office’s desktop programs. Web Apps will let users upload their documents from their computers to Microsoft’s cloud-based Docs.com, allowing for accessibility from any machine or device anywhere with a web connection.

Yet Google will be a tough act for Microsoft to follow. Even though Office Word is the world’s most popular document editing software out there, Google has been dominating the cloud for years. And what I find a brilliant marketing move, the company is targeting educational institutions…and signing them, too, for use of Gmail and Docs as primary mail and document management tools.

The proof of Google’s success? I believe Google has something like 60% of U.S. schools as customers now – with about 8 million users. The apps represent a low-cost way for students and faculty to create and collaborate on documents.

No matter which cloud-computing app companies and schools choose, many are recognizing the importance of monitoring how those apps perform. That’s why they’re turning to monitoring software like Monitis, which resides and operates on the cloud, to keep 24/7 watch over how the cloud platforms that support those apps are running. Schools, like businesses, depend on notifications that monitoring tools provide to help them spot and address issues with their service providers.

Recently, I read a blog about customer relationship management (CRM), and it brought out a lot of great points about how cloud computing makes a lot of sense for small businesses.

Cost Savings, Minimizing Expenditures

First, start-ups see the technology as an end-to-end solution that presents multiple cost savings opportunities. For example, start-ups may not be sure of when their business volume will go up or down, but the cloud allows them the opportunity to pay only for the server capacity that they need. So, they can scale up or down as necessary.

Another cloud benefit for smaller firms is that they don’t need to put out a huge amount of capital to support servers – for example, housing, cooling and maintaining them. Instead, they can focus more on selling their products.

Training/Education

Cloud-based applications are customizable and extremely user-friendly, and companies don’t have to waste a lot of time training employees to use the system and subsequent upgrades. The cloud also gives companies a chance to let their IT folks do more strategic work – like planning for the future growth of computing needs – rather than running around resolving technical problems and putting out fires. Lastly, smaller companies can give wider access to cloud applications to employees because they can use the cloud via their Blackberrys, iPad, iPhone or other device with access to the web. They don’t even need a PC.

Computing Costs

The Cloud holds advantages where the pocketbook is concerned, too. While costs for a dedicated server varies, depending on the apps hosted, a small business that needs to use a server for 700 to 800 hours a month could pay about $24.95 per month for shared hosting and between $90 and $140 for cloud computing, says the article. On the other hand, a dedicated server can cost $55 to $100 each month.

OK; so you may be asking, isn’t a dedicated server cheaper? Not really, because cloud computing usually comes with maintenance, free upgrades, and data encryption for security purposes. You’ll find cloud computing vendors that only charge pennies per hour in operating costs, while some will even offer free cloud computing services for limited daily use. For example, companies like Monitis, offer free monitoring tools, such as the ability to instantly check websites to see if they’re up or down.

Best of all, firms that prepay for cloud services often get the best prices. According to the article, experts estimate that a cloud computing data center is capable of operating 100 servers for just about $38,000 per year, only $5 per hour. And you can get even better rates when you contract with cloud vendors because they can predict profits for the year.

Tracking SLAs

While contracting with cloud vendors may get you better pricing, it’s not a guarantee of good service. That’s why it’s important to constantly track and monitor service level agreements (SLAs), and a good independent monitoring company can give you accurate numbers on such things as cloud performance metrics. Plus, monitoring services, such as Monitis, offer companies proactive notification if a server fails on your cloud platform.

Cloud computing makes good economic and business sense for small companies, and backing up those services with independent monitoring makes even more sense.

The cloud and its relationship to the economy; what an interesting subject.

Some say the cloud is growing because the economy is so bad (well, bad but getting better), and that companies are increasingly adopting the cloud because computing costs are lower (for example, server maintenance costs).

But I like James Urquhart’s contention that the cloud is growing because businesses want more agility in their cash flow. Specifically, what’s so attractive about the cloud, especially to start-ups, is that the cloud’s “pay-as-you-go” model, allows companies to have more cash on hand – to invest, to improve their products, to grow.

Let’s look at this more closely. Traditionally, corporate IT builds or buys an application, usually paying up-front licensing fees. And then the company has to buy the infrastructure on which to run the app. That’s a huge investment, and much of its return depends on the success or failure of that app.

Cloud computing, however, allows companies to migrate from a capital-intensive strategy and replace it with an ongoing operational expense. Plus, if you’re not buying software for apps and such, you don’t have to suffer through version after version until you get the one that works without a hitch. All that’s taken care of on the cloud.

While I agree with Urquhart’s theory, I give credit to the growth of the cloud to the troubled economy, too. I think lower cost computing – whether it’s seen from an upfront investment or long-term savings perspective – is more attractive to more organizations in these days of tight IT budgets and CIO directives to pare costs.

And I offer proof that that theory is correct – judging from the success we at Monitis are experiencing, in terms of growing interest in cloud-based monitoring services of everything from cloud platforms, servers, websites, transactions, apps, etc.

Ever since Google was hacked late last year, I’ve been wondering just how much information was accessed and compromised. Well, we now know.

There was a recent story in the New York Times that quoted an anonymous person with direct knowledge of Google’s investigation into the attack, and this person says that the hackers lifted code for Google’s single sign-on system to use its different applications, for example, Gmail and Docs. (Single sign-on software enables users to sign-on just once to all their Google services.)

While Google made major changes to its network security, the incident opened up renewed concern across the industry and among government about the security and safety of the cloud – and how stable and protected is the information stored on there.

I’ve said this before here in this blog, and I’ll say it again. The cloud is a phenomenon that’s not going to be stopped by individual incidents of security breaches. What’s needed is effective industry collaboration to improve security standards, and that’s happening now.

But savvy companies who use cloud-based services and apps should equip themselves with extra protection, such as cloud platform, website transaction and database monitoring services. Until that golden day comes when we’ve finally made hacking a lost profession, you can’t be too safe on the cloud.

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.

If you’ve been wondering what the iPad will do for the cloud, or what it even has to do with the cloud, wonder no more.

A new poll asked 135 IT folks how they thought the iPad affects cloud computing. It shows that 30% predict the iPad will “further push the value of virtualized infrastructures” so that data can be accessed from different devices. Another 20% foresaw that the new gadget, the debut of which has just been postponed until the end of May due to growing demand, proves that all objects will eventually become “internet appliances” connecting to the cloud.

The next biggest percentage, nearly one in five (18%) responded that storage “will become a major issue,” as people rethink how they store and organize data by using the iPad. Next, 15% turned the question on its head and said that the cloud “affects the iPad more than the iPad having an effect on the cloud.” Another 13% didn’t see any relationship between the cloud and iPad, while a small number, 3%, consider the iPad Apple’s mothership, and so people will trust the brand to adopt cloud computing.

Most of the respondents who recognize the relationship between the iPad and the cloud probably also understand that virtualization plays a key role in the way cloud computing evolves. And people agree that the tablet is the next step to an embedded computer on any object.

My view of the value of the iPad is that, more so than the iPhone, it will make consumers and small businesses think about the necessity and usefulness of the cloud as the modern way of computing – access to the net anytime and anywhere and the most convenient, mobile place to store your data and access apps for work and leisure. And a deeper understanding of the cloud’s vulnerabilities in, in fact, keeping data secure, will lead to further demand for cloud monitoring services so that companies can feel more secure.

Guest Post:

Hello I’m Rick Stivers, and I’m the Director of Network & IT Services for Schoolwires. Schoolwires provides strategic online communication, community-management and productivity solutions to the K-12 education market. Our core product is Centricity, which brings together robust and flexible website management, community management and web 2.0/social network capabilities in a single, user-centric solution.  We also deliver Schoolwires Synergy™, a digital file sharing solution, and Schoolwires Assist™, a service request solution. We currently work with nearly 1,000 districts, over 5,000 schools and over  5 million users across the nation.

 We currently provide four different hosting models.

- ASP Hosted at our Managed Facility through Expedient Communications

- Educational Service Agency Hosted at their own facilities which serve districts in their regions.

- Client Hosted – Self Hosted at School Districts on their own equipment

- Schoolwires Appliance – Schoolwires maintained equipment at School Districts.

Over the past year we have really pushed toward the cloud. We implemented an Enterprise VMware Architecture with High Availability, DRS, and VMotion. One benefit of this push was higher reliability on the hardware side and reduction of our server footprint.

We began working with Monitis roughly two years ago. At the time I was unhappy with the current solution I inherited. It was a solution which required our own server, and was not robust enough for the number of sites we needed to monitor. We did an exhausting search and were just not happy with what we were finding due to the number of sites we needed to monitor and the ROI for many solutions were not cost effective. I found Mon.it.or.us, and immediately liked what I saw during the trial process. I really liked the fact that they provided a solution along the same model as ours (SaaS), and that it was priced very competitively. It could also scale to the number of sites we currently had (more than 1200) and where we expected to be in 3 years. The interface was also very user friendly and with the AJAX interfaces felt more like a desktop application than a web tool. The reports are very helpful, and really allow us to focus our attention on the lower performing sites. Monitis allows easy exporting of raw data. This has helped with productivity, because I can easily categorize reports based on hosting type and really pinpoint issues related to the location. I also liked that they were innovating and really willing to listen to feedback on feature requests. One of the real benefits of their solution is that it gives an independent view on our sites SLA numbers. Unlike software we load internally on our network and which increases our cost because it’s another server and application we need to manage.

Part of my job description requires that our sites maintain a certain SLA, and without Monitis this would be difficult to track and maintain. The downtime alerts are very accurate and allow us to respond quickly to service outages. We really value this partnership and will continue to work with Monitis to help improve their product and services. Thank you…

Rick Stivers, the Director of Network & IT Services for Schoolwires