According to a webinar presented by Viavi, 6 Steps for Maintaining Control in the Cloud, a survey was conducted by Gartner Research with IT engineers that had moved workloads to the cloud. The results showed that approximately 53% of respondents were blind as to what happens in their cloud network and 79% were dissatisfied with the monitoring data that they get about their cloud network. This lack of proper monitoring data leads to a lack of ability to accurately understand what your network is doing and how well it is/is not performing.
In a previous blog, I talked about how to get visibility into cloud networks and resolve the first part of the problem. This included why visibility was important and how to accomplish it. Once you have that information, the next thing you need to understand is the performance of your cloud network so that you can answer important questions. This includes:
How will the network handle the application data that you currently have?
Is the current contracted work space enough?
Will you encounter performance problems and need to upgrade the CPU and memory in a hurry before you get more user complaints?
Here are three suggestions to help you:
■ Test your cloud network for adequate capacity before you migrate from your current on-premises solution
■ Monitor your cloud and on-premises networks during the migration process
■ Continually verify that your cloud provider is delivering upon the contracted SLA
To get the answers you want, the first thing you will want to do is to insert virtual taps into your cloud network so that you get the proper monitoring data you need.
The second thing you will want to do is create a proactive cloud monitoring solution. Basically, this is a monitoring solution that uses software agents and probes that you can place across your cloud and physical infrastructure.
With a proactive monitoring solution, you can use visibility technology to actively test your solution before migration, during migration, and after migration. For instance, you can pre-test the network with synthetic traffic to understand how the solution will perform against either specific application traffic or a combination of traffic types. The synthetic traffic provides you the network and/or application loading of a "busy hour" and the flexibility to perform evaluations during the network maintenance window.
Once the migration starts, you can measure the ambient latency, throughput, and performance problems on a per-hop basis within the network to see how it is performing. This lets you analyze both your on-premises solution as well as your cloud solution. This can be especially important if you have a hybrid solution right now, and are in the (often multi-year) process of transitioning from the physical to the virtual (cloud) world. A proactive testing and monitoring approach gives you the confidence that your new application rollouts will be successful in either network.
Proactive monitoring also allows you to perform SLA validation during business hours, since it is not service disrupting. This allows you validate the SLA performance at will. The information gathered can then be used to inform management about which goals are being met. If goals are not being met, you can use the impartial data you have collected and contact your vendor to have them either fix any observed network problems, or give you a discount if they are failing to meet agreed upon SLAs.
The Latest
Gartner has highlighted the top trends that will impact technology providers in 2024: Generative AI (GenAI) is dominating the technical and product agenda of nearly every tech provider ...
In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 4 - Part 1, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) discusses artificial intelligence and network management ...
The integration and maintenance of AI-enabled Software as a Service (SaaS) applications have emerged as pivotal points in enterprise AI implementation strategies, offering both significant challenges and promising benefits. Despite the enthusiasm surrounding AI's potential impact, the reality of its implementation presents hurdles. Currently, over 90% of enterprises are grappling with limitations in integrating AI into their tech stack ...
In the intricate landscape of IT infrastructure, one critical component often relegated to the back burner is Active Directory (AD) forest recovery — an oversight with costly consequences ...
eBPF is a technology that allows users to run custom programs inside the Linux kernel, which changes the behavior of the kernel and makes execution up to 10x faster(link is external) and more efficient for key parts of what makes our computing lives work. That includes observability, networking and security ...
Data mesh, an increasingly important decentralized approach to data architecture and organizational design, focuses on treating data as a product, emphasizing domain-oriented data ownership, self-service tools and federated governance. The 2024 State of the Data Lakehouse report from Dremio presents evidence of the growing adoption of data mesh architectures in enterprises ... The report highlights that the drive towards data mesh is increasingly becoming a business strategy to enhance agility and speed in problem-solving and innovation ...
Too much traffic can crash a website ... That stampede of traffic is even more horrifying when it's part of a malicious denial of service attack ... These attacks are becoming more common, more sophisticated and increasingly tied to ransomware-style demands. So it's no wonder that the threat of DDoS remains one of the many things that keep IT and marketing leaders up at night ...
Today, applications serve as the backbone of businesses, and therefore, ensuring optimal performance has never been more critical. This is where application performance monitoring (APM) emerges as an indispensable tool, empowering organizations to safeguard their applications proactively, match user expectations, and drive growth. But APM is not without its challenges. Choosing to implement APM is a path that's not easily realized, even if it offers great benefits. This blog deals with the potential hurdles that may manifest when you actualize your APM strategy in your IT application environment ...
This year's Super Bowl drew in viewership of nearly 124 million viewers and made history as the most-watched live broadcast event since the 1969 moon landing. To support this spike in viewership, streaming companies like YouTube TV, Hulu and Paramount+ began preparing their IT infrastructure months in advance to ensure an exceptional viewer experience without outages or major interruptions. New Relic conducted a survey to understand the importance of a seamless viewing experience and the impact of outages during major streaming events such as the Super Bowl ...