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4 Key Resources to Monitor in the Cloud

Good application performance monitoring in the cloud involves repeatedly monitoring and testing a few key areas that act differently in most cloud environments than they do in traditional situations. Tracking the resulting values over time allows you to track normal usage patterns and trends, and determine normal behavior for your provider's resources.

Valuable resources to monitor in the cloud include:

1. Network Latency

If your application depends on access to a network resource, like DNS for reverse lookup of domain names for example, then the application should regularly test this resource and your monitoring system should record its results in an easily visualized format. Also, the access time to the hosts application from both cloud and non-cloud locations should be checked and tracked. This will allow differential latency comparisons that will help reduce uncertainty about the root cause of slow response time. For instance, if the application is fast from within the cloud, and slow from without, is there a network issue on the cloud provider's Internet facing systems?

2. Cloud API Feature Availability

If your application is dynamic, and needs to use features of the Cloud vendor's API to function, you should script and test those functions to ensure they are available, and that they perform fast enough to meet your needs. Functions like instance launching, taking a volume snapshot, or adding a new volume to a running instance are good things to test periodically.

3. Virtualization Overhead

Differential monitoring of instances in the cloud versus instances on actual hardware can help you determine overall virtualization overhead for your application. Knowing the relative performance will help you size the instances you launch, and let you calculate the cost of operation on cloud infrastructure versus in-house. This makes cost-benefit analysis and cost-based justification for using cloud systems possible.

4. Configuration Tracking

So many of the failures experienced by computing infrastructures are the result of improperly managed configuration changes. The knowledge of the last time a configuration was changed becomes a critical piece of information in root cause analysis. At a minimum, the monitoring system should have a record of boot time (often associated with updates or other configuration changes) and ideally it will also have some indication of the nature of the change.

While moving to the cloud can be cost-effective in the abstract, as with any technology project it’s important to validate the assumptions you make when determining what to move, and what the cost savings actually end up to be.

About Roger Ruttiman

Roger Ruttiman, VP of Engineering & Quality at GroundWork, has 18 years of software development and leadership experience. Ruttiman is the lead architect responsible for product architecture, building and managing local and offshore teams. Before joining GroundWork, Ruttiman was a lead engineer at Advent Software in San Francisco, and at Autodesk in the US and Europe.

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4 Key Resources to Monitor in the Cloud

Good application performance monitoring in the cloud involves repeatedly monitoring and testing a few key areas that act differently in most cloud environments than they do in traditional situations. Tracking the resulting values over time allows you to track normal usage patterns and trends, and determine normal behavior for your provider's resources.

Valuable resources to monitor in the cloud include:

1. Network Latency

If your application depends on access to a network resource, like DNS for reverse lookup of domain names for example, then the application should regularly test this resource and your monitoring system should record its results in an easily visualized format. Also, the access time to the hosts application from both cloud and non-cloud locations should be checked and tracked. This will allow differential latency comparisons that will help reduce uncertainty about the root cause of slow response time. For instance, if the application is fast from within the cloud, and slow from without, is there a network issue on the cloud provider's Internet facing systems?

2. Cloud API Feature Availability

If your application is dynamic, and needs to use features of the Cloud vendor's API to function, you should script and test those functions to ensure they are available, and that they perform fast enough to meet your needs. Functions like instance launching, taking a volume snapshot, or adding a new volume to a running instance are good things to test periodically.

3. Virtualization Overhead

Differential monitoring of instances in the cloud versus instances on actual hardware can help you determine overall virtualization overhead for your application. Knowing the relative performance will help you size the instances you launch, and let you calculate the cost of operation on cloud infrastructure versus in-house. This makes cost-benefit analysis and cost-based justification for using cloud systems possible.

4. Configuration Tracking

So many of the failures experienced by computing infrastructures are the result of improperly managed configuration changes. The knowledge of the last time a configuration was changed becomes a critical piece of information in root cause analysis. At a minimum, the monitoring system should have a record of boot time (often associated with updates or other configuration changes) and ideally it will also have some indication of the nature of the change.

While moving to the cloud can be cost-effective in the abstract, as with any technology project it’s important to validate the assumptions you make when determining what to move, and what the cost savings actually end up to be.

About Roger Ruttiman

Roger Ruttiman, VP of Engineering & Quality at GroundWork, has 18 years of software development and leadership experience. Ruttiman is the lead architect responsible for product architecture, building and managing local and offshore teams. Before joining GroundWork, Ruttiman was a lead engineer at Advent Software in San Francisco, and at Autodesk in the US and Europe.

Hot Topics

The Latest

According to Auvik's 2025 IT Trends Report, 60% of IT professionals feel at least moderately burned out on the job, with 43% stating that their workload is contributing to work stress. At the same time, many IT professionals are naming AI and machine learning as key areas they'd most like to upskill ...

Businesses that face downtime or outages risk financial and reputational damage, as well as reducing partner, shareholder, and customer trust. One of the major challenges that enterprises face is implementing a robust business continuity plan. What's the solution? The answer may lie in disaster recovery tactics such as truly immutable storage and regular disaster recovery testing ...

IT spending is expected to jump nearly 10% in 2025, and organizations are now facing pressure to manage costs without slowing down critical functions like observability. To meet the challenge, leaders are turning to smarter, more cost effective business strategies. Enter stage right: OpenTelemetry, the missing piece of the puzzle that is no longer just an option but rather a strategic advantage ...

Amidst the threat of cyberhacks and data breaches, companies install several security measures to keep their business safely afloat. These measures aim to protect businesses, employees, and crucial data. Yet, employees perceive them as burdensome. Frustrated with complex logins, slow access, and constant security checks, workers decide to completely bypass all security set-ups ...

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Cloudbrink's Personal SASE services provide last-mile acceleration and reduction in latency

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 13, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses hybrid multi-cloud networking strategy ... 

In high-traffic environments, the sheer volume and unpredictable nature of network incidents can quickly overwhelm even the most skilled teams, hindering their ability to react swiftly and effectively, potentially impacting service availability and overall business performance. This is where closed-loop remediation comes into the picture: an IT management concept designed to address the escalating complexity of modern networks ...

In 2025, enterprise workflows are undergoing a seismic shift. Propelled by breakthroughs in generative AI (GenAI), large language models (LLMs), and natural language processing (NLP), a new paradigm is emerging — agentic AI. This technology is not just automating tasks; it's reimagining how organizations make decisions, engage customers, and operate at scale ...

In the early days of the cloud revolution, business leaders perceived cloud services as a means of sidelining IT organizations. IT was too slow, too expensive, or incapable of supporting new technologies. With a team of developers, line of business managers could deploy new applications and services in the cloud. IT has been fighting to retake control ever since. Today, IT is back in the driver's seat, according to new research by Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) ...

In today's fast-paced and increasingly complex network environments, Network Operations Centers (NOCs) are the backbone of ensuring continuous uptime, smooth service delivery, and rapid issue resolution. However, the challenges faced by NOC teams are only growing. In a recent study, 78% state network complexity has grown significantly over the last few years while 84% regularly learn about network issues from users. It is imperative we adopt a new approach to managing today's network experiences ...

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Broadcom

From growing reliance on FinOps teams to the increasing attention on artificial intelligence (AI), and software licensing, the Flexera 2025 State of the Cloud Report digs into how organizations are improving cloud spend efficiency, while tackling the complexities of emerging technologies ...