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A Private Matter: Performance Management in the Private Cloud

One of the most important Business Service Management challenges facing companies right now is how to maintain performance management when migrating to the cloud. But the truth is that there are public clouds and private clouds, which are both very different – and consequently require very different ways of approaching monitoring, management and BSM.

Public cloud seems to be getting most of the press these days, which is not really fair, because private cloud seems to be getting most of the deployments.

“Our research is showing that private cloud adoption, and intent for adoption, is outweighing public cloud by a significant margin,” confirms Julie Craig, Research Director, Enterprise Management Associates (EMA). “Most of the companies that we deal with are moving rapidly towards private cloud adoption and less quickly towards public cloud adoption.”

Interestingly, the reasons behind the popularity of private cloud are related to Business Service Management. Craig explains, “Most companies want the visibility and control over their mission-critical deployments, which would be lacking if they move them to a public cloud.”

The Management Challenge

While the public cloud is a whole new approach to IT that involves outsourcing your infrastructure, the private cloud is simply a virtualized environment that serves the business side of the organization more efficiently by offering functionality such as usage metering, standardized service catalogs, and on-demand self-service provisioning. For this reason, private cloud brings much of the same challenges as the virtual environment, such as the need for a new type of monitoring tool designed for virtualization.

“Private clouds have highly virtualized environments, and we are just getting to the point right now where a lot of the traditional application and transaction management vendors are providing good visibility into virtualized environments,” says Craig. “Companies that do not have the ability to trace business services across virtualized environments are going to have to deal with that before they are going to be successful in terms of monitoring their private cloud.”

Craig also points out a difference between virtualization and private cloud – virtualization tends to have more infrastructure-focused monitoring capabilities, but as organizations move to private cloud, they need to focus more on monitoring applications and business services. This also happens to be a critical step towards Business Service Management.

Click here to read more about how private cloud drives Business Service Management.

Managing Across Hybrid Environments

Another challenge of monitoring and management in the private cloud is that for the present, most environments will be hybrid – some combination of cloud and physical, and even some combination between public and private cloud. In the hybrid environment, an organization could easily end up with multiple, disconnected management tool silos.

“It is important to have one monitoring solution that covers both physical assets and the private cloud,” says Ben Grubin, Director, Data Center Solutions, Novell. “There is a tendency that the more different environments you compute within – private cloud, public cloud, virtual and physical environments – the more different management stacks you have to maintain. This is untenable in the long run. They need to come together in a single pane of glass. You need to have a single management stack that is capable of working across all those environments.”

“Ultimately, it is important for companies to move toward comprehensive monitoring across the public and private cloud,” Craig agrees. “That is still forward thinking – I don’t think there are too many companies that are going to be doing that within the next year or so, just because it is going to take a while for management products to mature to that point. And also because it is going to take a while for adoption to mature to the point.”

“But this is something to keep in mind as you purchase new products, to look at the capability and even just the direction of the vendor in terms of whether they will be able to support capabilities like bursting,” Craig adds, referring to the capability to switch applications from private to public cloud as needed, such as during a periodic spike in usage. “If you want to be able to do those kinds of things, you are going to need products in place that can support that.”

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A Private Matter: Performance Management in the Private Cloud

One of the most important Business Service Management challenges facing companies right now is how to maintain performance management when migrating to the cloud. But the truth is that there are public clouds and private clouds, which are both very different – and consequently require very different ways of approaching monitoring, management and BSM.

Public cloud seems to be getting most of the press these days, which is not really fair, because private cloud seems to be getting most of the deployments.

“Our research is showing that private cloud adoption, and intent for adoption, is outweighing public cloud by a significant margin,” confirms Julie Craig, Research Director, Enterprise Management Associates (EMA). “Most of the companies that we deal with are moving rapidly towards private cloud adoption and less quickly towards public cloud adoption.”

Interestingly, the reasons behind the popularity of private cloud are related to Business Service Management. Craig explains, “Most companies want the visibility and control over their mission-critical deployments, which would be lacking if they move them to a public cloud.”

The Management Challenge

While the public cloud is a whole new approach to IT that involves outsourcing your infrastructure, the private cloud is simply a virtualized environment that serves the business side of the organization more efficiently by offering functionality such as usage metering, standardized service catalogs, and on-demand self-service provisioning. For this reason, private cloud brings much of the same challenges as the virtual environment, such as the need for a new type of monitoring tool designed for virtualization.

“Private clouds have highly virtualized environments, and we are just getting to the point right now where a lot of the traditional application and transaction management vendors are providing good visibility into virtualized environments,” says Craig. “Companies that do not have the ability to trace business services across virtualized environments are going to have to deal with that before they are going to be successful in terms of monitoring their private cloud.”

Craig also points out a difference between virtualization and private cloud – virtualization tends to have more infrastructure-focused monitoring capabilities, but as organizations move to private cloud, they need to focus more on monitoring applications and business services. This also happens to be a critical step towards Business Service Management.

Click here to read more about how private cloud drives Business Service Management.

Managing Across Hybrid Environments

Another challenge of monitoring and management in the private cloud is that for the present, most environments will be hybrid – some combination of cloud and physical, and even some combination between public and private cloud. In the hybrid environment, an organization could easily end up with multiple, disconnected management tool silos.

“It is important to have one monitoring solution that covers both physical assets and the private cloud,” says Ben Grubin, Director, Data Center Solutions, Novell. “There is a tendency that the more different environments you compute within – private cloud, public cloud, virtual and physical environments – the more different management stacks you have to maintain. This is untenable in the long run. They need to come together in a single pane of glass. You need to have a single management stack that is capable of working across all those environments.”

“Ultimately, it is important for companies to move toward comprehensive monitoring across the public and private cloud,” Craig agrees. “That is still forward thinking – I don’t think there are too many companies that are going to be doing that within the next year or so, just because it is going to take a while for management products to mature to that point. And also because it is going to take a while for adoption to mature to the point.”

“But this is something to keep in mind as you purchase new products, to look at the capability and even just the direction of the vendor in terms of whether they will be able to support capabilities like bursting,” Craig adds, referring to the capability to switch applications from private to public cloud as needed, such as during a periodic spike in usage. “If you want to be able to do those kinds of things, you are going to need products in place that can support that.”

Hot Topics

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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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OpenTelemetry (OTel) arrived with a grand promise: a unified, vendor-neutral standard for observability data (traces, metrics, logs) that would free engineers from vendor lock-in and provide deeper insights into complex systems ... No powerful technology comes without its challenges, and OpenTelemetry is no exception. The engineers we spoke with were frank about the friction points they've encountered ...

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The power of Kubernetes lies in its ability to orchestrate containerized applications with unparalleled efficiency. Yet, this power comes at a cost: the dynamic, distributed, and ephemeral nature of its architecture creates a monitoring challenge akin to tracking a constantly shifting, interconnected network of fleeting entities ... Due to the dynamic and complex nature of Kubernetes, monitoring poses a substantial challenge for DevOps and platform engineers. Here are the primary obstacles ...

The perception of IT has undergone a remarkable transformation in recent years. What was once viewed primarily as a cost center has transformed into a pivotal force driving business innovation and market leadership ... As someone who has witnessed and helped drive this evolution, it's become clear to me that the most successful organizations share a common thread: they've mastered the art of leveraging IT advancements to achieve measurable business outcomes ...