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APM Challenges in a Hybrid Cloud

Eric Anderson

Public and private cloud computing have received plenty of attention in recent years, as businesses worldwide have opted to implement such services. For small firms, the public model is a boon for cash-strapped companies that cannot afford any missteps in their IT procurement processes.

Large enterprises that want more control over their solutions have often opted for a private cloud, which is not a shared resource with other businesses. Although both of these options are ideal for their respective user base, hybrid clouds should not be overlooked in the grand scheme of what is becoming a necessary technology throughout the IT sector.

A recent Infonetics Research survey indicated that adoption of hybrid clouds among enterprises is projected to more than double by 2015. Platform-as-a-Service and Cloud-as-a-Service are expected to experience the largest increases between 2013 and 2015. Cliff Grossner, directing analyst for data center and cloud services at the firm, said hybrid solutions are "the next evolution in cloud architecture."

However, the cloud abstracts important detail from the people who need to make sure it's performing as expected. As business-critical applications move to the cloud, IT professionals need to understand what's happening in the "black box" beyond their physical reach.

According to Enterprise Management Associates, only five percent of companies can definitively pinpoint the source(s) of their application-related problems – and these percentages relate to on-premises applications only. At the same time, more than 50 percent of companies report the cost of an hour of downtime for the “most critical business applications” to be between $75,000 and $500,000.

The goal is to give admins the ability to identify poor user experience before it becomes a costly business issue. Yet root cause analysis requires visibility into the underlying components of the application, which is hard to achieve when the infrastructure is owned by a service provider, or distributed across disparate monitoring silos. Organizations that are far down a path with on premises or private cloud APM solutions often don’t have the tools required to deliver real-time, proactive information in public or hybrid cloud environments.

Hybrid cloud APM addresses this problem, providing a single pane of glass from which to manage application performance and availability across public and private environments, from server to website to end user.

As more hybrid cloud application deployments go mainstream, end users must be able to expect the same level of availability, access to applications and performance in the cloud that they receive from non-hosted applications.

Here are some key features to look for in a hybrid cloud APM solution:

- Ability to collect and send performance metrics at any frequency

- Ability to create alerts on custom metrics to know the moment performance exceeds expected bounds

- Ability to customize dashboards for integrated views combining any metrics

- Ability to monitor multiple application services, such as Apache, MySQL, Redis, Cloudwatch, as well as create your own

- Ability to see data across all boundaries, including cloud or on-premises, various clouds, and separate regions/availability zones

Cloud computing is all about running the right application workload on the right system at the right time. As increasing numbers of workloads become split between in-house and hosted environments, organizations will need to carefully consider how their APM solution addresses cloud-related challenges beyond their immediate control.

Eric Anderson is CTO and Co-Founder of CopperEgg.

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APM Challenges in a Hybrid Cloud

Eric Anderson

Public and private cloud computing have received plenty of attention in recent years, as businesses worldwide have opted to implement such services. For small firms, the public model is a boon for cash-strapped companies that cannot afford any missteps in their IT procurement processes.

Large enterprises that want more control over their solutions have often opted for a private cloud, which is not a shared resource with other businesses. Although both of these options are ideal for their respective user base, hybrid clouds should not be overlooked in the grand scheme of what is becoming a necessary technology throughout the IT sector.

A recent Infonetics Research survey indicated that adoption of hybrid clouds among enterprises is projected to more than double by 2015. Platform-as-a-Service and Cloud-as-a-Service are expected to experience the largest increases between 2013 and 2015. Cliff Grossner, directing analyst for data center and cloud services at the firm, said hybrid solutions are "the next evolution in cloud architecture."

However, the cloud abstracts important detail from the people who need to make sure it's performing as expected. As business-critical applications move to the cloud, IT professionals need to understand what's happening in the "black box" beyond their physical reach.

According to Enterprise Management Associates, only five percent of companies can definitively pinpoint the source(s) of their application-related problems – and these percentages relate to on-premises applications only. At the same time, more than 50 percent of companies report the cost of an hour of downtime for the “most critical business applications” to be between $75,000 and $500,000.

The goal is to give admins the ability to identify poor user experience before it becomes a costly business issue. Yet root cause analysis requires visibility into the underlying components of the application, which is hard to achieve when the infrastructure is owned by a service provider, or distributed across disparate monitoring silos. Organizations that are far down a path with on premises or private cloud APM solutions often don’t have the tools required to deliver real-time, proactive information in public or hybrid cloud environments.

Hybrid cloud APM addresses this problem, providing a single pane of glass from which to manage application performance and availability across public and private environments, from server to website to end user.

As more hybrid cloud application deployments go mainstream, end users must be able to expect the same level of availability, access to applications and performance in the cloud that they receive from non-hosted applications.

Here are some key features to look for in a hybrid cloud APM solution:

- Ability to collect and send performance metrics at any frequency

- Ability to create alerts on custom metrics to know the moment performance exceeds expected bounds

- Ability to customize dashboards for integrated views combining any metrics

- Ability to monitor multiple application services, such as Apache, MySQL, Redis, Cloudwatch, as well as create your own

- Ability to see data across all boundaries, including cloud or on-premises, various clouds, and separate regions/availability zones

Cloud computing is all about running the right application workload on the right system at the right time. As increasing numbers of workloads become split between in-house and hosted environments, organizations will need to carefully consider how their APM solution addresses cloud-related challenges beyond their immediate control.

Eric Anderson is CTO and Co-Founder of CopperEgg.

Hot Topics

The Latest

IT and line-of-business teams are increasingly aligned in their efforts to close the data gap and drive greater collaboration to alleviate IT bottlenecks and offload growing demands on IT teams, according to The 2025 Automation Benchmark Report: Insights from IT Leaders on Enterprise Automation & the Future of AI-Driven Businesses from Jitterbit ...

A large majority (86%) of data management and AI decision makers cite protecting data privacy as a top concern, with 76% of respondents citing ROI on data privacy and AI initiatives across their organization, according to a new Harris Poll from Collibra ...

According to Gartner, Inc. the following six trends will shape the future of cloud over the next four years, ultimately resulting in new ways of working that are digital in nature and transformative in impact ...

2020 was the equivalent of a wedding with a top-shelf open bar. As businesses scrambled to adjust to remote work, digital transformation accelerated at breakneck speed. New software categories emerged overnight. Tech stacks ballooned with all sorts of SaaS apps solving ALL the problems — often with little oversight or long-term integration planning, and yes frequently a lot of duplicated functionality ... But now the music's faded. The lights are on. Everyone from the CIO to the CFO is checking the bill. Welcome to the Great SaaS Hangover ...

Regardless of OpenShift being a scalable and flexible software, it can be a pain to monitor since complete visibility into the underlying operations is not guaranteed ... To effectively monitor an OpenShift environment, IT administrators should focus on these five key elements and their associated metrics ...

An overwhelming majority of IT leaders (95%) believe the upcoming wave of AI-powered digital transformation is set to be the most impactful and intensive seen thus far, according to The Science of Productivity: AI, Adoption, And Employee Experience, a new report from Nexthink ...

Overall outage frequency and the general level of reported severity continue to decline, according to the Outage Analysis 2025 from Uptime Institute. However, cyber security incidents are on the rise and often have severe, lasting impacts ...

In March, New Relic published the State of Observability for Media and Entertainment Report to share insights, data, and analysis into the adoption and business value of observability across the media and entertainment industry. Here are six key takeaways from the report ...

Regardless of their scale, business decisions often take time, effort, and a lot of back-and-forth discussion to reach any sort of actionable conclusion ... Any means of streamlining this process and getting from complex problems to optimal solutions more efficiently and reliably is key. How can organizations optimize their decision-making to save time and reduce excess effort from those involved? ...

As enterprises accelerate their cloud adoption strategies, CIOs are routinely exceeding their cloud budgets — a concern that's about to face additional pressure from an unexpected direction: uncertainty over semiconductor tariffs. The CIO Cloud Trends Survey & Report from Azul reveals the extent continued cloud investment despite cost overruns, and how organizations are attempting to bring spending under control ...

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Azul