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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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I've spent a lot of time in the channel, and one thing I keep coming back to is this: a partner program is only as good as what it looks like in the field. Many programs look great on paper, but when a partner is in front of a customer navigating a complex hybrid environment or trying to make the case for AI-powered observability, the gap between what a vendor promises and what it actually delivers becomes very clear, very fast ...

Enterprises today operate in a real-time environment where uninterrupted access to trusted data has become a baseline expectation for users, applications and automated systems. Traditional DataOps models, built on manual effort and human triage, cannot keep pace with this always active demand. AI agents are emerging as the operational backbone, ensuring consistent data availability, reinforcing trustworthiness and enabling a level of scale that manual processes cannot achieve ...

For decades, trust in the digital workplace rested on familiar signals. We trusted faces on video calls, voices on the phone, and emails that appeared to come from people we knew. These cues felt human and intuitive. They anchored how decisions were made, approvals were granted, and access was authorized. AI-powered deepfakes have quietly broken that model ...

Cloud migration was supposed to be a one-way door. For most enterprises, it turns out it isn't. Cloud data repatriation is a real and growing trend. A new survey ... finds that 89% of organizations plan to expand their on-premises infrastructure footprint over the next two years — and 75% have already moved at least some workloads back from public cloud in the past 24 months. The findings point to a broad rethinking of where data belongs ...

Over the past few years, large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the software industry. Given their ability to excel at multi-step reasoning, LLMs have helped enterprises streamline workflows and adapt to the unknown. However, employing such models comes with sky-high costs, latency issues, and limited flexibility. In the realm of IT operations, it is generally wiser to employ smaller, domain-specific models instead ...

For years, DevOps teams operated under a simple assumption: collect enough telemetry, and you can find and fix any problem. That assumption is breaking down. Modern enterprises now operate across microservices, hybrid cloud environments, APIs, Kubernetes, and highly automated delivery pipelines. Releases happen continuously, dependencies shift constantly, and failures spread faster than teams can diagnose them ...

New Relic surveyed IT and engineering leaders from the media and entertainment (M&E) sector to understand what's working — and where challenges persist with their observability practices. The findings reveal how M&E organizations are navigating rising platform complexity, audience expectations, and AI-driven change. Below are five takeaways that stand out ...

Let me start with something I've seen play out more times than I can count. A team hits a wall with the cloud. Costs creep up, then spike. Performance starts to feel inconsistent. Someone in finance asks a simple question like "why did this double?" and nobody has a clean answer ... Maybe this isn't the right place for everything. That realization feels like a breakthrough, like you've identified the problem. In reality, you've just identified the starting line ...

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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

I've spent a lot of time in the channel, and one thing I keep coming back to is this: a partner program is only as good as what it looks like in the field. Many programs look great on paper, but when a partner is in front of a customer navigating a complex hybrid environment or trying to make the case for AI-powered observability, the gap between what a vendor promises and what it actually delivers becomes very clear, very fast ...

Enterprises today operate in a real-time environment where uninterrupted access to trusted data has become a baseline expectation for users, applications and automated systems. Traditional DataOps models, built on manual effort and human triage, cannot keep pace with this always active demand. AI agents are emerging as the operational backbone, ensuring consistent data availability, reinforcing trustworthiness and enabling a level of scale that manual processes cannot achieve ...

For decades, trust in the digital workplace rested on familiar signals. We trusted faces on video calls, voices on the phone, and emails that appeared to come from people we knew. These cues felt human and intuitive. They anchored how decisions were made, approvals were granted, and access was authorized. AI-powered deepfakes have quietly broken that model ...

Cloud migration was supposed to be a one-way door. For most enterprises, it turns out it isn't. Cloud data repatriation is a real and growing trend. A new survey ... finds that 89% of organizations plan to expand their on-premises infrastructure footprint over the next two years — and 75% have already moved at least some workloads back from public cloud in the past 24 months. The findings point to a broad rethinking of where data belongs ...

Over the past few years, large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the software industry. Given their ability to excel at multi-step reasoning, LLMs have helped enterprises streamline workflows and adapt to the unknown. However, employing such models comes with sky-high costs, latency issues, and limited flexibility. In the realm of IT operations, it is generally wiser to employ smaller, domain-specific models instead ...

For years, DevOps teams operated under a simple assumption: collect enough telemetry, and you can find and fix any problem. That assumption is breaking down. Modern enterprises now operate across microservices, hybrid cloud environments, APIs, Kubernetes, and highly automated delivery pipelines. Releases happen continuously, dependencies shift constantly, and failures spread faster than teams can diagnose them ...

New Relic surveyed IT and engineering leaders from the media and entertainment (M&E) sector to understand what's working — and where challenges persist with their observability practices. The findings reveal how M&E organizations are navigating rising platform complexity, audience expectations, and AI-driven change. Below are five takeaways that stand out ...

Let me start with something I've seen play out more times than I can count. A team hits a wall with the cloud. Costs creep up, then spike. Performance starts to feel inconsistent. Someone in finance asks a simple question like "why did this double?" and nobody has a clean answer ... Maybe this isn't the right place for everything. That realization feels like a breakthrough, like you've identified the problem. In reality, you've just identified the starting line ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 24, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses network observability tool sprawl ... 

In cloud-native systems, scaling is often as simple as moving a slider. For on-premise databases, the stakes are different. Over-provisioning hardware is expensive. Under-provisioning leads to performance bottlenecks that are difficult to fix once the equipment is in the rack ...