APMdigest asked experts from across the industry – including consultants, analysts and the leading vendors – for recommendations on the best way to ensure application performance in the hybrid cloud. Part 3 covers different aspects of monitoring.

Start with 28 Ways to Ensure Application Performance in the Hybrid Cloud - Part 1

Start with 28 Ways to Ensure Application Performance in the Hybrid Cloud - Part 2

11. BUSINESS SERVICES MONITORING

Cloud is one of the pillars of innovation impacting every aspect of business as organizations go through Digital Transformation (DX). Through the cloud, businesses are more agile. However, DX velocity creates risk everywhere from infrastructure and application integration to provisioning of services as well as other challenges to achieve a robust and functioning digital future. This means both virtual and physical instrumentation is required for continuous business services monitoring and real-time analytics to assure application performance – from the network edge to the core and into the cloud. Insight into application, network, server and user experience is derived from traffic-based data and secondary sources, like NetFlow and synthetic transactions, to enable organizations to innovate with confidence while transforming their operations, reducing costs, and improving the quality of customer experience at any scale and at the speed of business.
Ron Lifton
Senior Enterprise Solutions Marketing Manager, NetScout

12. VISIBILITY INTO LOCAL INFRASTRUCTURE

One critical point to remember when talking about application performance is that the application is only one piece of the puzzle. The health of the infrastructure, whether it's hybrid cloud or any other type of environment, informs the health of the application in important ways. In the instance of hybrid specifically, where an application is often running on-premises and utilizing the cloud in only specific instances, it is even more important to understand the health of the local network, monitor the resources the application is consuming on the local infrastructure, and to monitor cloud usage and availability. In a hybrid environment, applications can take advantage of more resources, but there are also twice as many problems that can arise if IT lacks visibility into infrastructure.
Andrew Cutting
Director of Channel Sales, North America, Paessler AG

13. SINGLE MONITORING SOLUTION ACROSS CLOUD AND ON-PREMISE

Every hybrid cloud use case brings its own monitoring challenges. When your application works across both cloud based and non-cloud based data centers, it is important to ensure that your monitoring tools work consistently across all your infrastructure — both the the portions in the cloud and in your own data centers. If you use different tools based on the location of your application or infrastructure components, you may have a difficult time diagnosing problems across domains. You need a single monitoring solution that works across both, and a cloud-based monitoring tool provides you the best flexibility for both environments.
Lee Atchison
Principal Cloud Architect and Advocate, New Relic

Treat your hybrid cloud architecture as a unified environment. Do not allow on-prem and public cloud to fracture into different management and data silos. Think of compute, storage and network as a single resource pool. Geographic location does not matter. Build teams, processes, and tools that embrace this concept. Organizations that do so have a better shot at ensuring application performance.
Russ Elsner
Consulting Architect, Office of the CTO, ScienceLogic

Fixing application performance issues in a hybrid cloud environment can consume a lot of time and resources. The best way to ensure app performance is to proactively fix small issues before they escalate into bigger problems in the future. Organizations need to set up a monitoring strategy that will provide them complete visibility into application performance regardless of the application deployment architecture. This will help them to quickly get to the root cause of issues in any environment.
Arun Balachandran
Applications Manager Market Analyst, ManageEngine

This isn't your Father's hosted app. Today's cloud is a complex environment. You can monitor the performance of your application – which is a key metric for sure – but you'll not truly be in control until you have holistic visibility into the ENTIRE infrastructure, right down to the container and micro-services level if necessary.
Richard Whitehead
Chief Evangelist, Moogsoft

14. INTEGRATED CROSS-STACK DATA

Hybrid clouds bring together the best and worst of private clouds (the customer owns everything) and public clouds (the customer owns their applications but has no control or visibility into anything else). To ensure application performance in hybrid clouds enterprises need to take a layered approach to instrumentation. They need to carefully instrument the IaaS layer (the hardware and the cloud platform), the PaaS layer (all of the software between the IaaS layer and the applications), and then each SaaS layer (which means application specific instrumentation by a market leading APM tool). The key is to then combine these real time streams of disparate metrics, objects and relationships into a useful fabric.
Bernd Harzog
CEO, OpsDataStore

Because most apps today use complex multi-tiered architectures, a best practice to ensure app performance across hybrid cloud environments must have visibility into real-time communication between the different app tiers while being agnostic to the actual location of the individual workloads.
Ananda Rajagopal
VP - Product Line Management, Gigamon

15. SYNTHETIC MONITORING

One successful approach to manage hybrid cloud performance is combining synthetic monitoring (API) with local APM installations on cloud/on premise/multi cloud installations. Identifying application problems regardless of target environment, quickly points to where you have gaps in your APM installations and testing procedures.
Sven Hammar
Founder and CEO, Apica

16. SAAS-BASED MONITORING

Key to monitoring hybrid cloud environments are SaaS-based monitoring solutions that can dynamically discover hybrid application topologies, as they change or evolve, without requiring manual configuration changes to specify which application is running where. This automation of application discovery across private and public clouds, along with a logical and visual application topology across code and open source frameworks is key for monitoring hybrid cloud environment.
Sachin Agarwal
VP Marketing, OpsClarity

Read 28 Ways to Ensure Application Performance in the Hybrid Cloud - Part 4, covering tools that help you leverage performance data.