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Cloud Performance Monitoring - Lift & Shift Doesn't Work

Keith Bromley

With all of the hype around cloud computing these days, it's a wonder that IT departments haven't come to an absolute standstill due to a bewildering amount of confusion. Don't get me wrong, cloud computing has clear and definite benefits. At the same time there is an excessive amount of vendor hype that it will fix a lot of problems which it will not. It can also create new problems with a lack of visibility and many IT professionals are disappointed with their leap to a pure cloud environment.

9 out of 10 respondents have seen a direct negative business impact due to lack of visibility into public cloud traffic

Consider this. A survey performed by Dimensional Research for Ixia showed that 9 out of 10 respondents have seen a direct negative business impact due to lack of visibility into public cloud traffic. This includes application and network troubleshooting and performance issues, as well as delays in resolving security alerts stemming from a lack of visibility.

In addition, Sanjit Ganguli of Gartner Research also conducted polling on public cloud migrations at the Gartner December 2017 Data Center Conference and found that 62 percent were not satisfied with the monitoring data they get from their cloud vendor now that they have moved to the cloud. In addition, 53 percent actually said that they were blind to what happens in their cloud network.

While not all cloud migration problems are avoidable, many can be. Specifically, performance issues are a real consideration for new cloud networks. Once you migrate to the cloud, and during the migration process, you will not have clear network performance data within your environment. It is up to you to implement this, if you want this visibility. The tools that the public cloud vendors provide will not be good enough.

Business intelligence applications are one example of a problem area. After porting the service from your completely controllable on-premises environment to a public cloud instance, you may find that it runs slower (after you receive multiple customer complaints). The "lift and shift" concept failed. The result is often an increase in more CPU, RAM, and interconnect bandwidth. This creates an unplanned and perpetual cost increase.

Another example is that you cannot natively tell how your applications are truly performing or even how your cloud instance is performing. Is it meeting or exceeding the service level agreement (SLA) that was put in place? Your cloud vendor will probably tell you that it is, but you have no independent data for a "check and balance" strategy on what they are delivering.

So, does this mean you give up using the cloud, hopefully not. There are clear business benefits to the cloud and to prolonged hybrid cloud solutions. The answer is to do a thorough assessment of what you are migrating and then perform baseline performance monitoring before, during, and after the move.

For instance, during the migration process, proactive performance monitoring of both your on-premises and cloud environments will be useful. Test the performance yourself to characterize how it is actually working at all phases. With the right tool, this testing can be fairly painless. An alternative is to copy and export cloud data back to your on-premises performance monitoring tools (assuming that you are operating a hybrid cloud environment) for analysis there. Many organizations that just blindly port services and applications to the cloud encounter cloud computing issues quickly, particularly performance issues.

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Cloud Performance Monitoring - Lift & Shift Doesn't Work

Keith Bromley

With all of the hype around cloud computing these days, it's a wonder that IT departments haven't come to an absolute standstill due to a bewildering amount of confusion. Don't get me wrong, cloud computing has clear and definite benefits. At the same time there is an excessive amount of vendor hype that it will fix a lot of problems which it will not. It can also create new problems with a lack of visibility and many IT professionals are disappointed with their leap to a pure cloud environment.

9 out of 10 respondents have seen a direct negative business impact due to lack of visibility into public cloud traffic

Consider this. A survey performed by Dimensional Research for Ixia showed that 9 out of 10 respondents have seen a direct negative business impact due to lack of visibility into public cloud traffic. This includes application and network troubleshooting and performance issues, as well as delays in resolving security alerts stemming from a lack of visibility.

In addition, Sanjit Ganguli of Gartner Research also conducted polling on public cloud migrations at the Gartner December 2017 Data Center Conference and found that 62 percent were not satisfied with the monitoring data they get from their cloud vendor now that they have moved to the cloud. In addition, 53 percent actually said that they were blind to what happens in their cloud network.

While not all cloud migration problems are avoidable, many can be. Specifically, performance issues are a real consideration for new cloud networks. Once you migrate to the cloud, and during the migration process, you will not have clear network performance data within your environment. It is up to you to implement this, if you want this visibility. The tools that the public cloud vendors provide will not be good enough.

Business intelligence applications are one example of a problem area. After porting the service from your completely controllable on-premises environment to a public cloud instance, you may find that it runs slower (after you receive multiple customer complaints). The "lift and shift" concept failed. The result is often an increase in more CPU, RAM, and interconnect bandwidth. This creates an unplanned and perpetual cost increase.

Another example is that you cannot natively tell how your applications are truly performing or even how your cloud instance is performing. Is it meeting or exceeding the service level agreement (SLA) that was put in place? Your cloud vendor will probably tell you that it is, but you have no independent data for a "check and balance" strategy on what they are delivering.

So, does this mean you give up using the cloud, hopefully not. There are clear business benefits to the cloud and to prolonged hybrid cloud solutions. The answer is to do a thorough assessment of what you are migrating and then perform baseline performance monitoring before, during, and after the move.

For instance, during the migration process, proactive performance monitoring of both your on-premises and cloud environments will be useful. Test the performance yourself to characterize how it is actually working at all phases. With the right tool, this testing can be fairly painless. An alternative is to copy and export cloud data back to your on-premises performance monitoring tools (assuming that you are operating a hybrid cloud environment) for analysis there. Many organizations that just blindly port services and applications to the cloud encounter cloud computing issues quickly, particularly performance issues.

Hot Topics

The Latest

AI is the catalyst for significant investment in data teams as enterprises require higher-quality data to power their AI applications, according to the State of Analytics Engineering Report from dbt Labs ...

Misaligned architecture can lead to business consequences, with 93% of respondents reporting negative outcomes such as service disruptions, high operational costs and security challenges ...

A Gartner analyst recently suggested that GenAI tools could create 25% time savings for network operational teams. Where might these time savings come from? How are GenAI tools helping NetOps teams today, and what other tasks might they take on in the future as models continue improving? In general, these savings come from automating or streamlining manual NetOps tasks ...

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 ...