According to a webinar presented by Viavi, 6 Steps for Maintaining Control in the Cloud, a survey was conducted by Gartner Research with IT engineers that had moved workloads to the cloud. The results showed that approximately 53% of respondents were blind as to what happens in their cloud network and 79% were dissatisfied with the monitoring data that they get about their cloud network. This lack of proper monitoring data leads to a lack of ability to accurately understand what your network is doing and how well it is/is not performing.
In a previous blog, I talked about how to get visibility into cloud networks and resolve the first part of the problem. This included why visibility was important and how to accomplish it. Once you have that information, the next thing you need to understand is the performance of your cloud network so that you can answer important questions. This includes:
How will the network handle the application data that you currently have?
Is the current contracted work space enough?
Will you encounter performance problems and need to upgrade the CPU and memory in a hurry before you get more user complaints?
Here are three suggestions to help you:
■ Test your cloud network for adequate capacity before you migrate from your current on-premises solution
■ Monitor your cloud and on-premises networks during the migration process
■ Continually verify that your cloud provider is delivering upon the contracted SLA
To get the answers you want, the first thing you will want to do is to insert virtual taps into your cloud network so that you get the proper monitoring data you need.
The second thing you will want to do is create a proactive cloud monitoring solution. Basically, this is a monitoring solution that uses software agents and probes that you can place across your cloud and physical infrastructure.
With a proactive monitoring solution, you can use visibility technology to actively test your solution before migration, during migration, and after migration. For instance, you can pre-test the network with synthetic traffic to understand how the solution will perform against either specific application traffic or a combination of traffic types. The synthetic traffic provides you the network and/or application loading of a "busy hour" and the flexibility to perform evaluations during the network maintenance window.
Once the migration starts, you can measure the ambient latency, throughput, and performance problems on a per-hop basis within the network to see how it is performing. This lets you analyze both your on-premises solution as well as your cloud solution. This can be especially important if you have a hybrid solution right now, and are in the (often multi-year) process of transitioning from the physical to the virtual (cloud) world. A proactive testing and monitoring approach gives you the confidence that your new application rollouts will be successful in either network.
Proactive monitoring also allows you to perform SLA validation during business hours, since it is not service disrupting. This allows you validate the SLA performance at will. The information gathered can then be used to inform management about which goals are being met. If goals are not being met, you can use the impartial data you have collected and contact your vendor to have them either fix any observed network problems, or give you a discount if they are failing to meet agreed upon SLAs.
The Latest
The first word in APM technology is "Application" ... yet for mobile, apps are entirely different. As the mobile app ecosystem is evolving and expanding from pure entertainment to more utilitarian uses, there's a rising need for the next generation of APM technology to stay ahead of the issues that can cause apps to fail ...
For application performance monitoring (APM), many in IT tend to focus a significant amount of their time on the tool that performs the analysis. Unfortunately for them, the battle is won or lost at the data access level. If you don’t have the right data, you can’t fix the problem correctly ...
Findings of the Digital Employee Experience survey from VMware show correlation between enabling employees with a positive digital experience (i.e., device choice/flexibility, seamless access to apps, remote work capabilities) and an organization's competitive position, revenue growth and employee sentiment ...
In today's competitive landscape, businesses must have the ability and process in place to face new challenges and find ways to successfully tackle them in a proactive manner. For years, this has been placed on the shoulders of DevOps teams within IT departments. But, as automation takes over manual intervention to increase speed and efficiency, these teams are facing what we know as IT digitization. How has this changed the way companies function over the years, and what do we have to look forward to in the coming years? ...
Although the vast majority of IT organizations have implemented a broad variety of systems and tools to modernize, simplify and streamline data center operations, many are still burdened by inefficiencies, security risks and performance gaps in their IT infrastructure as well as the excessive time it takes to manage legacy infrastructure, according to the State of IT Transformation, a report from Datrium ...
When it comes to network visibility, there are a lot of discussions about packet broker technology and the various features these solutions provide to network architects and IT managers. Packet brokers allow organizations to aggregate the data required for a variety of monitoring solutions including network performance monitoring and diagnostic (NPMD) platforms and unified threat management (UTM) appliances. But, when it comes to ensuring these solutions provide the insights required by NetOps and security teams, IT can spend an exorbitant amount of time dealing with issues around adds, moves and changes. This can have a dramatic impact on budgets and tool availability. Why does this happen? ...
Data may be pouring into enterprises but IT professionals still find most of it stuck in siloed departments and weeks away from being able to drive any valued action. Coupled with the ongoing concerns over security responsiveness, IT teams have to push aside other important performance-oriented data in order to ensure security data, at least, gets prominent attention. A new survey by Ivanti shows the disconnect between enterprise departments struggling to improve operations like automation while being challenged with a siloed structure and a data onslaught ...
A subtle, deliberate shift has occurred within the software industry which, at present, only the most innovative organizations have seized upon for competitive advantage. Although primarily driven by Artificial Intelligence (AI), this transformation strikes at the core of the most pervasive IT resources including cloud computing and predictive analytics ...
When asked who is mandated with developing and delivering their organization's digital competencies, 51% of respondents say their IT departments have a leadership role. The critical question is whether IT departments are prepared to take on a leadership role in which collaborating with other functions and disseminating knowledge and digital performance data are requirements ...
The Economist Intelligence Unit just released a new study commissioned by Riverbed that explores nine digital competencies that help organizations improve their digital performance and, ultimately, achieve their objectives. Here's a brief summary of 7 key research findings you'll find covered in detail in the report ...
