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How to Improve Cloud Computing with Performance Monitoring

Keith Bromley

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.

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Application performance monitoring (APM) is a game of catching up — building dashboards, setting thresholds, tuning alerts, and manually correlating metrics to root causes. In the early days, this straightforward model worked as applications were simpler, stacks more predictable, and telemetry was manageable. Today, the landscape has shifted, and more assertive tools are needed ...

Cloud adoption has accelerated, but backup strategies haven't always kept pace. Many organizations continue to rely on backup strategies that were either lifted directly from on-prem environments or use cloud-native tools in limited, DR-focused ways ... Eon uncovered a handful of critical gaps regarding how organizations approach cloud backup. To capture these prevailing winds, we gathered insights from 150+ IT and cloud leaders at the recent Google Cloud Next conference, which we've compiled into the 2025 State of Cloud Data Backup ...

Private clouds are no longer playing catch-up, and public clouds are no longer the default as organizations recalibrate their cloud strategies, according to the Private Cloud Outlook 2025 report from Broadcom. More than half (53%) of survey respondents say private cloud is their top priority for deploying new workloads over the next three years, while 69% are considering workload repatriation from public to private cloud, with one-third having already done so ...

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Back in March of this year ... MongoDB's stock price took a serious tumble ... In my opinion, it reflects a deeper structural issue in enterprise software economics altogether — vendor lock-in ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 15, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses Do-It-Yourself Network Automation ... 

Zero-day vulnerabilities — security flaws that are exploited before developers even know they exist — pose one of the greatest risks to modern organizations. Recently, such vulnerabilities have been discovered in well-known VPN systems like Ivanti and Fortinet, highlighting just how outdated these legacy technologies have become in defending against fast-evolving cyber threats ... To protect digital assets and remote workers in today's environment, companies need more than patchwork solutions. They need architecture that is secure by design ...

Traditional observability requires users to leap across different platforms or tools for metrics, logs, or traces and related issues manually, which is very time-consuming, so as to reasonably ascertain the root cause. Observability 2.0 fixes this by unifying all telemetry data, logs, metrics, and traces into a single, context-rich pipeline that flows into one smart platform. But this is far from just having a bunch of additional data; this data is actionable, predictive, and tied to revenue realization ...

64% of enterprise networking teams use internally developed software or scripts for network automation, but 61% of those teams spend six or more hours per week debugging and maintaining them, according to From Scripts to Platforms: Why Homegrown Tools Dominate Network Automation and How Vendors Can Help, my latest EMA report ...

How to Improve Cloud Computing with Performance Monitoring

Keith Bromley

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.

Hot Topics

The Latest

Artificial intelligence (AI) is core to observability practices, with some 41% of respondents reporting AI adoption as a core driver of observability, according to the State of Observability for Financial Services and Insurance report from New Relic ...

Application performance monitoring (APM) is a game of catching up — building dashboards, setting thresholds, tuning alerts, and manually correlating metrics to root causes. In the early days, this straightforward model worked as applications were simpler, stacks more predictable, and telemetry was manageable. Today, the landscape has shifted, and more assertive tools are needed ...

Cloud adoption has accelerated, but backup strategies haven't always kept pace. Many organizations continue to rely on backup strategies that were either lifted directly from on-prem environments or use cloud-native tools in limited, DR-focused ways ... Eon uncovered a handful of critical gaps regarding how organizations approach cloud backup. To capture these prevailing winds, we gathered insights from 150+ IT and cloud leaders at the recent Google Cloud Next conference, which we've compiled into the 2025 State of Cloud Data Backup ...

Private clouds are no longer playing catch-up, and public clouds are no longer the default as organizations recalibrate their cloud strategies, according to the Private Cloud Outlook 2025 report from Broadcom. More than half (53%) of survey respondents say private cloud is their top priority for deploying new workloads over the next three years, while 69% are considering workload repatriation from public to private cloud, with one-third having already done so ...

As organizations chase productivity gains from generative AI, teams are overwhelmingly focused on improving delivery speed (45%) over enhancing software quality (13%), according to the Quality Transformation Report from Tricentis ...

Back in March of this year ... MongoDB's stock price took a serious tumble ... In my opinion, it reflects a deeper structural issue in enterprise software economics altogether — vendor lock-in ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 15, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses Do-It-Yourself Network Automation ... 

Zero-day vulnerabilities — security flaws that are exploited before developers even know they exist — pose one of the greatest risks to modern organizations. Recently, such vulnerabilities have been discovered in well-known VPN systems like Ivanti and Fortinet, highlighting just how outdated these legacy technologies have become in defending against fast-evolving cyber threats ... To protect digital assets and remote workers in today's environment, companies need more than patchwork solutions. They need architecture that is secure by design ...

Traditional observability requires users to leap across different platforms or tools for metrics, logs, or traces and related issues manually, which is very time-consuming, so as to reasonably ascertain the root cause. Observability 2.0 fixes this by unifying all telemetry data, logs, metrics, and traces into a single, context-rich pipeline that flows into one smart platform. But this is far from just having a bunch of additional data; this data is actionable, predictive, and tied to revenue realization ...

64% of enterprise networking teams use internally developed software or scripts for network automation, but 61% of those teams spend six or more hours per week debugging and maintaining them, according to From Scripts to Platforms: Why Homegrown Tools Dominate Network Automation and How Vendors Can Help, my latest EMA report ...