Performance Management For the Cloud: The Cloud Service Provider View

Srinivas Ramanathan
Learn more about eG Innovations

In my previous blogs in this four-part blog series I discussed performance management from the deployment perspective and the Cloud consumer view. The third perspective is that of the provider of the cloud service – whether it is the public cloud provider or the private cloud provider.

Start with Part One: Performance Management Challenges for Cloud-Hosted Services

Start with Part Two: Performance Management from the Cloud: The Deployment Perspective

Start with Part Three: Performance Management of the Cloud: The Cloud Consumer View

If you are the IT manager of a cloud service provider, the cloud itself is a service that that you are delivering to users. Your primary concern is to make sure that users of the cloud service are happy. Cloud service users must be able to login at any time, provision new instances as required, be able to start and stop instances and deploy applications in these instances.

For applications deployed in your cloud infrastructure, the performance of these applications should match the performance they would have had if they had been hosted on-premise, on physical machines.

Performance management FOR the cloud helps you, the cloud provider, deliver better cloud performance, maximum service availability, and superior customer satisfaction. The performance management system also helps you right-size your infrastructure, so that you can achieve the necessary returns for your investment in the cloud infrastructure.

To manage your cloud infrastructure, look for a performance management solution with the following characteristics:

Monitors the cloud infrastructure end-to-end

Typically, cloud infrastructures are built on a virtualization platform (e.g., VMware vSphere, Citrix XenServer, Microsoft Hyper-V). There are specialized applications that handle security (e.g., VMware vShield), web applications that enable user self-service and the cloud platform (e.g., VMware vCloud, Citrix CloudStack) that powers your cloud service.

The underlying infrastructure components including Active Directory, SAN, network equipment, etc. also need to be monitored as a failure of any of these components can also impact the cloud service. A performance management solution for the cloud should be capable of handling all of these infrastructure tiers from a central console.

Scalability

Scalability, to ensure that the management solution can handle the workload as your infrastructure grows, is another key requirement.

Supports Automation

A key driving factor for cloud computing is agility – the ability to power-up and power-down instances rapidly, on-demand. To achieve the kind of agility that customers expect, cloud service providers must make their operations fully automated. This covers the management system as well.

When a new cloud instance is provisioned, it should be automatically added to the management system for monitoring. Agent-based or agentless monitoring should be enabled. If required, agents should be installed on the cloud instances automatically. Touch-free provisioning and configuration of the management system is a very key requirement. Likewise, once provisioning and configuration of the monitoring has been done, alerts generated from the management system should be automatically handled.

To support this level of automation, the management system should support open interfaces that can be integrated with toolsets already being used by the cloud service provider. For instance, cloud service providers are already using runbook automation tools like Dynamic Ops, HP Orchestration and others. The performance management system should offer APIs (application programming interfaces) or CLIs (Command Line Interfaces) to allow its integration with the existing automation/orchestration tools.

For alert management, service providers often use trouble ticketing systems such as HEAT, BMC Remedy, and others. The management system must support interfaces that allow trouble tickets to be automatically opened when a problem is detected and automatically closed when a problem is fixed.


Allows cloud service providers to offer monitoring

The right performance management system will not only allow you to oversee the operation of your cloud service, but it can also allow you - the cloud service provider - to offer monitoring as a value-added service to your customers. For this purpose, the management system should support multi-tenancy – i.e., the same management platform can be used to monitor networks, servers and applications for multiple enterprise customers.

In this case, each customer gets a personalized login and when he/she logs into the management system, they only get to see the parts of the infrastructure that they have been configured to access and get reports for. The monitoring service can offer monitoring of the cloud instances that the customer is using. Advanced monitoring can also be offered to customers, providing them in-depth insight into applications like databases, web servers, Java applications, etc. that customers are hosting in the cloud.


The key benefits to service providers from a management solution that monitors the cloud infrastructure are:

- Ensuring that the performance of the cloud infrastructure meets the expectation of users.

- Facilitates effective provisioning of the cloud infrastructure to deliver the expected ROI without compromising on performance.

- Enables the cloud service provider to provide performance metrics of the cloud as a value-added service to their customers.

In summary, cloud performance management needs to be considered from three different perspectives, each of which has unique needs. A comprehensive approach needs to incorporate performance management FROM the cloud, OF the cloud and FOR the cloud. This will provide IT operations management with a new best practice for cloud performance management via a much more holistic view into every tier of the cloud infrastructure than traditional silo-based approaches provide.

This blog is the final in a series of four on cloud management.

Part One: Performance Management Challenges for Cloud-Hosted Services

Part Two: Performance Management from the Cloud: The Deployment Perspective

Part Three: Performance Management of the Cloud: The Cloud Consumer View

Srinivas Ramanathan is CEO and Founder of eG Innovations.

Related Links:

www.eginnovations.com

Hot Topics

Related Vendors

The Latest

Why Cloud Reliability Comes Down to People and How to Improve It

Cloud outages are usually described as technical failures. When a service goes down, a dependency breaks, or a region has issues, the focus immediately shifts to infrastructure. But if you look closely at how these incidents actually unfold, the root cause is rarely the technology itself. It is almost always tied to decisions made earlier, during design, implementation, or day-to-day operations. The system behaves the way it was built. The real question is how it was built ...

Why IT Keeps Getting Handed an AI Training Problem It Can't Solve Alone

77% of leaders say their teams need AI skills urgently. 64% say their organization plans to train current employees rather than hire new ones. So far, so reasonable. The part that surprised me is who's been put in charge: 34% of those leaders say IT and engineering own the AI skills mandate. Learning and Development or HR own it at 7% of organizations. That's roughly five-to-one in favor of the people who understand the tools, over the people whose actual job is teaching adults how to learn new ones ...

Bringing IBM i Into the Modern Observability Stack: The Missing Piece of Enterprise AIOps

In the ever-evolving digital landscape, enterprises are increasingly focused on enhancing their observability stacks to gain deeper insights into their IT environments. Observability has become a cornerstone of modern IT operations, enabling organizations to monitor, diagnose, and optimize their systems with unprecedented precision. However, a critical piece of the puzzle often goes unnoticed in this transformation: IBM i ...

89% of Frontend Teams Use AI in Their Workflows, but Few Use It for Observability

We just surveyed 300 frontend and mobile engineers across 16 countries, and the finding that keeps sticking with me isn't the one about AI. It's this: 74% of engineering teams rate themselves in the "middle" of the observability maturity scale. Not reactive, not strategic. Stuck in the middle. They have dashboards, they have tracing, they have alerts. And yet when something goes wrong, they still can't tell you why ...

MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Podcast - Episode 25: AI's Impact on WAN

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 25, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses  AI's impact on the Wide Area Network (WAN) ... 

6 Signs Your APM Dashboard Looks Healthy but Your App Is Not

Application performance monitoring (APM) dashboards are only as useful as what they are configured to measure. The default setup covers obvious failure modes such as downtime, error spikes, and latency breaches, but it does not cover everything. Some failures produce no alerts or anomalies. The dashboard stays green while users experience a broken product. Here are six signs that is happening ...

AI Innovation Was the First Phase. Governance and Accountability Are the Next ...

The race to deploy AI is largely over. Most enterprises have entered it. The question now is not whether artificial intelligence is running inside the organization. The question is whether anyone is genuinely responsible for what it does. That is not a technical question. It is a leadership one. And most organizations are not yet structured to answer it honestly ...

Your AI Agent's Biggest Problem Isn't the Model - It's the Data

A new analysis of 250 real-world queries across common retail tasks, such as product pricing, availability, ratings, shipping and specifications, reveals systemic inefficiency at the heart of web-based AI agents. On average, 97.9% of the data retrieved by agents from live web pages is irrelevant to the query being answered. Specifically, the average page ingested ran nearly 9,000 characters, while the average answer was just 32 characters, resulting in a noise-to-signal ratio of 278:1. Price queries were the most extreme outlier, with noise rates approaching 99.5%. That's not a rounding error. That's a structural problem ...

Observability Is the New Control Plane for Enterprise Transformation

The enterprises that will define the next decade are not the ones that deployed the most technology. They are the ones who understood what their technology was actually doing. That distinction is not a philosophical point. It is the central operational challenge facing every organization that has spent the last five years modernizing at speed ...

When AI Becomes the Corporate OS

AI is becoming the operating system of the enterprise. It acts as an invisible coordination layer that understands intent, connects systems, and executes work across complex SaaS environments. Previously, employees had to click through multiple systems — CRM, ERP, support tools, collaboration platforms — to complete a single task. Now, instead of navigating each application manually, they can simply state what they need to accomplish ...

Performance Management For the Cloud: The Cloud Service Provider View

Srinivas Ramanathan
Learn more about eG Innovations

In my previous blogs in this four-part blog series I discussed performance management from the deployment perspective and the Cloud consumer view. The third perspective is that of the provider of the cloud service – whether it is the public cloud provider or the private cloud provider.

Start with Part One: Performance Management Challenges for Cloud-Hosted Services

Start with Part Two: Performance Management from the Cloud: The Deployment Perspective

Start with Part Three: Performance Management of the Cloud: The Cloud Consumer View

If you are the IT manager of a cloud service provider, the cloud itself is a service that that you are delivering to users. Your primary concern is to make sure that users of the cloud service are happy. Cloud service users must be able to login at any time, provision new instances as required, be able to start and stop instances and deploy applications in these instances.

For applications deployed in your cloud infrastructure, the performance of these applications should match the performance they would have had if they had been hosted on-premise, on physical machines.

Performance management FOR the cloud helps you, the cloud provider, deliver better cloud performance, maximum service availability, and superior customer satisfaction. The performance management system also helps you right-size your infrastructure, so that you can achieve the necessary returns for your investment in the cloud infrastructure.

To manage your cloud infrastructure, look for a performance management solution with the following characteristics:

Monitors the cloud infrastructure end-to-end

Typically, cloud infrastructures are built on a virtualization platform (e.g., VMware vSphere, Citrix XenServer, Microsoft Hyper-V). There are specialized applications that handle security (e.g., VMware vShield), web applications that enable user self-service and the cloud platform (e.g., VMware vCloud, Citrix CloudStack) that powers your cloud service.

The underlying infrastructure components including Active Directory, SAN, network equipment, etc. also need to be monitored as a failure of any of these components can also impact the cloud service. A performance management solution for the cloud should be capable of handling all of these infrastructure tiers from a central console.

Scalability

Scalability, to ensure that the management solution can handle the workload as your infrastructure grows, is another key requirement.

Supports Automation

A key driving factor for cloud computing is agility – the ability to power-up and power-down instances rapidly, on-demand. To achieve the kind of agility that customers expect, cloud service providers must make their operations fully automated. This covers the management system as well.

When a new cloud instance is provisioned, it should be automatically added to the management system for monitoring. Agent-based or agentless monitoring should be enabled. If required, agents should be installed on the cloud instances automatically. Touch-free provisioning and configuration of the management system is a very key requirement. Likewise, once provisioning and configuration of the monitoring has been done, alerts generated from the management system should be automatically handled.

To support this level of automation, the management system should support open interfaces that can be integrated with toolsets already being used by the cloud service provider. For instance, cloud service providers are already using runbook automation tools like Dynamic Ops, HP Orchestration and others. The performance management system should offer APIs (application programming interfaces) or CLIs (Command Line Interfaces) to allow its integration with the existing automation/orchestration tools.

For alert management, service providers often use trouble ticketing systems such as HEAT, BMC Remedy, and others. The management system must support interfaces that allow trouble tickets to be automatically opened when a problem is detected and automatically closed when a problem is fixed.


Allows cloud service providers to offer monitoring

The right performance management system will not only allow you to oversee the operation of your cloud service, but it can also allow you - the cloud service provider - to offer monitoring as a value-added service to your customers. For this purpose, the management system should support multi-tenancy – i.e., the same management platform can be used to monitor networks, servers and applications for multiple enterprise customers.

In this case, each customer gets a personalized login and when he/she logs into the management system, they only get to see the parts of the infrastructure that they have been configured to access and get reports for. The monitoring service can offer monitoring of the cloud instances that the customer is using. Advanced monitoring can also be offered to customers, providing them in-depth insight into applications like databases, web servers, Java applications, etc. that customers are hosting in the cloud.


The key benefits to service providers from a management solution that monitors the cloud infrastructure are:

- Ensuring that the performance of the cloud infrastructure meets the expectation of users.

- Facilitates effective provisioning of the cloud infrastructure to deliver the expected ROI without compromising on performance.

- Enables the cloud service provider to provide performance metrics of the cloud as a value-added service to their customers.

In summary, cloud performance management needs to be considered from three different perspectives, each of which has unique needs. A comprehensive approach needs to incorporate performance management FROM the cloud, OF the cloud and FOR the cloud. This will provide IT operations management with a new best practice for cloud performance management via a much more holistic view into every tier of the cloud infrastructure than traditional silo-based approaches provide.

This blog is the final in a series of four on cloud management.

Part One: Performance Management Challenges for Cloud-Hosted Services

Part Two: Performance Management from the Cloud: The Deployment Perspective

Part Three: Performance Management of the Cloud: The Cloud Consumer View

Srinivas Ramanathan is CEO and Founder of eG Innovations.

Related Links:

www.eginnovations.com

Hot Topics

Related Vendors

The Latest

Why Cloud Reliability Comes Down to People and How to Improve It

Cloud outages are usually described as technical failures. When a service goes down, a dependency breaks, or a region has issues, the focus immediately shifts to infrastructure. But if you look closely at how these incidents actually unfold, the root cause is rarely the technology itself. It is almost always tied to decisions made earlier, during design, implementation, or day-to-day operations. The system behaves the way it was built. The real question is how it was built ...

Why IT Keeps Getting Handed an AI Training Problem It Can't Solve Alone

77% of leaders say their teams need AI skills urgently. 64% say their organization plans to train current employees rather than hire new ones. So far, so reasonable. The part that surprised me is who's been put in charge: 34% of those leaders say IT and engineering own the AI skills mandate. Learning and Development or HR own it at 7% of organizations. That's roughly five-to-one in favor of the people who understand the tools, over the people whose actual job is teaching adults how to learn new ones ...

Bringing IBM i Into the Modern Observability Stack: The Missing Piece of Enterprise AIOps

In the ever-evolving digital landscape, enterprises are increasingly focused on enhancing their observability stacks to gain deeper insights into their IT environments. Observability has become a cornerstone of modern IT operations, enabling organizations to monitor, diagnose, and optimize their systems with unprecedented precision. However, a critical piece of the puzzle often goes unnoticed in this transformation: IBM i ...

89% of Frontend Teams Use AI in Their Workflows, but Few Use It for Observability

We just surveyed 300 frontend and mobile engineers across 16 countries, and the finding that keeps sticking with me isn't the one about AI. It's this: 74% of engineering teams rate themselves in the "middle" of the observability maturity scale. Not reactive, not strategic. Stuck in the middle. They have dashboards, they have tracing, they have alerts. And yet when something goes wrong, they still can't tell you why ...

MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Podcast - Episode 25: AI's Impact on WAN

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 25, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses  AI's impact on the Wide Area Network (WAN) ... 

6 Signs Your APM Dashboard Looks Healthy but Your App Is Not

Application performance monitoring (APM) dashboards are only as useful as what they are configured to measure. The default setup covers obvious failure modes such as downtime, error spikes, and latency breaches, but it does not cover everything. Some failures produce no alerts or anomalies. The dashboard stays green while users experience a broken product. Here are six signs that is happening ...

AI Innovation Was the First Phase. Governance and Accountability Are the Next ...

The race to deploy AI is largely over. Most enterprises have entered it. The question now is not whether artificial intelligence is running inside the organization. The question is whether anyone is genuinely responsible for what it does. That is not a technical question. It is a leadership one. And most organizations are not yet structured to answer it honestly ...

Your AI Agent's Biggest Problem Isn't the Model - It's the Data

A new analysis of 250 real-world queries across common retail tasks, such as product pricing, availability, ratings, shipping and specifications, reveals systemic inefficiency at the heart of web-based AI agents. On average, 97.9% of the data retrieved by agents from live web pages is irrelevant to the query being answered. Specifically, the average page ingested ran nearly 9,000 characters, while the average answer was just 32 characters, resulting in a noise-to-signal ratio of 278:1. Price queries were the most extreme outlier, with noise rates approaching 99.5%. That's not a rounding error. That's a structural problem ...

Observability Is the New Control Plane for Enterprise Transformation

The enterprises that will define the next decade are not the ones that deployed the most technology. They are the ones who understood what their technology was actually doing. That distinction is not a philosophical point. It is the central operational challenge facing every organization that has spent the last five years modernizing at speed ...

When AI Becomes the Corporate OS

AI is becoming the operating system of the enterprise. It acts as an invisible coordination layer that understands intent, connects systems, and executes work across complex SaaS environments. Previously, employees had to click through multiple systems — CRM, ERP, support tools, collaboration platforms — to complete a single task. Now, instead of navigating each application manually, they can simply state what they need to accomplish ...