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Why Cloud Consumers Need “Objective” Application Performance Management

Jim Young

The long anticipated rise of cloud computing is finally taking hold, with analysts reporting more investment in public clouds than private clouds, and suggesting that half of all production applications will be running on public clouds in three or four years.

The allure of public clouds springs from advantages like improved service scalability, reduced operational costs, and an increased focus on business goals and strategies instead of the technology needed to pursue them. However, there is a cost to that flexibility and economy, in reduced visibility of application and infrastructure health. Without direct control over the cloud infrastructure itself, traditional application performance management (APM) tools may prove impractical to deploy and manage.

I recently read a story about a war of words between a leading platform as a service vendor and a disgruntled customer, who discovered that they weren’t actually getting the amount of virtual computing capacity that they had been told they were getting.

Putting aside the customer’s justifiable indignation at not getting the resources that they believed they were paying for, the real story for a cloud consumer here (or an APM Product Manager) is that the tools they were using to monitor their workloads didn’t really provide them with a complete story. Then, when the continued mystery warranted a deeper-dive tool, it appears that they were pressured or influenced into purchasing a particular cloud APM tool because of a relationship between that tool vendor and the PaaS provider.

This suggests (and logic supports) that customers are better off using objective APM tools when monitoring workloads on public clouds, whether those workloads are running on a Platform as a Service (PaaS) solution like Heroku, or an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) solution like Amazon or Rackspace.

We generally espouse such a practice to help a customer maintain a posture of portability, so they can nimbly move workloads around to different cloud platforms, yet maintain continuity in their real-time and historical view of application health, without having to train their eyes on a new health dashboard whenever they move their workloads. We can employ the slightly suspicious sounding argument that a customer should not necessarily rely on his service provider for monitoring tools, since that provider has a vested interest in painting a rosy picture. Even in the presence of SLAs, a cloud tenant with no access to the infrastructure is somewhat at the mercy of his provider for performance reporting. An APM solution that the customer can deploy and configure himself provides a level of “checks and balances” oversight.

It can be impractical for customers to deploy legacy monitoring tools when moving to public clouds, so there is a need for a solution that can be deployed within those public clouds, in their own little sphere of control where their application VMs reside. By adopting an elastic and scalable ­yet small and easy to deploy architecture, as well as the ability to embed additional monitoring technology into base VM images, this solution enables robust APM, even when users can only deploy simple Linux VMs to someone else's cloud.

Jim Young is Information Development Manager, IBM Cloud and Smarter Infrastructure

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Why Cloud Consumers Need “Objective” Application Performance Management

Jim Young

The long anticipated rise of cloud computing is finally taking hold, with analysts reporting more investment in public clouds than private clouds, and suggesting that half of all production applications will be running on public clouds in three or four years.

The allure of public clouds springs from advantages like improved service scalability, reduced operational costs, and an increased focus on business goals and strategies instead of the technology needed to pursue them. However, there is a cost to that flexibility and economy, in reduced visibility of application and infrastructure health. Without direct control over the cloud infrastructure itself, traditional application performance management (APM) tools may prove impractical to deploy and manage.

I recently read a story about a war of words between a leading platform as a service vendor and a disgruntled customer, who discovered that they weren’t actually getting the amount of virtual computing capacity that they had been told they were getting.

Putting aside the customer’s justifiable indignation at not getting the resources that they believed they were paying for, the real story for a cloud consumer here (or an APM Product Manager) is that the tools they were using to monitor their workloads didn’t really provide them with a complete story. Then, when the continued mystery warranted a deeper-dive tool, it appears that they were pressured or influenced into purchasing a particular cloud APM tool because of a relationship between that tool vendor and the PaaS provider.

This suggests (and logic supports) that customers are better off using objective APM tools when monitoring workloads on public clouds, whether those workloads are running on a Platform as a Service (PaaS) solution like Heroku, or an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) solution like Amazon or Rackspace.

We generally espouse such a practice to help a customer maintain a posture of portability, so they can nimbly move workloads around to different cloud platforms, yet maintain continuity in their real-time and historical view of application health, without having to train their eyes on a new health dashboard whenever they move their workloads. We can employ the slightly suspicious sounding argument that a customer should not necessarily rely on his service provider for monitoring tools, since that provider has a vested interest in painting a rosy picture. Even in the presence of SLAs, a cloud tenant with no access to the infrastructure is somewhat at the mercy of his provider for performance reporting. An APM solution that the customer can deploy and configure himself provides a level of “checks and balances” oversight.

It can be impractical for customers to deploy legacy monitoring tools when moving to public clouds, so there is a need for a solution that can be deployed within those public clouds, in their own little sphere of control where their application VMs reside. By adopting an elastic and scalable ­yet small and easy to deploy architecture, as well as the ability to embed additional monitoring technology into base VM images, this solution enables robust APM, even when users can only deploy simple Linux VMs to someone else's cloud.

Jim Young is Information Development Manager, IBM Cloud and Smarter Infrastructure

Related Links:

www.ibm.com

Hot Topics

The Latest

According to Auvik's 2025 IT Trends Report, 60% of IT professionals feel at least moderately burned out on the job, with 43% stating that their workload is contributing to work stress. At the same time, many IT professionals are naming AI and machine learning as key areas they'd most like to upskill ...

Businesses that face downtime or outages risk financial and reputational damage, as well as reducing partner, shareholder, and customer trust. One of the major challenges that enterprises face is implementing a robust business continuity plan. What's the solution? The answer may lie in disaster recovery tactics such as truly immutable storage and regular disaster recovery testing ...

IT spending is expected to jump nearly 10% in 2025, and organizations are now facing pressure to manage costs without slowing down critical functions like observability. To meet the challenge, leaders are turning to smarter, more cost effective business strategies. Enter stage right: OpenTelemetry, the missing piece of the puzzle that is no longer just an option but rather a strategic advantage ...

Amidst the threat of cyberhacks and data breaches, companies install several security measures to keep their business safely afloat. These measures aim to protect businesses, employees, and crucial data. Yet, employees perceive them as burdensome. Frustrated with complex logins, slow access, and constant security checks, workers decide to completely bypass all security set-ups ...

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Cloudbrink's Personal SASE services provide last-mile acceleration and reduction in latency

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 13, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses hybrid multi-cloud networking strategy ... 

In high-traffic environments, the sheer volume and unpredictable nature of network incidents can quickly overwhelm even the most skilled teams, hindering their ability to react swiftly and effectively, potentially impacting service availability and overall business performance. This is where closed-loop remediation comes into the picture: an IT management concept designed to address the escalating complexity of modern networks ...

In 2025, enterprise workflows are undergoing a seismic shift. Propelled by breakthroughs in generative AI (GenAI), large language models (LLMs), and natural language processing (NLP), a new paradigm is emerging — agentic AI. This technology is not just automating tasks; it's reimagining how organizations make decisions, engage customers, and operate at scale ...

In the early days of the cloud revolution, business leaders perceived cloud services as a means of sidelining IT organizations. IT was too slow, too expensive, or incapable of supporting new technologies. With a team of developers, line of business managers could deploy new applications and services in the cloud. IT has been fighting to retake control ever since. Today, IT is back in the driver's seat, according to new research by Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) ...

In today's fast-paced and increasingly complex network environments, Network Operations Centers (NOCs) are the backbone of ensuring continuous uptime, smooth service delivery, and rapid issue resolution. However, the challenges faced by NOC teams are only growing. In a recent study, 78% state network complexity has grown significantly over the last few years while 84% regularly learn about network issues from users. It is imperative we adopt a new approach to managing today's network experiences ...

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