While you may feel confident in your ability to monitor and manage the performance of self-hosted applications, what happens when your applications begin transferring to the dynamic Cloud? Whether your enterprise is relatively new and small, or established and expansive, IT professionals must design not only their monitoring capabilities, but also the actual applications, to seamlessly integrate with cloud-based actions. The following are essential principles and best practices within the realm of application performance management in the cloud.
Determining if the Application is Suitable for the Cloud
The first step, before ever delving into the various cloud APM solutions, is determining if your application is suitable for the cloud. Not every application is designed to function properly via cloud-based hosting. Therefore, it’s imperative for the functionality of your website to review requirements for each application before integrating into your network, or before switching to cloud hosting.
In order for an application to perform at optimum levels, it requires a specific type of network architecture. The communication an application requires between the server and the host as well as the number of tier dependencies determines whether or not application performance will be hindered or enhanced. It’s essential to perform various cloud readiness checks before going live to determine if your current applications are appropriate.
Establish a Unified View Across Hybrid Enterprises
With the rising complexity in business service stacks, it’s essential that IT directors proactively manage cloud-based applications from end-to-end. When you have a complex network of applications, it’s essential to create a unified view across the entire cloud to effectively monitor, diagnose and repair applications. The ideal tool is one that provides real-time visibility into application performance, which then ensures an optimal experience from beginning-to-end. Granual end-to-end visibility is critical in determining the overall functionality and performance of applications. A unified view across hybrid environments, applications are able to be monitored and performed at premium performance levels for a satisfying end-user experience.
Continual End-User Perspective Monitoring
In the cloud, IT directors must monitor applications, not from the data center, but from the end-user perspective, regardless of where the actual application is sourced. In order to determine how cloud applications are interacting with your business demands, IT organizers must use non-intrusive technology to track and discover transactions and application performance, not from the back-end, but from the user’s perspective. There are a number of companies that allow applications to be continually monitored from a user perspective, such as Pingdom and Dotcom-Monitor.
The more dynamic environments and requirements from cloud applications require monitoring based upon the end-user experience. Therefore, it’s essential that your business integrate dynamic cloud-based monitoring solutions to track not only the end-user experience, but also how the IT infrastructure affects the functionality of each application.
