Monitoring Cloud-Based Application Performance

When you move your application to the cloud you may not have to manage servers, but you will still have to manage performance.

Do not think of performance as a single metric or a monolithic characteristic of your application; instead, think of performance from different stakeholders’ perspectives and according to the levels in your application stack.  Your systems administrator and IT managers might be primarily concerned with holding the cloud provider to the service level agreements they negotiated. Your customers and applications users are more concerned with response times and availability regardless of what your contract says. 

If your application is underperforming the first step is to determine the root cause of the problem.  Slow application response time could indicate a problem with the web application, a bug in the application server, a poorly written database query or a problem with I/O performance in your cloud storage. If it’s your job to correct the problem, you’ll want performance monitoring tools in place.

Performance monitoring tools have long been available for internal IT operations and vendors; service providers are extending their offerings to support cloud-based applications. There are enough similarities between on premise and cloud deployed applications that many techniques and good practices apply regardless of where you deploy your application. There are differences though, especially as you move from infrastructure as a service (IaaS) to platform as a service (PaaS) and ultimately to software as a service (SaaS).

Here are some capabilities you will want to consider for monitoring cloud-based applications.

Look for a combination of support for alerts as well as detailed root cause analysis.  You should have the ability to define performance metrics, such as response time for a specified web application function, as well as criteria for generating alerts. You may decide that one or two slow web application responses shouldn’t ruin your evening by sending you unwanted and unnecessary SMS messages. The monitor can save the messages for times when the average response over an extended period crosses some threshold.  Once you have the alert that your application is not meeting performance requirements, you will want detailed information to diagnose the problem.

Dan Sullivan is an author, systems architect, and consultant with over 20 years of IT experience with engagements in systems architecture, enterprise security, advanced analytics and business intelligence. He has worked in a broad range of industries, including financial services, manufacturing, pharmaceuticals, software development, government, retail, gas and oil production, power generation, life sciences, and education.  Dan has written 16 books and numerous articles and white papers about topics ranging from data warehousing, Cloud Computing and advanced analytics to security management, collaboration, and text mining.

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