Changing at the Speed of Cloud

Thu, 12 Jan 2012 10:30:00 EST

Cloud computing has been a force in the industry for the past few years. Regardless of your feelings for it, one fact remains true ─ you have to monitor it just like any other system in your infrastructure, sometimes more so. The cloud presents a few challenges for traditional monitoring: the base hardware isn't yours; the instance isn't on your network and sometimes the machine can just vanish never to be heard from again. Let’s start with the latter problem. There are many tools out there to help you manage your cloud instances, most of which understand that things go away, recognize that, and boot up new machines on the fly with a command or two. How do we tie that into your monitoring though? Traditional systems require sometimes complex configuration changes and service restarts to recognize those changes. Some companies I talk to boot up and shut down in excess of 100 instances a day. That is a new instance every 4.8 minutes given an eight-hour workday. To have to continually restart my monitoring system to handle that volume is crazy, especially given that some systems, if rebooted every five minutes, might not have time to run all their checks, and you end up not monitoring what you think you are. This is fundamentally flawed and eliminates much of the value that going cloud delivers to an organization that relies on IT performance to ensure business performance.

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Changing at the Speed of Cloud