Knowledge Byte: Monitoring and Reporting a Cloud Environment

Monitoring the cloud environment is a key component of a successful cloud computing environment.

Monitoring Definition and Objectives

● Monitoring a cloud environment is a continuous activity because the network needs to be available 24 hours a day.

● An organization needs to be able to monitor and manage the cloud environment quickly and efficiently.

● The ability to remotely manage the virtualization environment allows for a flexible way to manage the environment and respond to any issues or alerts that might arise.

● Report tier availability, performance, and throughput so you can better manage the infrastructure that serves your business.

Monitoring Requirements for Cloud Deployments

● Application and Network monitoring and alerting solutions for cloud-based deployments.

● Centralized monitoring solution for cloud environment.

● Dashboard to give the administrator one single pane to view the entire cloud environment.

● A dedicated server for monitoring needs to cater to lost network connectivity, generating an alert to draw attention to the problem.

Monitoring Benefits in Cloud Computing

● Proper monitoring leads to increased availability for servers, services, and applications, and helps avoid problems.

● Monitoring the cloud environment helps organizations detect network outages quickly and efficiently.

● Understanding how to properly monitor the cloud computing environment enables an organization to plan for future resource utilization and to become proactive instead of reactive.

● Monitoring allows an organization to plan for future resource utilization and respond to issues that arise with the cloud environment.

● Monitoring is a key metric when providing chargeback and resource provisioning.

● Monitoring the cloud environment allows an organization to plan for future growth and to be proactive when it comes to distributing compute resources.

● Without a proper monitoring solution, it becomes difficult to respond quickly to a constantly changing environment.

● Effective monitoring techniques provide an efficient means of monitoring all aspects of a cloud environment without placing a major performance burden on the environment itself.

● Monitoring techniques should be able to manage the performance of the enterprise and give detailed information on the current usage of the cloud environment.

● Combining monitoring and alerting gives an administrator a way to be proactive instead of reactive when it comes to the cloud environment.

● Being able to control multiple virtualization host computers from a single console saves time and makes managing the cloud environment an easier task.

● An administrator can use a variety of protocols to monitor an environment, and there are various ways in which an administrator can be notified of potential problems.

● One of the goals of monitoring an environment is to ensure the overall health of the environment.

● An administrator can publish cloud health statistics on a corporate intranet site, allowing the entire organization access to the health data.

● An administrator might publish a dashboard on the company Intranet site that shows the current Service Level Agreements (SLAs) of the organization and whether or not the IT department has met those SLAs.

● Monitoring is needed for chargeback.

● An IT department can monitor the cloud environment and get a report on who consumed which compute resources and for how long, allowing the organization to charge the proper department or show the proper individual the use of those compute resources.

● Monitoring a cloud environment can ensure the overall health of the environment and gives an IT department the ability to measure the cloud service against its SLAs.