Welcome to Virtualization and Beyond
Workload Visibility is Most Important in the Cloud
Written By Steven Hunt, Product Strategy Principal, SolarWinds
For many companies, the path to the cloud can be a difficult
one. In "Key
Considerations for Moving Applications to the Public Cloud," I highlighted
important aspects one should evaluate when transitioning to the cloud. Public
cloud and other third-party vendors have slowly begun to offer solutions and
services to help make this transition less difficult by doing more of the hard
work for you. Most vendors have also realized that many companies will continue
to operate in a hybrid IT environment,
where some workloads will be hosted in the cloud and some will continue to be
hosted on-premises.
Microsoft Loves the Cloud
Microsoft® has embraced this more than any other
company, which is no surprise given their longstanding foothold in the
traditional data center. Microsoft CEO, Satya Nadella, has made it abundantly
clear that cloud computing is the future of both IT and Microsoft. The path to
moving your virtual machines to Microsoft Azure® has been carefully
laid out with things like License
Mobility Through Software Assurance and Azure
Site Recovery. They have even provided a calculator
to highlight the benefits of the hybrid use case. Microsoft wants to ensure the
only thing stopping you from moving to the cloud is you.
Why Monitoring Is Important in the Cloud Conversation
However, determining and architecting where your workloads
will run is only part of the equation. Solutions into the visibility of
cloud-based workloads are extremely important for the ongoing monitoring of
business-critical applications. For those who are fortunate enough to have all
cloud-native application workloads, a solution like Microsoft Azure Monitor or
Amazon® CloudWatchTM may give you everything you need. Reducing
the complexity of a hybrid environment, however, requires a solution that
can seamlessly give you visibility into the usage, availability, and
performance of cloud- and non-cloud-based workloads.
How Monitoring Can Help
It is important to utilize the performance data you get from
your existing monitoring solution and establish a baseline prior to migrating
those workloads to the cloud. Doing so will allow you to model your potential cloud-based
resource consumption, which is what will drive your cloud services costs. It
will also help you understand any performance changes once those workloads have
transitioned to a cloud services provider. The main problem arises when you
have to adopt a new monitoring solution to gain the visibility required of
ongoing monitoring of cloud- and non-cloud-based workloads. This creates additional
costs-not only in licensing, but also in soft costs like resources and time
spent learning and adopting a new tool.
When you have visibility into both your cloud- and
non-cloud-based workloads in one solution, you simplify the tools you use,
their associated costs, and ultimately make your life easier and a little saner.
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Read more articles in the Virtualization and Beyond Series.
About the Author
Steven Hunt has been
involved in the IT industry for more than a decade, focusing on server-based
computing, desktop virtualization, end-user computing, and server virtualization
solutions for SMB to enterprise environments. Currently, he is responsible for
product strategy for the server and application monitoring and virtualization management product lines at SolarWinds.