While many tasks are simpler in a cloud-based infrastructure, a few become more complex. Performance monitoring in a hybrid cloud requires monitoring the individual and combined functioning of two distinct environments. Performance in a hybrid cloud comes from allocating workloads to the appropriate environment and ensuring sufficient server, memory, storage and network, but there may be limited visibility into the public cloud component of the hybrid cloud. Coming up with an effective monitoring strategy is critical to ensure the hybrid cloud functions as a single high-performing environment.
1. Plan for performance
Monitoring can help identify problems, but a well-designed hybrid cloud infrastructure can eliminate problems before they occur. Know your performance benchmarks before migrating or deploying applications in the cloud. Analyze data thoroughly to determine what’s most appropriately stored in the public cloud and which data should be stored in the private cloud; make similar assessments of applications and consider keeping mission-critical applications within your data center where you have full control over resource usage.
When synchronous updates aren’t required, use disk or tape to transport data to the cloud rather than using network bandwidth. New applications and APIs should be designed with cloud in mind, with workflows that minimize the impact. Simulate load and test performance in your development environment before deploying in production.
2. Build an actionable monitoring infrastructure
Look for tools that provide end-to-end visibility across the environment, with a single pane of glass offering a uniform view of overall and individual component performance. Monitoring should cover physical servers, virtual machines, applications, networks, firewalls, connections, and traffic.
Monitoring should correlate with a business transaction view to understand the performance experienced by end users; remember, in a hybrid cloud, their experience in the public cloud is impacted by workload from cloud users outside your business. Create automatic alerting to respond to issues immediately as well as analytics that can review logs for slowly developing problems; consolidate logs from multiple sources to create a comprehensive record of system events. Spend the time after an incident to perform root cause analysis and implement improvements that will prevent the problem from recurring.
3. Take advantage of automation
The cloud’s ability to scale easily lends itself to automated solutions to performance problems. Use load balancing to share traffic among virtual machines. Autoscaling lets cloud instances start up automatically based on rules and metrics. Your team doesn’t have to manually take action to make sure your minimum performance needs are met. With hybrid cloud, you can also automate cloudbursting to make use of public cloud capacity when your private cloud can’t meet the demand.
Are you concerned about how you’ll manage and monitor your hybrid cloud services? Managed services from dcVAST, including managed Nutanix and managed AWS, ensure your environments are designed and configured for peak performance as well as monitored with a 24×7 response when something goes wrong. Contact us to learn more about getting the best performance from your hybrid cloud.
