Overcoming 3 Performance Visibility Challenges in Your Cloud Ecosystem

Companies are betting big on the cloud. Vast amounts of time are spent each year building hybrid cloud and multicloud ecosystems capable of delivering infrastructure, business services, applications, and more. But the bigger a company becomes the more performance matters. Without sufficient visibility from network and application performance management, it’s difficult to proactively monitor those ecosystems and the business processes reliant on them. The following reviews three reasons why and suggests ways to fix them.
   
Cloud Complexity

Cloud ecosystems are complex and can be difficult to implement and maintain. Multicloud and hybrid cloud are even more complicated and may involve additional collaborative partners. Companies are not constrained by a private on-premises infrastructure or specific locations, so that they can migrate their workloads, databases, systems, platforms, applications, and the latest buzzworthy “fill in the blank as a service” at will. Visibility needs to be continuous throughout the entire migration process—before, during, and after—to quickly identify and resolve the root cause of degradations and outages. For example, is a sudden latency reported by the billing department after migration from a data center affecting a physical part of an enterprise’s corporate campus, all of its applications, or a specific accounts-payable application? Without visibility and analysis throughout the ecosystem via a single-pane-of-glass view and reports, even custom applications hosted in the cloud can become black boxes. 

Blind Spots

With a few clicks and configurations, companies can quickly scale their cloud environment up or down (vertically) and in or out (horizontally) to respond to changes in demand. This can also cause visibility gaps. Understaffed IT departments may simply lack proactive monitoring and analysis across the systems, servers, applications, and endpoints that make up their evolving ecosystem. Without performance management, quickly detecting and troubleshooting degradations before they affect employees and customers can be difficult. And by then, it may be too late, with conditions spiraling out of control and causing serious financial and reputational damage to enterprises.

Restrictive Point Tools

Cloud providers may include some sort of simple monitoring of their own environment as part of the service, but this will be only a portion of the overall path a particular transaction takes. Additionally, sticking solely in the cloud can lead to vendor lock-in or the need for IT to manage multiple vendors. Suspecting that outages originate within a third-party vendor’s environment is one problem. Getting that vendor to admit it may be another. Having vendor-agnostic evidence from the overall path of the transaction to share with your cloud provider will help build collaboration between IT and the vendor and reduce the time it takes to resolve the actual problem.

The Fix: End-Through-End Visibility

NETSCOUT network and application performance management solutions deliver end-through-end cloud visibility that includes:

• Out-of-the-box scalability, with an enterprisewide single-pane-of-glass view and analysis, and simultaneous support for more than 1,000 protocols and applications
• Deep packet inspection at scale for smart data to help improve mean time to knowledge (MTTK) that dramatically reduces mean time to repair (MTTR)
• Visibility before, during, and after migrations for evidence-based planning, decision-making, and validating the success of transitions with data-rich dashboards, contextual session drilldowns, proactive alerting, and trend reporting
• Support for physical and virtual environments, reducing the need for and cost and complexity of using multiple solutions

Learn more about NETSCOUT performance management solutions or contact us.