I was talking to a colleague of mine today about his company’s efforts to move their SAAS based application offering to the cloud.  They were only about 15% the way there but for the most part, things were going great - except for one small issue.  Occasionally, the application would suffer performance issues and they weren’t sure why.

What? 

He continued that they were not too alarmed since everything usually returned to normal within a five-minute timeframe.  Not trying to be a pessimist or anything but this sounds like a hope and pray strategy to me.

This may be ok for non-critical or internal only infrastructure like development environments, but it is a scary reality if the resource is a critical business application; more so if it is your core product directly impacting your revenue.  The only way for an IT organization or a SAAS/PAAS company to increase the usage of private and public clouds is if they can meet the operational needs of the business.  The requirement for real-time awareness and visibility is not going to go away just because you are capturing cost savings by moving to a shared infrastructure.

Over on the Cloud Computing Journal, Kevin Smile talks about the management challenges of cloud computing.  Kevin writes,

Most organizational ITSM has been ineffective to date in cloud environments because it fails to integrate these critical service management functions.

The cloud offers extensive benefits: increased speed-to-market, adaptability to changing conditions, and reduction of fixed costs. But the complexity of cloud computing requires organizations to carefully align cloud resources to business needs. This means managing both the customer-side demand and the supplier-side service.  Most companies simply lack the skills and processes to perform this balancing act right.

Here at Zenoss, we can't agree more and are working to make sure you have the awareness needed to manage the transition to the cloud.  Matt Ray recently lead a “gameday” demonstration where Zenoss was used to monitor web applications hosted inside Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2).  When the applications were shut down, Zenoss monitoring detected the change and issued alerts on the event allowing for the provisioning of new resources.

Check out our Zenoss Cloud Forum for more resources on monitoring virtual environments and stay tuned for our upcoming 3.0 release which includes features designed from the ground-up for dynamic service assurance.