Network Instruments organized a poll of attendants of Interop, an US IT conference. The poll shows that usage of application clouds had increased by 20 percent in the last year. However a lot of users worry about lack of control over their business clouds. Quite often it happens that the network team doesn’t have appropriate tools to deal with the problems appeared on a cloud.
To control clouds in a proper way it is not enough to find the best cloud service provider, it is also necessary to deploy monitoring tools that will provide needful metrics to assess cloud efficiency and prevent probable problems.
Monitoring the user experience is one of the best ways to estimate performance and find out that the problem is in the cloud. It can provide you such an important metrics as application and server response times, requests and availability, network delays, client and server errors and successful transmissions.
Some of the methods that are used to regulate internal networks can also be suit for clouds. For example, it would be a good idea to implement performance benchmarks to control managed cloud services.
Before trying to find a problem in the cloud it is essential to rule out the internal infrastructure and network. It can be made by checking performance and availability metrics for service components. When you are sure that the problem is not in the internal network, you can find out its location with the help of analysis tools that are able to track the route and give you an opportunity to determine where the fault is.
