Speaking recently to a colleague, Mike Mallo, he remarked that in his seventeen years in systems management he has seen many waves of technology for IT professionals to monitor their data centers but has never been so amazed with the recent leap forward in this area. He has seen an evolution from concepts initially used to monitor the mainframe, applied to client/server architecture, then to distributed systems, service oriented architecture, virtualization, and now the cloud. However it is only with the advent of the cloud and the leveraging of hypervisor that a truly revolutionary approach to monitoring is enabled, to provide a much simpler and more elegant solution.
New application performance monitoring solutions to monitor cloud based workloads no longer require a lengthy learning curve to get started, nor do they require a large investment to get started - coming in as low as $99 per VM. These are heavily simplified offerings compared to enterprise offerings as they focus on monitoring the VM itself and the web response time of applications running on the VM. Due to this simplification, it is easy to get started.
An application developer can quickly ensure that their cloud hosted test environment is running normally and not impacting their test results, while also seeing how their application is performing. This capability can stay with the application VM as it gets promoted into production and will scale along with the workload to take on large scale production loads.
This is a great capability for development shops who do not wish to make a large up-front monitoring investment (in both time and money) and who wish to utilize the same tooling in both the development and operations of applications running in the cloud.
Vive la Revolution!
Jim Young is Information Development Manager, IBM Cloud and Smarter Infrastructure
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