APMdigest asked experts from across the industry – including consultants, analysts and the leading vendors – for recommendations on the best way to ensure application performance in the hybrid cloud. Part 4 covers tools that help you leverage performance data.

Start with 28 Ways to Ensure Application Performance in the Hybrid Cloud - Part 1

Start with 28 Ways to Ensure Application Performance in the Hybrid Cloud - Part 2

Start with 28 Ways to Ensure Application Performance in the Hybrid Cloud - Part 3

17. AUTOMATED ALERT CORRELATION

Hybrid cloud brings an unmatched level of fragmentation and complexity, compounded by modernization in application development - with the uptake of continuous delivery, infrastructure as code, containerization, and the use of micro-services. This exacerbates an already painful problem of the inability to scale manual processes for incident detection, investigation and collaboration in order to keep up with the growing volume of alerts. Automated alert correlation, that delivers enriched and actionable insight into incidents, is the need of the hour. This bridge between the gap of machine generated alerts and human understanding is the key to ensuring application performance with faster time to resolution.
Mala Ramakrishnan
Head of Product Marketing, BigPanda

18. SINGLE PANE OF GLASS

A solution that seamlessly monitors applications across hybrid environments is a necessity. Only a single pane of glass can equip IT teams with the insights they need to plan for capacity, release apps and to monitor applications that run on distributed production environments.
Krishnan Badrinarayanan
Sr. Product Marketing Manager, Riverbed

Create greater gravity around a single management console. Enterprises need to extend real-time performance analytics and IT efficiencies beyond conventional on-premise orthodoxies to include the public cloud resources while at the same time assuring service delivery quality and self-healing functions across conventional infrastructure silos.
Atchison Frazer
VP of Marketing, Xangati

With both on-premises and cloud resources to manage in a hybrid IT environment, a monitoring toolset that quickly surfaces a single point of truth across those platforms is essential and will increase the efficiency and effectiveness of monitoring as a discipline. The normalization of utilization metrics, saturation alerts and error events from applications, regardless of their location, enables a more efficient approach to remediation, troubleshooting and optimization.
Kong Yang
Head Geek, SolarWinds

19. ROOT CAUSE ANALYSIS

The most important word for organizations building out a hybrid cloud is "anticipation." Issues that threaten performance, security, and service availability are inevitable, and balancing the clear benefits of hybrid clouds — tailoring the solution to the need, lower costs, and improved manageability — are the challenges: hybrid clouds typically present a broader attack surface and have more PFPs ("Potential Failure Points") than less complex systems. Preparing for – rather than reacting to – these issues is cost effective and leads to a faster MTTR ("Mean Time To Resolution") for both performance and security issues. How? Enhancing monitoring and investigation capabilities, with a particular emphasis on forensics, the process of getting quickly to root cause. Application, network, and security forensics should all be in place and operational before a problem occurs, not after, for any organization building out a hybrid cloud.
Mandana Javaheri
CTO, Savvius

20. DEPLOYMENT AUTOMATION FOR MULTIPLE OPEN SOURCE MONITORING APPS

Automation is the best way to ensure app performance in any hybrid cloud environment. Companies should look for solutions that can automate the deployment of a wide range of open source Big Data applications to allow for optimal flexibility in the use of application platforms. One such category of open source applications allows businesses to monitor application performance. This type of modern open source software and application monitoring technology can be supported on many different platforms, making it hybrid-cloud compatible. Automation eliminates the time consuming and error-prone manual system engineering of these open source distributed systems. Because different open source tools have different degrees of complexity, automation commoditizes this “heavy lifting” and allows a greater audience of perspective users to take advantage of more of these tools. Its no longer just the “big data elite” that can take advantage of all of the tools in the market today.
Dave Hirko
Managing Partner, Stackspace

21. VM LOAD BALANCING AND MONITORING

Virtual machines that are overloaded with traffic can't efficiently run applications in the hybrid cloud, leading to app lag times and performance delays. Load balancing tools can effectively distribute day traffic to VMs. and monitoring gives IT teams complete, easy visibility into the traffic on each VM, along with real-time reports on application delivery. By monitoring the traffic, you can eliminate any guesswork relative to app performance, wherever you're deploying.
Simon Taylor
SVP and GM, Comtrade System Software and Tools

Read 28 Ways to Ensure Application Performance in the Hybrid Cloud - Part 5, covering approaches you might not have thought about.