Cloud Migration Requires a New Monitoring Strategy
Most businesses have a multi-cloud, hybrid IT environment. Whether according to a strategic plan, the result of individual department IT decisions, or shadow IT usage by their employees, they are using more than one cloud provider. In addition, they continue to have on-premises IT resources. This complex environment makes monitoring complex, as well. In many cases, businesses should build out a new monitoring solution more capable of monitoring their mix of technologies.
The Challenges of Monitoring Hybrid and Multi-Cloud Environments
The mixed environments businesses are supporting today are difficult to monitor. Every provider has their own tool that provides metrics for that environment only; there are also likely multiple tools monitoring resources within the data center. Yet despite the many tools collecting data, it’s difficult to obtain an overall, consolidated view of status. That lack of insight makes providing support and investigating issues challenging.
Cloud vendor’s monitoring tools may lack data to help the business assess the effectiveness of its cloud migration. Performance metrics may be collected or presented differently than metrics were in the data center, making it impossible to effectively compare performance across environments. The tools may also make it hard to understand utilization, and can lack historical data needed for analytics. Finally, the tools don’t effectively capture the user experience, as the user’s access to a business service may depend on multiple technologies that are deployed in multiple locations.
Another important concern is that simply knowing what needs to be monitored is difficult. The dynamic nature of cloud means services are continually being added and removed. Besides making it easy to overlook an important component, the steady change makes it harder to compare metrics over time, as they’re never looking at exactly the same thing.
Learn more in 5 Cloud Migration Mistakes to Avoid.
Build Monitoring into Your Migration Plan
Because of these challenges, succeeding at cloud can’t rely solely on the cloud provider’s monitoring tool; you also can’t rely on operations staff to monitor multiple dashboards for each cloud environment.
Instead, businesses will need to be proactive and plan for a new approach to monitoring as part of the migration planning. This will typically require evaluating various tools available that pull together data from multiple clouds, or even implementing your own tool to create a consolidated view customized to meet your needs. Making sure the selected or built tool captures the necessary data requires spending time to identify the metrics that matter most to your business. Gathering the data must be automated for the tool to be successful.
Creating an effective monitoring strategy is just one of the challenges of planning a cloud migration. Contact CCS Technology Group to learn how our cloud services help you succeed with your migration and ongoing cloud usage.
