Migrating Applications To The Cloud

Legacy approaches to IT monitoring don't often transition well to the cloud.
Here are three key steps IT leaders can take to increase the effectiveness of their
monitoring solutions—and to limit exposure to cloud challenges.
Modern enterprises are migrating applications to the cloud, replacing legacy

technologies with new cloud-based architectures that offer numerous advantages,
including lower costs, increased efficiency, and the ability to scale workloads on
demand. This flight has turbulence, however. A recent report by Gartner analysts
Padraig Byrne and Sanjit Ganguli shows how cloud adoption presents significant
challenges, including:
• IT operations teams no longer have the same access to the infrastructure

and networks that support their services, thus creating visibility gaps in
monitoring.
• An enterprise's cloud migration effort is often spearheaded from outside
the infrastructure and operations (I&O) team, which—though it has limited
say on the matter —is still held responsible for service availability.
• IT ops teams often lack the skills to monitor cloud-based services and
struggle to find experts who can.
In addition, with the move to microservices, containers, and serverless
technologies, workloads running in the cloud have now become much more
dynamic and ephemeral. All of this change and uncertainty leads to a startling
prediction: By 2021, less than 15% of organizations will implement holistic
monitoring, putting $255 billion of investments in cloud-based solutions at risk,
Gartner notes.
So, how can IT organizations maintain a high level of service quality when
running applications in the cloud and still realize the benefits that they expect?
Byrne and Ganguli offer three key steps that IT ops leaders and managers can
take to lessen visibility gaps and sustain service quality.
1) Inventory the cloud types in your environment. While running

applications in the cloud outsources much of the complexity of IT infrastructure,
it also introduces new visibility gaps in monitoring.
The type of cloud architecture—including private cloud, infrastructure as a service

(IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), and software as a service (SaaS)—has a big
impact on your ability to monitor it, the Gartner analysts note. For example,
private cloud offers the most control because IT operations owns the entire stack.
In this environment, IT ops generally will use traditional monitoring techniques.
Visibility gaps present a far greater problem with IaaS, PaaS and Saas cloud
architectures. With IaaS, for instance, everything below the OS is now beyond the
view of IT operations, which can't utilize traditional monitoring techniques that
rely on access to the hypervisor or virtual switch.
2) Eliminate gaps in monitoring visibility. In traditional environments,

monitoring teams have clear visibility into all tiers of the IT architecture—from
the physical hardware and network stack to the application layer. But in a cloud-
centric scenario, IT leaders should move toward a more end user-focused
approach to visibility and away from infrastructure-based monitoring. These
approaches can help IT teams achieve their cloud-centric goals:
• Synthetic monitoring
• End-user monitoring
• Network performance monitoring
• Cloud-native technology monitoring
• Business performance monitoring
To gain a full view of the IT environment, teams should assess their current
monitoring tools against identified visibility gaps, determine how well existing
tools are covering these areas, and implement one of the monitoring approaches
above to bridge the remaining gaps.
3) Invest in skills for cloud monitoring. An IT ops specialist typically has a
particular set of skills. A database admin, for example, will be adept at identifying
issues with problematic SQL queries.
But transitioning to the cloud calls for a new approach: Bring on the generalists!
IT ops teams should move away from siloed solutions and embrace a "holistic
monitoring strategy," Gartner notes. Recently, DevOps teams at companies like
Finastra have been moving from ITOps to NoOps (No Operations). This implies
that monitoring and automation should be good enough to allow development
teams to deploy in the cloud on demand without ITOps intervention. As
Harbinder Kang, Global Head of Developer Operations at Finastra noted, “As a
result, you can consume IT resources directly and without waiting. This allows
different personas within the business to improve their productivity.”
This new approach requires IT leaders to find the correct balance of specialist
know-how, as well as team members capable of covering multiple areas, including
new technologies. While having deep skills in a specific area will always be a
desirable trait, the role of the generalist—one who can manage a broad range of
applications or systems—will gain greater significance in a cloud-oriented world.
This requires a monitoring tool that can provide end-to-end visibility of the entire
application landscape across multiple cloud platforms.
The Gartner report, How to React to the Impact of the Cloud on IT Operations
Monitoring, goes into far greater detail (with helpful examples). It's definitely
worth a read if your organization is planning—or struggling with—monitoring
applications in the cloud. Download it here.
Aaro

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Legacy approaches to IT monitoring don't often transition well to the cloud.

Modern enterprises are migrating applications to the cloud, replacing legacy

• IT operations teams no longer have the same access to the infrastructure

1) Inventory the cloud types in your environment. While running

The type of cloud architecture—including private cloud, infrastructure as a service

2) Eliminate gaps in monitoring visibility. In traditional environments,

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