There are just as many explanations to cloud services these days as there are cloud service providers. Regardless of the definition and the type of service (IaaS, SaaS, PaaS), the end result for IT is the same: infrastructure is extended off-premise. IT departments have another functionality requirement for their monitoring system as enterprises expand and resources become more dynamic.

As the uptake of cloud services increases, so does the pressure on IT to manage them. In a recent survey carried out by Opsview, 67% of organisations were concerned about the threat of cloud-sprawl. Fortunately, Opsview is ready to tackle any challenges presented by cloud monitoring.

Here are five ways to use Opsview in conjunction with cloud services.

Tune Applications, Reduce Costs

Servers in the cloud should be monitored just like servers on-site, but evaluated in finer detail especially since elastic computing provides a tuning opportunity. System resources can be added or reduced based on application needs.

Opsview graphs present historical data of monitored services to allow administrators to confidently tune dynamic resources. Certainly a powerful benefit, but reducing resources to lower costs shouldn’t compromise stability. Keeping a close eye on resource statistics allow administrators to understand events and distinguish between anomalies and patterns.

Performance trending for applications is paramount for cloud servers since the ability to turn down resources like RAM and CPU actually affects the bottom line with providers charging on a usage basis.

Extend any component into the cloud

Enterprises look to the cloud to position business critical applications, taking advantage of top tiered data centres and ease of availability to employees traveling around the world. Isn’t your monitoring system a business critical application? With Opsview’s distributed architecture, any component can be extended into the cloud. On-site slave servers can report to a master in the cloud. Slave servers can be placed in each cloud environment, serving as a backup to other slaves spread across cloud regions or different providers. The Opsview master could also stay on-site and remotely monitor cloud environments.

The ease of building in the cloud doesn’t limit how Opsview works, rather it extends its ability to monitor the “big picture” for any enterprise.

Provide Limitied Access

With so many cloud offerings, the decision on which provider to use can be time consuming. Sometimes for business reasons (fortunate or not) the decision is made for us and we have to “make it work.” A business unit may strongly suggest their servers be placed with a recognized provider while another division looks at the cheapest solution on the market.

As a result, each cloud environment may have certain users interested in only those servers. Use Opsview to give them visibility to resources and performance metrics without showing them all servers monitored. Create a Role that limits them to the Host Group for servers hosted by their cloud provider of choice. Opsview can continue to be the centralised solution to monitoring and alerting for servers in the cloud, making proprietary add-on cloud offerings unnecessary.

Use libcloud to Enhance Opsview Checks

Many cloud providers have an API as a value add to their services to help administrators manage multiple instances. Libcloud from Apache provides a way to interface multiple providers, giving IT a common platform to develop checks that span environments. Opsview includes Service Provider checks for Amazon and Slicehost, with more on the way with future updates, and easily incorporates custom scripts and checks seamlessly as administrators discover important metrics to monitor with cloud servers. Since cloud interfaces allow for quick provisioning of instances but not a detailed audit trail of who created the server, create a check and alert when new instances are added so everyone on the team is aware of additional servers in the environment.

How much impact is the cloud having on your business? We’d love to hear your thoughts…

IT monitoring has become the most strategically important part of any enterprise process reliant on technology. Any network failure or server outage will impact an organisation’s ability to do business, and therefore, its bottom line.

Using the right tools to monitor your IT is vital not only to the continued health of your IT operations but also to the overall performance of your business. For this reason your monitoring solution must be stable and reliable with a track record of deployment in large scale production environments. This post outlines 10 reasons why choosing the right toolset is paramount to assuring overall business performance.

It’s not just IT that is affected by downtime

So many business tools rely on IT, without a means of monitoring there’s no way to know the reason why the phones don’t work or management reports can’t be produced because a database is offline. And, considering its significance in managing and mitigating enterprise security and compliance risk, IT monitoring is a key requirement for knowing who has access to what in any modern enterprise.

Monitoring is the heartbeat of your business

IT monitoring acts as your IT infrastructure’s nervous system. It senses operational issues and empowers your IT department to take not only remedial, but proactive action swiftly. IT monitoring is an organisation’s view on every aspect of its performance.

Mixing tools can hamper business effectiveness

Problems can start to occur when multiple monitoring systems are used to manage every layer of the IT infrastructure, including networks, servers and applications. Systemic complexity characterised by a mix of proprietary management tools and IT processes can slow reaction times and hamper overall monitoring effectiveness. Only a single system capable of deep visibility of an IT infrastructure can provide an effective solution that will improve business performance rather than detract from it.

Freeware systems aren’t scalable

Free software is often designed as a testing ground for enterprise applications or, in many cases, only meant for use in a simple monitoring environment. For any growing organisation, a scalable network monitoring application is a must in order to handle any growth in the IT estate over time.

It’s not just about internal customers

In our increasingly interconnected, “always on” world, detailed IT performance monitoring can help to minimise the costs of a poor user experience by alerting you when any part of your back-office or virtual storefront is slow or down. Web surfers, for example, have very little patience for badly performing websites. For every second a web store is down customers may be lost.

Prevention is better than cure

The idea behind monitoring an IT environment is “prevention is better than cure”. Businesses will operate far more effectively by spotting problems before they occur rather than being purely reactive. However when downtime does occur, you need the fastest route to addressing the issue possible. Opsview’s ‘Service Desk Connector’ module, for example, integrates monitoring with fault logging systems helping to streamline incident management.

Monitoring is your ‘Insurance Policy’

The value of monitoring enterprise IT systems is linked to their levels of availability, acting as a kind of insurance policy for a business’s bottom line. As the larger and more geographically distributed an enterprise becomes, so the strategic importance of monitoring and assuring performance increases in terms of delivering daily value by supporting ‘business as usual’.

Monitoring tools must integrate with your current systems

When considering monitoring tools it’s important to ensure the provider will be able to meet the levels of openness required for integrating with your own IT systems, while allowing the flexibility required to maximise the use of IT performance information at every level of the business. For corporate networks it is essential that the monitoring system has a scalable architecture in order to cover all systems and locations.

IT infrastructure is no longer restricted to ‘on-premise’

Due to the rise of ‘cloud-computing’, having a clear view of IT performance is all the more important, whether it’s of the server room next door or IT services hosted thousands of miles away through a third-party data centre or software provider. Only a system that can monitor on-premise, virtual and cloud-based servers can offer the management capabilities for an enterprise business to operate effectively.

Staff productivity can be affected

Considering how much pressure IT budgets are under nowadays, most enterprises don’t want to hire their own in-house software engineering staff to fix the source code of third-party applications. The ideal monitoring solution should include software maintenance to ensure that an organisation receives critical software fixes quickly and with minimum disruption business.

If you’re managing any web sites or web applications Selenium can be used with Opsview’s monitoring platform to ensure your customers get the very best user experience and increase your online conversion rates.

What is Selenium?

Selenium is a suite of tools to automate web application testing, it is also the 34th element in the periodic table. You can use the Selenium IDE to record web browser actions in the form of test cases. These test cases can be saved in a number of different formats and replayed when needed. The Selenium IDE is implemented as a Firefox extension.

What is Opsview?

Opsview provides comprehensive monitoring and management capabilities for a very wide range of web applications. Our Community Edition is free, easy to install and simple to use. More advanced features are available with Opsview Enterprise. Check out our screencasts

User Experience monitoring

In 2001, Zona Research reported that 30% of surfers would abandon a Web site if it took more than 8 seconds to load, creating the widely-quoted ´8-second´ standard. Ten years later, with wide adoption of broadband services users become frustrated if sites take more than a couple of seconds to load.

Monitoring your web applications from an user’s perspective is vital for ensuring they get the best experience and allows you to get early warning of any application performance issues. You can use the Selenium IDE to record common paths through your web applications and the have Opsview replay these paths on a regular basis. Opsview will alert if any URLs fail to load in a pre-defined timescale or if the entire path takes too long to complete. These checks can be replayed from multiple locations (Opsview Slaves) to give you a complete picture of how your customers are experiencing the applications.

End-to-end testing

Using Selenium to perform end-to-end web application testing ensures that the whole system is being monitored in concert. This can be combined with individual component checks to provide a coherent overview of system performance and health. The Selenium IDE can be used to record transactions performed through the web applications. These are then replayed on a regular cycle to ensure the transaction completes successfully in a given timeframe. By replaying key transactions all components and sub-systems that comprise the application are exercised to ensure correct operation.

Selenium in action

Ten uses for Selenium with Opsview

1. Measure how your applications are performing for end-users
2. Keep tabs on your shopping cart / order processing application
3. Check that your landing page forms are working correctly
4. Confirm that web site authentication is working
5. Check that you’re not getting any pesky database errors
6. Track your cloud hosting provider’s performance against their SLA
7. Make sure your boss can get to his web mail account
8. Be the first to know that Opsview’s web UI is offline
9. Ensure your load balancer is working correctly
10. Get alerted if your homepage has been hacked

What next?

Installation and configuration instructions can be found in Opsview’s documentation along with instructions for downloading the selenium plugin.

Our recommended approach is to configure Selenium on an Opsview slave server, either by updating an existing slave or by deploying a new one. Selenium can place an appreciable load on your server so we recommend allocating another 1GB RAM. For heavy Selenium usage you should consider allocating an additional CPU core.

Thanks

Thanks to Alan Wijntje @ Ziggo, Rohit Deshmukh @ Opsview and Steve Burt @ Opsview for their work on the Selenium plugin for Opsview and related documentation.

All enterprises depend on reliable servers, network devices and business applications. Any downtime hits your bottom line. To ensure maximum IT performance across your business, you have to identify and resolve problems before they impact the user experience or security of your data.

To diagnose reliability and performance problems on complex networks you need visibility of system events combined with the ability to spot trends and exceptions. For example, without proactive IT monitoring how can you tell whether poor application performance is related to network congestion, database performance or a high number of users?

Monitoring network events as they happen!

Powerful graphing tools

Here are five reasons why you need better network and application visibility:

1.    To maximise your return on network investments for business application delivery All businesses invest heavily in setting up and maintaining their IT infrastructure whether it be physical, virtualised or in the Cloud. Effective capacity planning allows you to target your spending wisely and track your return on investment. IT monitoring gives you instant access to the data you need for trend analysis and provides data warehouse capability suitable for enterprise reporting and capacity planning.

2.    To anticipate and resolve issues before they’re problems Knowing when there is a problem with your IT systems can be useful but anticipating problems before they occur is the real value of system monitoring. IT monitoring gives you the visibility needed to spot performance and capacity issues before they have an impact on your systems. It can also process alarms from network, storage, power and cooling infrastructure ensuring you can mitigate the effects of failing hardware.

3.    Make your staff more effective The biggest asset for any business is its staff, also usually this is the biggest cost. Adoption of effective IT monitoring tools shifts the focus of your staff from fire-fighting to forward-planning. A project-based approach is more time efficient and allows you to focus the talents of your staff more effectively.

4.    To ensure quality and service levels Maintaining quality of service requires visibility. Performance issues can remain hidden to the business while quietly eroding the confidence of customers and partners. IT monitoring exposes current problems and gives you the tools for long terms analysis and reporting. It provides service level reporting, providing clear evidence that you’re meeting the required service levels.

5.    Move things forward! System monitoring is the cornerstone of IT management best practice. By adopting IT monitoring you’re making immediate efficiency gains and you’re laying the foundation for even greater levels of automation, scalability and resiliency.

In the light of the recent events at a BT network centre in Paddington (London, UK), where a series of compound failures caused a massive outage with huge knock-on effects, I’m sure many businesses are taking another look at their own (and their suppliers) availability with a view to beefing up business continuity. Within the spirit of continuous improvement this should be taken as an opportunity to improve the overall ’system’ rather than finger pointing.

What is business continuity?

Quite simply, business continuity is how you can stay in business (and meet your customers demands) in the wake of a disaster (whether a localised incident such as flooding or a further reaching issue like a terrorist attack). Your plan will typically cover all the business critical functions, systems and data.

So what is high availability?

High availability (or HA) is the way that system designers ensure ‘operational continuity’ of a system. This will typically involve ensuring that the system has no single point of failure (and for really fault tolerant systems there should also be no single point of recovery).

One of the common mistakes that people often make is getting confused between availability and scalability. Scaling is usually described in terms of vertical (bigger boxes) or horizontal (lots of boxes) scaling – horizontally scaled systems often have a degree of high availability whereas vertical scaling is potentially a bigger risk as you lose more capability when you lose a bigger box.

How do redundancy and diversity fit into the picture?

The phrase ‘belt & braces’ describes this nicely – two different ways of achieving the same goal.

One example might be having multiple (diverse) suppliers provide network connections to a building; in data centres it is common to have a (redundant) backup generator – though this is usually coupled with a battery-based UPS (uninterruptible power supply) to provide seamless failover.

But we’ve got this new fangled Cloud thing…

Let’s attempt to clarify what ‘cloud computing’ means – there are a number of different types of on-demand services that run ‘in the Cloud’:

• IaaS – Infrastructure as a Service
• PaaS – Platform as a Service
• SaaS – Software as a Service
• IaaS – Infrastructure as a Service

This category splits into:

• Virtual Private Server (VPS) providers such as Slicehost allow businesses to rent a fixed size virtual server on demand for a set monthly fee
• Elastic computing providers such as Amazon EC2 allow businesses to have a virtual machine image that can grow to meet requested demand (vertical scaling).

PaaS – Platform as a Service

Platform as a Service providers offer application-hosting platforms (again these can be of fixed-size or scalable) so that application developers can focus on adding business value rather than needing to worry about the underlying infrastructure. Google AppEngine is one example of this approach for Java & Python applications.

SaaS – Software-as-a-Service

Software-as-a-Service provides access to business software over the Internet for a set monthly fee. This can either be multi-tenanted, where multiple companies share a system, or with separate installations per customer. One of the major SaaS success stories is SalesForce.com who started with a CRM on-demand offering.

Public vs. private vs. hybrid clouds

We’ve already discussed public cloud offerings above; a private cloud is typically an on-premise or a dedicated outsourced managed cloud platform (e.g. using the open source Eucalyptus or VMWare vCloud). A hybrid cloud is where a private cloud is used in conjunction with one or more external cloud providers.

There is also the notion of community clouds with varying definitions:

1. whereby similar organisations pool resources into a shared multi-tenant cloud (though I prefer to describe this as a shared private cloud or a restricted cloud e.g. Google’s ‘GovCloud’)
2. a decentralised peer-to-peer cloud utilising spare computing power (and bandwidth) of internet-connected computers.

Deployment models

Assuming that your organisation can operate its business critical systems and store business critical data in the Cloud, then there are a number of possible deployment models to consider, chiefly:

1. Backup
2. Failover
3. Active-active
4. Cloud as a backup

Cloud as a backup

In this model, data plus the necessary software packages and configuration data (e.g. CMDB configuration data) for critical systems are backed up to 1 (or ideally more) hosts in the cloud. In the event of a disaster at the primary operating location, new virtual servers are commissioned and the configuration management tool (e.g. Puppet) is used to provision the servers with the appropriate software.

Recovery time is dependent upon the time taken to commission/provision the new virtual servers and perform any data transfer (or decryption). Database/file replication techniques can help to reduce the time to recover.

Failover to the cloud

For this model, there are pre-configured server instances in the cloud running the business critical systems combined with data replication. In the event of a disaster at the primary operating location, the systems are failed over to the cloud instance (this can be manual or use an automated ‘global load balancer’).

Active-active

This form of hybrid cloud is fundamentally the same as the failover option, however there are more complexities involved in the data synchronisation, session failover etc.

The Cloud

So how can the Cloud help with planning Business Continuity activities?

1 & 2: People & premises

For knowledge worker businesses, the Internet and widespread availability of broadband has increased the prevalence of distributed home workers. With a distributed workforce and cloud-based systems these two are items of less concern; it remains a practical option to have staff work from home (or indeed a temporary serviced office) in the event of a disaster accessing systems running in the cloud.

For a true ‘belt and braces’ approach, 3G/HSDPA mobile broadband dongles can be used to provide a secondary Internet connection for home workers should their main internet connection be unavailable.

3: Technology

Infrastructure-as-a-Service is very compelling for providing a Business Continuity strategy for data centre(s) using the deployment models outlined above. Furthermore, VoIP services can provide sufficient telephony cover for small-medium businesses.

4: Information

Cloud-based services (whether computing based or dedicated storage solutions e.g. Amazon S3) can aid your business in having current data stored confidentially and readily available in the event of a disaster. Some regulated organisations may have to consider whether the service provider can store data within the appropriate territory/jurisdiction. Data integrity is a further consideration for more complex system environments (particularly with the backup approach) – this needs to be taken into account for solution design / recovery procedures.

Conclusion

So we’ve established that cloud computing can alleviate some of the business continuity execution effort from your business, however you still need to plan properly (what happens if key personnel are unavailable; how will equipment & supplies be sourced) and perform due diligence on service providers to ensure that their SLAs and DR plans align with your needs.