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3 Approaches to Cloud Performance Monitoring in 2024

The cloud is a solution to many modern IT problems, but it also creates new obstacles that enterprise leaders must overcome. In an article for Forbes, Progress Software Vice President Pavel Minarik said, “As workloads move to cloud-based systems, performance monitoring can become opaque, preventing system admins from having the data and visibility they need.”

This means that modern businesses need to adopt smarter cloud performance monitoring approaches to find success in 2024 and beyond.

Key Takeaways:

Cloud performance testing is an approach that monitors the condition of a cloud and its workload through the administration of controlled tests outside of the live environment.
The automated cloud monitoring approach removes the human element from the surveillance process, therefore reducing errors and freeing up staff for more important tasks.
Implementing targeted alerting ensures that the appropriate teams can respond in a timely manner as soon as key metrics pass critical thresholds.

What is cloud performance monitoring?

Cloud performance monitoring is a specific subset of a broader cloud monitoring strategy. When monitoring performance in the cloud, IT staff use a wide range of tools and methods to gain insight into the health of a cloud and the level of optimization of the workloads running within.

When gauging the performance of a cloud, key items to monitor include:

Website performance
Cloud storage
Databases
Virtual machines
Virtual networks

By maintaining visibility over all elements of the cloud and the services that the cloud provides, organizations can manage performance as well as cost efficiency and threat vulnerability. IT teams can detect errors before they severely impact performance, simplify the implementation of business continuity measures, and proactively scale up or down as activity levels fluctuate.

Private and public clouds may require different cloud performance monitoring strategies in accordance with the level of control that organizations have over each respective cloud type. There are a few notable approaches to performance monitoring in 2024. Becoming familiar with them can enable IT decision-makers to choose the best approach for their unique cloud deployments.

1. Cloud performance testing

Testing is an important part of monitoring that brings potential failure points to light in a controlled environment. Through cloud performance testing, organizations gain valuable data concerning the stability and responsiveness of their cloud workloads that they can leverage when rolling out improvements and, by extension, create a smoother experience for the end user.

Cloud functions need to be simple and seamlessly scalable. Proper performance testing in cloud environments facilitates that desired level of simplicity by using flexible solutions that identify current and future performance requirements. By pinpointing these exact resource demands, businesses can quickly provision to the cloud while keeping costs low.

The right performance testing method is one that can be as all-encompassing or as granular as the cloud itself. As an effective cloud performance monitoring process, testing can target entire clouds in a multicloud ecosystem or focus on specific elements within an individual cloud.

Performance testing processes include:

Load tests
Stress tests
Latency tests
Failover tests
Capacity tests
Soak tests

Effective performance testing requires the configuration of a robust development environment compatible with the organization’s existing cloud infrastructure. For those operating in a hybrid cloud environment, it is important to understand how to implement testing on both the private and public sides.

2. Automated cloud monitoring

Performance monitoring is a task that IT teams can perform manually, but doing so requires committing valuable staff members to tedious processes and exposing the monitoring process to human error. Choosing to automate cloud monitoring means having a system that continuously surveys the environment and, when configured correctly, rarely makes mistakes.

Automated monitoring tools identify patterns in the cloud’s fluctuating health and performance to predict vulnerabilities. This leads to faster and more data-driven reporting that empowers teams to identify and solve problems before they arise.

With more sophisticated cloud performance monitoring tools comes the ability to entrust more and more tasks to automation. An automated tool that proves itself capable of complex pattern recognition can handle tasks such as generating event-based responses, making real-time configuration changes, and performing comprehensive health checks.

Automation can even take over certain administrative duties. Rolling out upgrades, reactively implementing security protocols, and administering access control to user accounts are all processes that the enterprise can leave to automation. This frees up skilled staff members for more important tasks.

3. Targeted alerting

Alerts are crucial to the success of any monitoring strategy. The best practice is to set up alerts that target crucial metrics in the cloud and ensure that they reach the right team members who can resolve any of the issues that trigger those alerts.

IT managers can choose to target alerts at the metric that most significantly affect business outcomes. These may differ between organizations, but the important takeaway is that a flexible cloud performance monitoring solution can cover respective businesses where they are most vulnerable.

Another option is to monitor cloud costs and set up alerts that trigger when spending thresholds are exceeded. Not only does this keep cloud spend in check, but integrating automation into cost-related alert responses make it possible for AI to adjust budgets on the fly with minimal impact to performance.

Enterprise decision-makers might also choose to prioritize the end-user experience in their cloud monitoring plans. By targeting alerts at performance metrics that are specifically relevant to the end user, such as latency and availability, businesses can maintain good faith with their customers by quickly responding to feedback on the backend.

Take the smart approach to cloud performance monitoring

A comprehensive monitoring strategy in the cloud incorporates elements of performance testing, automation, and target-based alerting to safeguard the health of the environment and all the workloads running within. A smart cloud monitoring solution implements all of these elements with simplicity.

Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) enables smart IT cloud monitoring and intelligent operations. NCM brings streamlined self-service capabilities, intuitive security governance, and codeless task automation to organizations operating in the Nutanix environment.

The enterprise cloud is complex, but that does not mean cloud performance monitoring cannot be simple. Taking the smart approach ensures faster time to value and greater success-oriented performance.

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