Page 156 - How Cloud Computing Is Transforming Business and Why You Cant Afford to Be Left Behind

MANA GEMENT STRATEGIES F O R THE CL OUD R EV OL UTION

such as CloudStatus.com, a monitoring service provided by
VMware’s Hyperic unit, the supplier of Hyperic HQ open
source Web site monitoring software. CloudStatus continu-
ously monitors Amazon’s EC2 and Google’s App Engine
cloud.
For many IT staffs, learning how to monitor an applica-

tion that is running remotely will be a new skill, and one that
may require some deftness in interpreting what a cloud ven-
dor is saying versus what your own monitoring system may be
telling you. If response times sink, it will be important to know
whether the problem is with the performance of the virtual
server in the cloud or whether some new network latency has
been introduced because a router in your path to the cloud

has failed. If the cloud vendor shows a chart of perfect run-
time performance, it will be important to the cloud user to
have his own compilation of uptime performance statistics, in
case the vendor’s chart doesn’t seem to apply to his particular
server. If the vendor’s monitoring shows 100 percent uptime,
you will want your own monitoring results, showing a 30-
minute outage during the previous week, to be documented
and foolproof for the resulting conversation.
A new service, Apparent Networks’s www.PathViewCloud

.com, can provide details on the network path and network
latencies involved in moving a workload to the cloud and
getting results back. If the virtual machine stops running,
PathViewCloud can indicate whether the problem is the net-
work or the data center at the end of the network path your
workload traveled.

136