Enterprises these days are realizing the potential of cloud platforms and migrating to it for cloud desktop services. However, as of now, companies are more comfortable with a hybrid cloud approach than a complete migration. Their apps are deployed across on premise and public cloud infrastructure. By doing so, it served them as a comfortable middle-ground to achieve cost-efficiency and productivity while addressing the security concerns related to Cloud desktop Services.
Despite it being a smart approach towards digital transformation, it creates new operational domains and the need to use various monitoring techniques for a high-quality and full-stack cloud monitoring system.
Despite the way enterprises plan their hybrid cloud approach, there are two operational domains. First is a public data center that cannot control its infrastructure. The second operational domain is complicated inter service communication across distributed application components and data centers. An issue in any of the parts of the application can cause a domino effect, compromising user-experience.
When talking about the on premise data center the enterprise owns everything in that particular data center. Infrastructure, applications, and networking is owned by the company. Combining multiple monitoring techniques can give you efficient results in this case. However, once you step outside into an environment where enterprises do not own anything, including infrastructure, so the traditional monitoring techniques lose their efficiency.
In such cases, the availability and performance of an application are calculated by synthetic techniques:
APM (application performance management) using code injection and agent-data collection to understand the end-user experience.
For infrastructure monitoring, collecting health metrics using SNMP polling and UNIX-based utilities tp read performance data of networking equipment.
Packet capture and flow records offer a comprehensive understanding of incoming and outgoing traffic of the data center.
Ownership In Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure
When using the public cloud, you might own the application, but you have no control over the platform infrastructure or networking scheme. For virtual host-based packets adding probes like ntop is an option, but it comes with major overhead addition. It gets tougher for services like VPC logs and Cloud Watch to understand your performance metrics and require integration with modern analytics tools and platforms like Data dog or Splunk.
Enterprises that decide to go for a hybrid cloud approach rely on their strong internet connectivity between their on-premises data center and public cloud. To achieve the connection strength, their connection is made up of several ISPs. During any issue, the enterprise would need to figure out which ISP is part of the problem and to fix it as quickly as possible.
Without complete transparency, all your API calls, required to be executed across platforms and in-between micro services, can be a target of system failure. Without a proper way to detect the problem and resolve it, it could be a damaging move for your business. Combination of monitoring techniques can allow you to gain app, network path, and BGP routing layer insights.
We are now left with the question: what is a full-stack, hybrid cloud capability? When we’re in a hybrid cloud, monitoring the system should no longer be a vertical approach to look at network, server, storage, and application code. They can still do it. However, enterprises should set up a horizontal lens across different types of data centers, their connectivity, and inter service communication threads.
Enterprises should try a combination of techniques and data sets to offer an expanded view of digital service delivery across all operational domains. The result should be combined as data-based, automated, and algorithmically friendly platforms for better and smarter operations.
