Easing Flying Blind Fears of the Cloud
One of the key inhibitors of cloud computing revolves around some of the shoddy native instrumentation where monitoring is concerned, leaving IT managers with the sense of amaurotic shock, unable to see what is going on behind the virtual curtain.
When a company abstracts computing resources to the cloud and then shares them across multiple lines of business – or even multiple customers, it can feel a lot like turning a daycare loose in a shopping mall. Everything moves so fast, and keeping tabs on it all is daunting. To make matters worse, in many cases, public cloud vendors simply don’t have the capability to provide any amount of sophisticated insight in what is going on behind the hypervisor. This creates a pretty significant barrier for skittish CIOs who aren’t ready to leave a veritable minefield of variables open to chance.
This opens an opportunity for companies like ScienceLogic to come in with offerings of being the “all seeing eye” of the infrastructure. Where visibility and security concerns often rank high in surveys addressing barriers to cloud deployment, ScienceLogic offers what they hope will be a soothing balm for the discomforted IT manager. Its medicine comes in the form of a monitoring management platform which they say enables real-time monitoring capabilities to enable IT to manage their dynamic resources on virtually any type of system, including private, public and hybrid clouds.
“A lot of people focus on, well I’m just going to look at the application, or [other spot items such as} is the OS patched, or what version am I updated on with the latest hypervisor,” explained Jeremy Sherwood with ScienceLogic in a recent video (see above). “Ultimately it boils down to, ‘can I see the holistic stack from the top to the bottom? Can I really see the underpinning hardware and how it’s doing, what’s the BIOS flavor of that, how is the firmware, is this particular OS doing what it should be doing and is this hypervisor doing what it should be doing, etc.”
Rather than having to create individual monitoring tools for spot applications within the cloud infrastructure – a situation that can turn into a “we don’t know what we don’t know” proposition, ScienceLogic says that they can deliver monitoring and management capabilities that span every resource simultaneously.
An entire industry segment is erupting around this challenge, with new entrants joining the fray all the time. Just last week, Kaseya launched its version of cloud and network monitoring to the soup, which comes with its own set of bells and whistles aimed at giving IT managers more control in their cloud system. In its implementation, Kaseya offer predictive analytic capabilities that they say learns and remembers normal patterns based on time of day, day of the week and month and time of year, and sets thresholds based on these patterns – alerting IT of anomalies.
There is certainly plenty of opportunity in the space to be had. Neurosis about security, compliance, and general visibility in the cloud is one of those impulses that never seems to reach exhaustion. But with monitoring tools on the rise, there is hope that it can be contained.
