Written By: Russell Rothstein,
(Original Article)

Many companies are developing their strategy for migration of business applications to private and public clouds. During this critical stage, it is vital to ensure that service levels are not impacted by migrating the application from dedicated to shared IT resources. It’s no wonder that according to analyst firm IDC, two of the top three concerns that CIO’s have about private clouds are performance and availability.

We see in the market that enterprises are forming new cloud teams and internal committees, with a diverse set of skills, to plan for an effective organizational cloud strategy. One of their mandates in the organization’s journey to cloud is to plan for how to monitor and manage the performance and behavior of applications after deployment. These organizations undoubtedly have a range of infrastructure monitors in the data center. And most cloud service providers, whether internal or external, will provide services for monitoring cloud resources. Yet these tools typically do not provide an accurate picture of what end users are truly experiencing and how to quickly isolate and fix performance issues in application components located inside and/or outside the cloud.

This blog entry points out a few of the key application performance challenges that you are likely to encounter when pursuing a cloud strategy, so that you can address them proactively. I hope that during my session in the Cloud Performance Summit at CloudConnect (Instrumenting Applications When Access Goes Away on Monday March 7) the esteemed panel will address some of these challenges with a variety of perspectives – it should be informative and thought-provoking!

Written By: Beth Schultz (NetworkWorld)
(Original Article)

As Bojan Simic, president of IT analyst firm Trac Research, points out in new research note, “application performance management” (APM) has generated a ton of buzz over the last couple of years. Numerous vendors, be they providing APM specifically or wrapping APM functions into traditional management platforms, have glommed onto the term, promising value propositions such as end-to-end visibility and improved IT-business alignment.

“APM has gotten to the point where the term doesn't mean a whole lot anymore – when you see demos and talk to customers, it’s obvious that many ‘APM’ vendors really shouldn’t be competing against each other. People have got to understand that the APM bucket really consists of five or six different classes of technologies,” Simic says.

Written By: Michael Biddick, InformationWeek
(Original Article)

Just because you're using software as a service or hosting systems with a public cloud provider doesn't mean you're off the hook for performance problems. On the contrary: A critical application is a critical application, whether it lives on your own servers or in a mega data center in Singapore. It's a conundrum your security group is likely also coming to grips with: How do you guarantee highly functional, regulatory compliant computing when the infrastructure is entirely out of your control?

The security guys are on their own. For application performance management (APM) suite jockeys, what will change as applications that impact the bottom line move into the cloud is the set of metrics to be monitored. You'll need to transition from twisting dials to working closely with your cloud provider to aggregate data and give the business a real-time view of what matters. You'll also need the grit to abandon APM systems that just aren't working. Throwing good money after bad will only reinforce business leaders' tendency to see internal IT as hidebound, behind the times, and replaceable.