An APM Framework for Cloud Environments

How to measure performance when the cloud is in front of you, behind you, or all around you

When it comes to measuring and managing application performance in cloud environments, you need to look at where your cloud services are located within your application delivery system. This cloud service "geography" is critical because whether your cloud service(s) are at the back end and/or at the front end of your application delivery system will determine where and how you need to measure performance--and where you measure will dictate what application performance measurement toolkit is right for you.

NetForecast has created an APM framework for cloud environments that reflects cloud service geography. This posting describes that framework, and a future posting will describe which measurement tool vendors fit where within the NetForecast APM framework for cloud environments.

NetForecast APM Framework for Cloud Environments

Cloud in Front of You

Here you are using cloud services to augment what is directly shown to the users. It may be a CDN that just helps distribute your content, or third party that actually delivers content to your users without your direct involvement. Any disruption of the frontend services directly and immediately affects the user experience.

To measure the end-user experience under these conditions you need to instrument the user. There are two ways to do this: you can run synthetic transactions, or you can measure real transactions. Truly comprehensive solutions use both methods because each has its own merits.

Cloud Behind You

If you use the cloud to augment your data center's servers, you are essentially using cloud computing to expand or replace you backend servers. This traffic funnels from your data center to the cloud service. Your users never see the cloud servers; however, they may see slower performance if the cloud servers fail or slow down.

You need a way to measure the cloud part of your backend; however, because you can't really measure anything on the cloud servers, you must measure the traffic going to/from the cloud service at your data center. Any good probe in the data center can do this. Of course it still needs to be able to process the traffic so it properly associates a transaction to/from the cloud to an application, or better yet to a user.

Another approach is to instrument the last server in the data center before the transaction leaves to the cloud.

Cloud Everywhere

What if you have a cloud in both directions and perhaps just rent your server at a hosting facility? You can't add a probe anywhere. You have only one or two server layers (web and application). You must instrument the transactions that run into the front and the ones that run to the back. In this case, the only place to instrument is the server. In this case, very smart server instrumentation with a desktop component is the only way to get a complete picture.

• Cloud Computing