APM and Server Monitoring on the Cloud: A Revolution

As IT companies accelerate their plans to move from traditional server environments to virtual servers within a cloud-based infrastructure, system administrators and network engineers everywhere are finding that they need to wrap their minds around a completely new server implementation and server monitoring and maintenance paradigm—moving from considering what sort of hardware demands their servers will experience to ensuring appropriate elasticity and scalability of virtualized servers.

For the cloud to achieve and maintain credibility with technology consumers, it’s imperative that engineers, administrators, and technicians make this transition quickly and successfully.  The cloud only works well when the engineers maintaining it and the developers coding for it understand how to leverage its amazing potential for scalability.

Thankfully, an increasingly impressive assortment of bleeding edge technology companies are offering tools to help developers and engineers understand exactly what’s happening with their applications and infrastructure.  At the forefront of these tools are software as a service (SaaS) application performance management (APM) tools.  We are particularly fond of New Relic’s SaaS APM suite.  It offers Real User Monitoring and Application Monitoring components that we’ve already written about before, and now they’ve added a Server Monitoring module that will prove invaluable to cloud developers and engineers.

New Relic is one of those companies that understand that server monitoring “the old way” is dying out.  At some level, CPU cycles, RAM usage, power supply load, etc. will always be important, but fewer and fewer people will need to worry about that.  Instead, engineers and administrators—in conjunction with developers—need to have a complete picture of how applications, end users, and virtualized servers all interact with one another to provide a seamless, reliable, and consistent user experience.  For the cloud to work, it needs to seem magical, and it’s only magical when the end user doesn’t have to stop and think about why his browser experience is slow or laggy or glitched.

One of the most exciting features of server monitoring is the ability integrate seamlessly with established cloud environments, such as Amazon Web Services, to gain instant and deep visibility into how server availability and status, as well as system resource management, affect application performance and user experience.  The APM tools out there now allow developers and engineers to really drill down into from application-specific performance issues to the underlying system-level root causes and clearly understand the relationship between the two and its magnitude of effect.

Lest readers walk away unimpressed, it’s important to note that APM tools are not only useful for monitoring deployed software.  Perhaps their most invaluable feature is their ability to function effectively in a development environment and allow developers to simulate the level of demand that they anticipate experiencing once software makes it to release.  These APM tools will prove invaluable as they shorten alpha and beta periods and allow developers to bring products to market much more rapidly.