Get Proactive: Cloud Management vs. Monitoring

Cloud is scalable, it’s flexible, it’s a whole host of cool-sounding adjectives. But what does that all mean in practice? While it’s nice for the IT budget to be able to adjust infrastructure resources on the fly, cloud servers are also facilitating a subtle shift in the way your department should be managing infrastructure.

It’s time to quit relying on monitoring solutions and simply reacting to problems as they arise. Proactive cloud management involves digging in across every department in your organization to more closely align IT resources with business objectives.

Here’s how the new paradigm of proactive cloud management differs from simple monitoring, patching, updates, and other firefighting.

Not quite out with the old…

Cloud monitoring is still an incredibly important piece of any production environment. You need to keep a careful eye on network activity, firewalls, antivirus/antimalware tools, intrusion detection and prevention (IPS/IDS), storage capacity, and of course utilization rates of CPU and memory for each virtual machine.

Built-in monitoring with vSphere and additional tools like CA Unified Infrastructure Management or other third party platforms like Dynatrace will let you generate reports and alerts to achieve your monitoring goals. Many cloud providers also offer monitoring as a service, with reports sent directly to you and with any potential issues noted.

Cloud monitoring should be at least a regularly scheduled scan, if not a constant scan, that provides a summary of any changes in the baseline environment.

This longstanding mode of monitoring must remain – you don’t want an application to fail due to performance issues or malware.

So what’s new with proactive management?

Monitoring does play a key factor in proactive management practices. Continue keeping a close eye on your cloud infrastructure and resolve issues as required. But instead of being constantly reactive and then putting out fires, start laying the groundwork for a collaborative, proactive IT management style that works across your entire organization.

The main shift here is going from resolving problems as they are presented, working with existing infrastructure, to predicting future demand and obstacles and adjusting your virtual datacenter in anticipation.

There are two main benefits to this style of management: you discover IT demand that you may not otherwise have known about, improving the image of IT within your organization as a value driver rather than a cost center, and you avoid potential VM failure from resource contention or security holes.