Running your IT infrastructure from the cloud can be a smart choice for modern businesses. Cloud computing allows you to build a scalable, flexible architecture at an affordable price. But few businesses are 100% on the cloud. Businesses may have legacy systems or specific resources that work better on-premises, or they may have made a significant investment in on-premises hardware. This means even the most cloud-savvy businesses are likely to use a hybrid blend of on-premises and cloud-based components for the foreseeable future. These hybrid IT environments require a compatible, comprehensive approach to monitoring if you hope to ensure sufficient visibility.
Why Cloud Computing?
Some key benefits of cloud-based infrastructure include the following:
● The cloud eliminates overhead. With cloud computing, no overhead means you can minimize the cost of on-premises tech maintenance.
● The cloud is secure. Because of trustworthy security assurances from major cloud providers, running IT infrastructure from the cloud can help you avoid the pitfalls of local security management. Sophisticated data encryption and regional storage units from major cloud computing services like AWS or Microsoft Azure mean cloud computing can even be more secure than on-premises infrastructure.
● The cloud is elastic. Because your cloud architecture doesn’t require physical reconfiguration, you can scale your services up and down as needed. As your enterprise IT infrastructure evolves, you won’t have to worry about purchasing new physical devices and disposing of old ones.
With the major advantages to cloud computing, it’s no wonder many leading enterprises—and a large portion of small and medium-sized businesses—have added cloud components to their IT setups.
What Are the Benefits of a Hybrid IT Environment?
Just because cloud computing offers major advantages to modern-day businesses doesn’t mean you should forget about your on-premises setup.
Maintaining on-premises data centers can be important when you need to quickly cache and retrieve data with minimal downtime. On-premises applications can also be crucial if you’re developing a new cloud-based application still in its infancy and need to continue to locally run your original version before the new app is properly tested. Additionally, you probably already have significant on-premises infrastructure in place, including physical servers, on-premises applications, and local databases, and you can’t move your entire infrastructure to the cloud overnight.
Even though cloud computing offers significant advantages, there are plenty of reasons why you need to keep on-premises components within your holistic IT setup. This combination of on-premises and cloud-based services is your hybrid IT environment.
The tech infrastructure market has largely shifted to the cloud in recent years, but even for highly tech-forward companies, there’s still a heavy reliance on hybrid environments. The efficiency and reliability of certain on-premises services mean few companies will be 100% in the cloud anytime soon. In other words, hybrid IT environments are here to stay.
The Art of Monitoring Your Hybrid IT Environment
Hybrid environment monitoring consists of monitoring your cloud and on-premises infrastructure and the custom applications running on them. As any admin can imagine, juggling a cloud environment and an on-premises environment can become complex without the right management strategy.
To ensure your managed services remain efficient and cost-effective, you need to manage every component of your hybrid IT environment with the same accuracy and efficiency you would give to your clients’ on-premises environments. To optimize your hybrid IT management, you can use a tool like SolarWinds® AppOptics™. AppOptics is a full-stack application performance monitoring (APM) solution with integrated infrastructure and application monitoring in the same framework, allowing you to monitor and troubleshoot across your hybrid environment without hassle.
With this integrated approach, you can monitor cloud-based and on-premises items and troubleshoot cloud performance issues with a comprehensive understanding of your hybrid infrastructure.
To understand how AppOptics can streamline your hybrid management process, let’s discuss how AppOptics caters to the two main components of your hybrid infrastructure management: full-stack APM and infrastructure monitoring.
Full-Stack APM With AppOptics
Cloud environments like Azure and AWS offer rudimentary performance metrics, but it’s still up to you to ensure your applications aren’t exceeding inefficient performance thresholds, which could indicate bottlenecks or deeper code-level issues.
To make your APM process more efficient, AppOptics gathers performance metrics from your cloud services providers and translates them into summaries. From your central AppOptics dashboard, you can view service summaries offering automated reports on your critical performance metrics, including error rate, CPU utilization, response rate, and request rate.
For a deeper dive into granular performance issues, trace summaries evaluate your code-level transactions, which can help highlight the areas of code potentially harming your application performance. Code profiling can be especially helpful for troubleshooting, since AppOptics can pinpoint troublesome components of slow transactions. AppOptics offers insight into performance indicators for a wide variety of languages and frameworks, including .NET, PHP, Python, Java, and many more.
Infrastructure Monitoring With AppOptics
For your hybrid IT environment, cloud-based application monitoring isn’t the only task ahead of you. AppOptics provides full-stack APM, which allows you to cross-reference cloud-based APM with on-premises infrastructure monitoring.
With over 150 out-of-the-box plug-ins and integrations, AppOptics allows you to integrate with cloud-based and on-premises infrastructure components for a single bird’s-eye view of your hybrid IT environment. From prepopulated dashboards, you can view performance metrics, including CPU utilization, network performance metrics, memory, disk space, and more—all with color-coded graphics in a user-friendly display. With service- and trace-level root cause summaries, AppOptics can help point you to where the performance issues are in your applications.
The AppOptics Advantage for Your Hybrid IT Environment
A hybrid IT environment can add efficiency and security to improve your clients’ bottom line, but admins need to know how to manage it. Troubleshooting performance issues in a hybrid environment means monitoring will be a full-stack process. You’ll need to understand and cross-reference performance indicators in your on-premises and cloud-based components.
With AppOptics, you can view cloud-based APM metrics in the context of your complete hybrid environment, and the tool gives you the ability to integrate with a vast number of applications to accommodate your expanding IT infrastructure. Monitoring your clients’ hybrid infrastructures requires a special set of skills. With SolarWinds AppOptics, full-stack end-to-end monitoring helps make it easy to manage a hybrid environment.
