Can You Really Manage the Cloud?

to ask when selecting a solution to monitor your Cloud.

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The winners will be the companies that understand how the cloud makes new offers and products possible. Some will find that lower prices are possible if IT costs drop from 15 percent of the operating budget to 1 percent or less. Others will find whole new ways to serve customers and create markets. You do not want to be the CIO or CTO who is being asked, Why cant we do what our competition is doing? You want to be the one forcing competitors to answer that question. dan Woods, Forbes

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The Race to the Cloud

the last five years have seen a revolutionary shift when it comes to operating technology infrastructure with the advent of virtualization and Cloud Computing. What was once a vision of it-as-a-Service is now rapidly becoming a reality as it organizations are now responsible for driving innovative change while offering more and more services at the utmost level of reliability. in order to meet these challenges head-on, enterprises and service providers are finding they need a new approach when it comes to managing and monitoring their end-to-end environment. Using expensive, brittle, legacy tools does not enable the responsiveness required by business stakeholders and customers.

If our management techniques are stuck in medieval times, how do we expect to ever truly reap the rewards of dynamic IT? Its $!*%&^. We never will. We can put all the VMware in the world all over our environment and without the ability to AUTONOMOUSLY manage it, it will always suck. Why? Because it will always come down to the lowest common denominator the ultimate point of failurea persons ability to make the right decision at the exact right time and execute it perfectly. Steve duplessie, enterprise Strategy Group
the point of this ebook is to offer you a guide as you search for a way to manage the Cloud. based on our experience working with some of the most innovative companies in the world who are effectively and efficiently managing Cloud Computing and highly virtualized infrastructures, we offer the following list of questions to guide you as you select a cloud management solution. no matter if you are thinking of going to the Cloud at some point or building one as we speak, we hope that these questions help you make the best decision possible when it comes time to take your it management system to the next level. thanks, Josh duncan and Floyd Stimling Zenoss the Cloud Management Company

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Availability and Performance Monitoring

How do you provide performance and availability across the entire IT infrastructure that is behind the Cloud?
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Availability and Performance Monitoring

no matter that Agility-as-a-Service is getting all the attention, the basics are the basics but now more than ever, its all connected. applications, servers, storage, and network resources are so dependant on each other that the smallest of changes can ripple through the environment causing severe consequences both downstream and upstream.

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Availability and Performance Monitoring

One of the key things about virtual environments is that you no longer have individual pieces of a data center but an integrated environment that is now behaving holistically. The cloud is just an extension of that. daniel heimlich, it business edge

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Availability and Performance Monitoring And for good measure

1. What do you really monitor, and how do you look beyond the numbers? a. b. c. d. e. 2. 3. 4. networking devices routers, switches, firewalls? physical servers? environmental controls? how about operating systems and applications? Storage devices?

What about legacy event management systems that you arent quite ready to get rid of yet? how easy is it to create custom integrations for old or new devices? do i have to deploy any agents?
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Can You Really Manage the Cloud? 5 Burning Questions to Ask

Event Management and Alerting

How can you help me address problems before they impact my end users (i.e. what are all these systems telling me)?
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Event Management and Alerting

Rising complexity of applications and business services are forcing IT to think and manage differently. We have moved from a few applications via browser based applications through N-tier composite applications to applications which are highly integrated across multiple tiers (Data center, clouds, all kinds). In a world of integrated business services we need to manage from the top down. eveline Oehrlich Senior analyst, infrastructure & Operations Forrester Research, inc.

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Event Management and Alerting

A 99.9% IT infrastructure uptime metric doesnt matter when business applications are unavailable, end-users are dissatisfied and no one knows the true state of the IT infrastructure when they need to know it. david Williams, Gartner

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Event Management and Alerting And for good measure

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. Can you suppress events that dont need to be seen? how do you handle complex events that need to be transformed before they are processed? What about automatically solving problems when a known event is received? how can i alert my team when there is a real issue that needs to be addressed? how about integrations with ticketing systems such as Remedy? how can i take this to the next level and automate my response based on a set of policy definitions [so i can run my business the way i want]?

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Infrastructure Visibility

How can I get a realtime, end-to-end view of the services I am providing once everything is virtualized and is constantly moving?
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Infrastructure Visibility

More than ever, we need to know where things are. Discovery and tracking of assets and applications in real time is more important than ever: As configurations can be easily changed and applications easily moved, control of the data center requires complete visibility. Configuration management systems must adapt to this new environment. Jean-pierre Garbani Forrester Research, inc.

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Infrastructure Visibility And for good measure

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. What information can be displayed in your dashboard, and how can i customize? how about limiting the infrastructure view depending on your role in the organization (multi-tenant access)? Can you let me see how all my devices are performing based on a location or custom group? What about business service views that show an end-to-end view of all the devices making up a service? Can you show me where the system issue is located and easily explain how this impacts my business?

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Dynamic Resource Management

How can you help mitigate the complexity and manage the risks associated with our dynamic resources? The future may be cloudy, but my operations better be clear, or the lightning will rain down.
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Dynamic Resource Management

Server consolidation, virtualization, and Cloud technologies are now part of doing business. this means that resources that used to be deployed once and then managed are now constantly shifting. the only way to manage this type of environment is to be aware of exactly whats happening in real-time. if you have to take a blade server offline, do you know what applications and services will be impacted?

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Dynamic Resource Management

The rate of change in these environments and the degree of resource sharing of these environments makes a continuous self-discovered understanding of configuration essential to the ability to assure infrastructure and applications performance. bernd harzog analyst at the Virtualization practice

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Dynamic Resource Management And for good measure

1. 2. how do you manage virtual resources and give me the visibility to manage how my resources are assigned? how can you help me troubleshoot and alert when dynamic changes negatively impact my performance levels (for example, a vMotion into an improperly configured resource pool) before there is a customer impact? how can you help me manage Cloud resources such as amazon eC2? VMware vCloud? What about integrated devices such as Cisco UCS? Whats coming next? how easy will it be for you to integrate with it? [prove it: give a recent example where you rapidly integrated with a new technology] What about business service views that show an end-to-end view of all the devices making up a service?
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3. 4. 5. 6.

Can You Really Manage the Cloud? 5 Burning Questions to Ask

Datacenter Insight

How can you transcend IT silos to provide me with the information needed to make operational and strategic planning decisions (I need Insight, not Reporting Regurgitation)?
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Datacenter Insight

Whether your goal is to improve operational efficiencies, or to provide new services, you need to capture, understand and use all of your data analytics must be core to your thinking. The value is not in any specific analytic algorithms, nor in having everyone become an expert in statistics; its in leveraging analytics and analytic applications for specific business goals. dennis Kennelly, ibM

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Datacenter Insight And for good measure

1. 2. how can you help me build a comprehensive real-time model with automated dependencies of my entire datacenter? now how can you help me analyze all this information? What information do you provide to help make fine-tuning decisions on a daily basis for my teams managing physical, virtual, and Cloud infrastructures? What about in-depth insights in order to make intelligent it-as-a-Service strategic planning decisions?

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How hard is it to really make all this work?

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Bonus Round

IT will play a critical role in business transformations. If youre going to change where you operate to include other countries, if youre going to take your product into adjacent industry markets, you need technology to give you the scale and connectivity to reach those markets and work with new customers in an effective way. Mark Mcdonald Gartner

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Bonus Round And for good measure

1. 2.

how many different products do you require to get all this functionality? Was the product built by system admins (and when was the original product written, anyway? this century)?
Can it be configured by command line? Can you extend the data capture, the screens, provide your own integrations?

3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

Can you touch and do everything before you buy? how fast can you get it up and running? how does the product scale [prove it: provide an example where product is running at Enterprise scale]? What are my deployment options? Can you offer multi-tenant deployments? how can you help enable local management with centralized oversight (for dispersed geographic locations)? Can this solution adapt to my business, or does my business have to adapt to the product?
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Can You Really Manage the Cloud? 5 Burning Questions to Ask

Resources

Want to hear how Zenoss is today delivering Cloud management solutions at scale for the leading Cloud providers in the industry? Learn more here.

Other Resources
Cloud donts: advice to avoid Wasted investment, dan Woods, Forbes Grow Up! the new World Of Managing it Stuff, Steve duplessie, enterprise Strategy Group a Growing Challenge, data Management and the Cloud, arthur Cole, Forrester the importance of information delivery in it Operations, david Williams, Gartner Research. 11 predictions for 2011, eveline Oehrlich the Cloud technology Challenge, Jean-pierre Garbani predictive analytics is Within Your Reach, denis Kennelly, ibM

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Authors
Floyd Strimling, technology evangelist, Zenoss
Floyd Strimling is a technology evangelist at Zenoss, who enjoys creating, debating, and following technology trends with the goal of making them a reality. Floyds unique background spans both hardware and software environments with experience in Cloud Computing/autonomic Computing, datacenter automation, Virtualization, networking and Security.

Josh duncan, product evangelist, Zenoss

Josh leads product Marketing at Zenoss and is an active blogger on the topic of infrastructure and cloud monitoring on the Zenoss blog. Josh has spent the last 13 years working for technology companies like dell, bank of america, and accenture, implementing and setting technology direction. While at bank of america, Josh was responsible for enterprise architecture, and worked on the initial shared infrastructure and grid computing efforts.
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