Feel like you’re performing a high-wire balancing act in your role as IT manager? Performance monitoring and capacity planning can be a real challenge regardless of your infrastructure design. You’ve got to decide what compute and storage resources are needed and predict when they’ll be needed. You’ve also got to balance the competing priorities of staying within budget and providing acceptable service levels to users. But these days you’re no longer simply managing an on-premises data center, you’ve also got to figure out which workloads to move to the cloud, how best to get them there and how to manage them in the cloud for the long term.
Moving workloads to the cloud offers increased agility and better disaster recovery — but only if you can avoid draining system performance, overworking your IT team and busting your budgets. Surprisingly, a recent survey by ActualTech Media found that 18% of cloud adopters were challenged enough by the move that they reverted to on-premises services. I doubt many IT managers would relish the idea of retracing steps like that.
So how can you get what you want out of the public cloud without losing your balance? Having a true understanding of the relationship between performance monitoring and capacity planning is a great first step. Performance monitoring is the day-to-day process of tracking, reporting and evaluating the performance of your IT infra¬structure. Most organizations measure performance according to whether workloads behave the way they should or create obstacles to normal operations. Does your infrastructure provide enough compute power, memory and storage to perform properly? Monitoring workload performance can help deter¬mine if you need more capacity for business to function at the desired level. Capacity planning helps you ensure that you have the resources you need now and into the near future.
As you develop your hybrid cloud environment, it’s important to spend some time considering which resources and workloads within your organization can truly benefit from a move to the cloud and which type of cloud is right for your business. Every organization will have slightly different needs, and it probably makes sense for some of your resources to stay on premises.
With all this increased complexity, comes the need for more robust performance monitoring tools to help you monitor your hybrid environment and give you the means to resolve issues quickly. Finding the right solution can even help simplify the planning and execution of your cloud migration.
From there, you’ll be able to see more clearly into your complex data center, begin to maximize performance and eliminate unused resources both on premises and in the cloud. The best tools enable you to control costs while also predicting future resource needs more accurately.
Want to see how other organizations are handling the increased complexity that’s emerged through the cloud? That ActualTech survey explored all these issues and more. Check out the resulting white paper to also read about how Foglight Evolve can help you keep the balance.
