by Don Jones

One of the reasons it’s so difficult to properly monitor a truly hybrid IT environment is because a truly hybrid IT environment can be incredibly complex. For example, suppose you have an e-commerce application running in Amazon’s EC2 cloud computing platform. That application may need to interact with your company’s SalesForce.com Software as a Service (SaaS) customer relationship management (CRM) software, and it may also need to talk to your outsourced Exchange Server messaging system. It may also need to access back-end resources in your own data center, running on Windows or Linux computers—or, better yet, on virtual machines, which in turn depend on the virtualization host, such as VMware vSphere or Microsoft Hyper-V.

How the heck do you monitor all that?

One way is to passively watch application traffic. In any application, you’ll have a few key transactions or end user tasks. Checking out on an e-commerce Web site is a good example: There are numerous back-end tasks that have to be coordinated, and various components of your infrastructure will become engaged in the task. By monitoring the communications between these components, you can determine the total response time as seen by the end user, and judge that metric against a service level agreement (SLA) level for checkout times.

To make that happen, however, takes an evolved, hybrid monitoring system. It needs to understand not just your internal resources—database servers, virtualization hosts, etc.—but also cloud computing providers, SaaS applications, managed services, and so on. It needs to be able to reach out beyond your network to gather performance statistics. In some cases, that may require a distributed network of monitoring agents designed to collect information from around the world. In some cases, you may even need agents that can actively probe your application with test data to measure response times—and you’ll want to do that from many different geographic locations so that you can obtain a balanced perspective of your application’s real global performance.

Since part of that e-commerce application is on a pay-as-you-go platform—EC2—you may also want to correlate the performance and utilization that you’re monitoring into budgetary terms. In other words, how much is your next bill going to be, and what will happen if your current traffic volume doubles or triples?

Hybrid IT is making us spot a lot of the weaknesses and shortcomings in our traditional IT monitoring solutions. As we continue to evolve more complex, super-distributed applications, we’ll have to continue evolving our monitoring tools as well.

About the Author

Don Jones has more than a decade of professional experience in the IT industry. He's the author of more than 30 IT books, including Windows PowerShell: TFM; VBScript, WMI, and ADSI Unleashed; Managing Windows with VBScript and WMI; and many more. He's a top-rated and in-demand speaker at conferences such as Microsoft TechEd and TechMentor, and writes the monthly Windows PowerShell column for Microsoft TechNet Magazine. Don is a multiple-year recipient of Microsoft's "Most Valuable Professional" (MVP) Award with a specialization in Windows PowerShell. Don's broad IT experience includes work in the financial, telecommunications, software, manufacturing, consulting, training, and retail industries and he's one of the rare IT professionals who can not only "cross the line" between administration and software development, but also between IT workers and IT management. Don is a co-founder of Concentrated Technologies, and serves as author and series editor for Realtime Publishers.