According to a definition from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST):
“Cloud computing is a model for enabling convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction.”

Organisations of all sizes are considering the inclusion of cloud computing in their IT model for a variety of reasons. Potential benefits of the cloud include greater resiliency, quicker time to market and response to changing needs/demand, improved customer service and cost savings.

The particular benefits to any organisation depend largely on the model adopted. The term “Cloud computing” has been used to describe a number of related technologies and is often interchanged with other similar terms such as “utility”, “on-demand” and “grid” computing.

NIST describe three cloud service models, each of which offers a different range of benefits: -

• Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) provides the consumer with the ability to provision processing, storage, networks, and other fundamental computing resources. An example might be the creation of a virtual server, onto which the consumer is able to install their own software.
• Platform as a Service (PaaS) enables the consumer to deploy onto the cloud infrastructure consumer-created or acquired applications created using programming languages and tools supported by the provider.
• Software as a Service (SaaS) provides the consumer with access to applications offered by the provider, running on a cloud infrastructure.

Here the “consumer” is the end-user of the service being provided, whether that be an external service being provided to the organisation by a third-party, or an internal service being supplied by another part of the organisation.

Each of the three service models offers slightly different challenges when it comes to monitoring them.

Infrastructure as a service is closest to the historical status quo. The consumer is able to deploy and run everything from the operating systems upwards, including applications, and controls those operating systems and deployed applications, configures storage, assigns processing capacity and will sometimes have control of certain networking components such as host firewalls.

Platform as a Service removes the lower tier of complexity in the managed environment. The consumer no longer manages the servers, operating systems, or storage, but has control over the deployed applications and possibly application hosting environment configurations.

Software as a Service removes another layer of responsibility. The consumer manages none of the infrastructure or application elements.

In each step - from a traditional server farm through the various levels of cloud services - the level of monitoring available also changes. Even with an IaaS model, where the consumer is able to provision individual virtual servers, the responsibility of monitoring the physical, hardware, layer, switches to the provider. Chassis failures, temperature warnings and the like are no longer available to the consumer (who probably won’t even know where the physical hardware actually is). With Paas, direct monitoring of application components, such as whether certain executables are running or how much memory they are consuming, is no longer a consideration. Resources reported by the platform, such as virtual memory being used by Java VMs, can still be monitored but the low-level stuff is hidden. Finally at the Saas level the consumer loses the ability to monitor anything other than the performance of the services being provided. Not only is the hardware invisible, but the operating systems and applications underlying those services.

Luckily Tivoli already enables us to monitor any mix of cloud and traditional architectures. As cloud models become more sophisticated, so does the mix of features offered by the Tivoli suite. IBM Tivoli Monitoring for Infrastructure as a Service, IBM Tivoli Composite Application Manager for Platform as a Service and Software as a Service models.

The key to monitoring in a cloud environment is to focus on what you can monitor and when depending on third-party providers the focus on the higher level functionality becomes even more important. Transaction processing, response time & user experience monitoring are often the “nice to haves” that lay above the more basic availability and resource checking that form the foundation for traditional monitoring solutions. As services climb up the cloud stack then the measurement of the user experience, rather than the availability of underlying hardware and software, becomes even more important, until at the Software as a Service level it becomes the only way to determine service status. Things we sometimes do now become all we can do when responsibility for large elements of our service is taken out of our hands.

The very advantages the cloud brings come with new challenges. The cloud’s ability to respond quickly to changing requirements, provisioning new capacity and new services, also means that the monitoring solution needs to be equally responsive. The automated discovery and mapping of such changes by Tivoli’s Application Dependency Discovery Manager and Business Service Manager allows the monitoring solution to keep pace with your rapidly changing environment. As new services come online Tivoli is able to detect the associated assets such as servers, databases, storage, etc. and build them into your new service map.

As services are farmed out to third-party or even in-house providers, there is also a stronger emphasis on SLAs. The Tivoli suite allows these to be tracked and provides a powerful tool in ensuring that they are kept. Tivoli Business Service Manager will even warn in advance when some types of SLA are going to be broken, allowing the service provider to be chased even before they have failed.

Overall the adoption of cloud technologies offers a new range of opportunities and challenges, both to service providers and consumers. Tivoli, and Pirean, are ready to meet them all.

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