Website Design and Hosting - Top 5 Monitoring Challenges in the Cloud

Website Design, Digital Media, and Web Hosting

Top 5 Monitoring Challenges in the Cloud

http://copperegg.com



Web Design & Hosting Evolution

• Cloud driving massive transformation for traditional web

design, digital media, and hosting

• Flexibility and agility

• All at a lower price

• Hosting in the cloud proving to be more cost effective and

time efficient

• Opposed to traditional hosting and colocation options

• Choosing Amazon Web Services (AWS) EC2, Rackspace, HP

Cloud, Linode, and the wide variety of emerging OpenStack

providers

• But…migration to cloud has created a new set of operational

challenges for monitoring

• Traditional tools cannot meet the challenges

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Top Five Monitoring Challenges

Website designers, digital media and web hosting shops face five

key challenges to monitor website and web server performance in

the cloud:

1. The Speed Factor – The Critical Measurement Step

2. Seeing it All – Maintaining Full Visibility

3. Troubleshooting New Performance Bottlenecks

4. Managing Multi-Customers, Multi-Sites – Controlled Scaling

5. Migrating, Testing, and Launching

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1. The Speed Factor –The Critical Measurement Step

• Build-Measure-Learn feedback loop

• At the core of Eric Ries’ book The Lean Startup

• Can build and deploy faster in the cloud – good news!

• But you need to measure – early and often

• Effective cloud monitoring is the glue that links fast deployment

with fast learning

• Gives you the detailed analytics at a fine enough granularity to make

data actionable

• Build faster, measure faster, and learn faster than your

competition

• Things change second-to-second in the public cloud

• Your monitoring needs to keep pace

• No shortcut to success here so don’t try to leapfrog measurement and

monitoring – the more you measure the faster you’ll go.

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http://theleanstartup.com/


2. Seeing it All –Maintaining Full Visibility

Cloud server instances share the underlying physical server with an

unknown number of others – and new cloud monitoring tools provide

you with the power to see it all in one view:

• Server instances: Linux (Ubuntu, CentOS, RHEL, and more), Windows,

MacOS, and FreeBSD for all your server types including Apache, nginx,

Drupal, IIS, MySQL Varnish, Redis, and numerous other app and DB

servers

• OS metrics, system details, processes, I/O, and more

• Web page performance, API health, TCP port availability for detailed

response time measurement, return code checks, URL-based

availability and health checks

• Linkages between the server health and the web applications they

support for correlated diagnostics

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3. Troubleshooting –New Performance Bottlenecks

• Need to find problems fast and become more proactive

• Due to high rate of change and underlying complexities in the cloud

• Stay proactive and watch for telltale signs:

• Website downtime, for example, is often preceded with sporadic response

time spikes where the site stays “up” but begins to slowly degrade and

slowdown.

• Server-side hard failures are often preceded by a softer burst in disk I/O,

network traffic, or memory growth.

• CPU Steal and IO wait to know if your suffering shared cloud virtualized

resource contention

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Tips and TricksUse cases and critical tips and tricks for web designers and

hosters:

• Proper Cloud Instance Sizing

• Track Memory, CPU, Disk I/O, CPU Steal, IO wait to understand

when your current capacity is at risk and you need to upgrade

instances or add on instances.

• Determining Root Cause between Server, Network, and App:

• Monitor for spikes and deviations in web application response time, in

particular data transfer time (application issues), time-to-first byte

(server issues), and connect time (network issues).

• Connect Web Deploys with Web Performance Issues

• Auto-annotate the time of each deploy so related performance issues

can be directly correlated to the deploy that triggered them.

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4. Managing Multi-Customers, Multi-Sites –Controlled Scaling

• Tagging allows all customer sites, URLs, APIs,

servers, TCP ports, and whatever additional

components you are managing to be organized by:

• Customer Name, Location

• Dev, Test, Prod

• Database, Web, App, API

• Allows for organized response and assignments to

different operational teams or users for triage or

oversight

• Can even give your customers a view of their own

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5. Migrating, Testing, and Launching

• Use a solution that can span across enterprise, colocation,

hosted, private, and public cloud environments

• Guarantee that the monitoring solution does not lock you into

one cloud provider as clouds change and the promise of an

Open Cloud should allow more cloud mobility in the future for

you and your customers

• Try out freemium offerings for cloud monitoring while in the

dev/test phase, and as you spin up and spin down instances

after launch

• Choose solutions that scale their pricing on a per-use basis,

using a utility-based service to monitor you utility-based

service

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Top Five Monitoring Challenges

• Accelerate your businesses and gain serious competitive

advantage through intelligent use of the cloud

• Website design, digital media, and hosting organizations

reaching new heights of success and customer growth with

cloud

• Control the cloud and make it work for you & your business by

conquering these 5 new challenges:

• The Speed Factor – The Critical Measurement Step

• Seeing it All – Maintaining Full Visibility

• Troubleshooting New Performance Bottlenecks

• Managing Multi-Customers, Multi-Sites – Controlled Scaling

• Migrating, Testing, and Launching

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Technology

Website Design and Hosting - Top 5 Monitoring Challenges in the Cloud