Monitoring of Cloud Based Applications
While the general principles are similar to those used for more traditional software, there are significant differences caused by the tendency of cloud-based applications to increase and reduce their instances.
Any cloud-based application must naturally come with a full set of monitoring tools. After all, what use is an e-commerce application that attracts clients, helps them make selections and then fails at a critical juncture? In the traditional web-server environment, administrators create elaborate checklists and track the application performance at critical points. The same is required in the cloud environment – but with important differences.
To begin with, the entire cloud infrastructure is not within your grasp as with traditionally hosted infrastructure. You are thus restricted to the diagnostic tools that the cloud service provider offers (ranging from basic to comprehensive). Alternately, you can create another application that has some privileges over your main application and runs a diagnostic program in the background. This diagnostic application works as a user and checks that all user functions are available and returning sensible values.
A key issue is the large numbers of virtual machines that can be created and destroyed in the course of a working day. Your diagnostic tools have to cater to this changing number and keep a health check on each. This certainly complicates the scenario somewhat.
New diagnostic software is able to monitor many more parts of the software than before. Superior checking algorithms mean there are fewer “false positives”.
Here are a few of the testing methodologies in widespread use:
Direct testing – This is the simplest method where the checking tools mimic a real user. Standard parameters are supplied to the software as a user response and standard answers are expected. Any variation is obviously cause for further checking. In addition to the returned values, the software also monitors the time taken to produce a response. While there can be variations, any large variations are a cause for concern and must be investigated.
Back end processes – Some diagnostic software check out the back-end processes. They will examine the database and send test queries to the server to check response and performance.
Network and other infrastructure – The delivery infrastructure needs to be checked out regularly. This means the various routers, switches and other hardware including the DNS servers. Testing also includes firewalls and other gateways. A glitch in any of these could mean the application is up-and-running but the end-user will still not get work done. The idea behind such testing is to ensure that while cloud service is available, security and networking devices do not interfere with service delivery.
Monitor Big Data Clusters – If your application uses big data, your diagnostics must be able to check out your Hadoop clusters to ensure that processing is going on as desired. Failure of cluster components will degrade application performance sharply.
Modern diagnostics for cloud applications handle this very fluid situation competently. The results are presented graphically in a very easy-to-understand manner, making for more robust cloud-based applications.
A special challenge is posed by mobile users. If the diagnostic results are seen by a user using her smartphone – say, the CIO checking out the services while in a meeting – then the dashboards have to be constructed in a way that the smartphone can handle. This means prioritizing the data to be displayed rather than merely shrinking the display. This calls for special skills – GMO Cloud for instance, provides additional monitoring services for thorough checking of systems and applications.
In the second part of this paper, we will look for how test results are interpreted and analyzed.
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About the Guest Author:
Sanjay Srivastava has been active in computing infrastructure and has participated in major projects on cloud computing, networking, VoIP and in creation of applications running over distributed databases. Due to a military background, his focus has always been on stability and availability of infrastructure. Sanjay was the Director of Information Technology in a major enterprise and managed the transition from legacy software to fully networked operations using private cloud infrastructure. He now writes extensively on cloud computing and networking and is about to move to his farm in Central India where he plans to use cloud computing and modern technology to improve the lives of rural folk in India.
