Top Five Gotchas for Monitoring Apps in the Cloud

1. Lack of End User or Business Context - With apps running in the cloud, monitoring infrastructure metrics indicates very little about your end-user experience,or the performance of your apps or business running in the cloud. End users experience business transactions so make sure your monitoring gives you this visibility.

3. Agent-less is Tough in the Cloud - You may not have any major issues with installing a packet sniffer or network-monitoring appliance in your own private cloud or data-center, nevertheless you won't be able to place these kinds of devices in PaaS or IaaS environments to monitor your application performance. Monitoring agents in comparison can easily be embedded or piggy-backed as part of an application deployment in the cloud. Agent-less may not be a option when trying to monitor many cloud applications.

4. High Network Bandwidth Costs - Cloud providers typically charge per gigabyte of inbound and outbound traffic. If your cloud application has 100 nodes and your collecting megabytes of performance data every minute, all of that data has to be communicated outside of the cloud to your monitoring solution's management server, which can be on-premise or in another cloud. Monitoring what's relevant in your application versus monitoring everything means you'll avoid exorbitant cloud usage bandwidth costs for transferring monitoring data.