I meet with dozens of customers throughout the year to discuss “the cloud”, a term we all hear in tech business these days and something as an industry we are all scrambling towards. Bottom line is some customers usually know why they need to go to the cloud, but a large part just know they need to go without a clear reason, a path to get there, or a plan of how to manage once they’re there.
The reasons to go to the cloud as we see it at PTP; budget predictability/cost savings (no more surprise equipment purchases), reduced physical footprint (who really wants to worry about rack space, generators and AC), instant scalability (you’re resources can keep sleeping because drive space won’t run out), accessibility of additional services for immediate deployment (data analytics anyone?) and ease of disaster recovery (I will miss flying to a different state with a bag full of tapes).
Those reasons make great business sense, but challenges exist. Everyone hears those nightmare stories about countless servers being spun up by developers and engineers and you go from 8 servers to 80 in one month and your bill goes in the same direction without notice. Remember, budget predictability is one of drivers. The cloud only works if its managed and governed correctly, which means the right monitoring/tooling and experienced engineers must be in place to ensure success. Otherwise you will be sitting at your desk one day asking yourself “Why should I love the cloud when it obviously hates me?”
This is where PTP comes in. We can help you stay away from a potential existential cloud crisis! We have the technology, we have the personnel, we have the capability to build an efficient, effective and secure cloud environment. Better than the traditional environment of the past! (oh, sorry I went all six-million-dollar man on you…)
I know you are busy, and want to get on with your day, so I’m just going to highlight one piece of our platform that give’s the PTP PeakPlus service our edge.
At PTP, our “PeakPlus” ITOM (IT Operations Management for those new at this) Platform powered by OpsRamp delivers the monitoring and management capabilities that provide a single pane of glass for managing both Cloud and On-Prem resources. Why do we leverage the platform? Well the answer is simply, native cloud monitoring solutions have limitations which add complexity, require multiple configurations and in short do not provide the data needed to effectively manage your environment.
An OpsRamp blog post goes into a little more detail on why we choose the platform (hang on it is going to get a bit technical).
Challenges when using CloudWatch only to monitor AWS infrastructures:
- Region-Specific Configurations. CloudWatch will need to be configured separately for each region that contains AWS resources. Metrics are defined for each region, so each configuration is different.
- Manual Alarm Configurations. Alarm configurations must be pushed out manually to already created or to be created workloads.
- Generic Notifications. – CloudWatch notifications need to be manually configured for each AWS region and do not seamlessly integrate into native ITSM platforms.
- Limited insight to Applications. CloudWatch does not provide any out of the box templates for managing applications. An agent is required, and configurations are created manually.
Improvements in Control of Your AWS Instances with PTP PeakPlus with OpsRamp:
- Ability to combine AWS CloudWatch metrics. OpsRamp’s digital operations command center and PTP ITIL processes. Identify categorize, assign priority and respond to issues before they impact your business.
- Real-Time Analytics. Ingest and store all CloudWatch metrics in OpsRamp for unified and real-time insights into the availability and health of your cloud applications.
- Immediate Visibility for both Cloud & OnPrem infrastructures. Stream CloudWatch and CloudTrail logs and alerts into OpsRamp via integration. Monitor and maintain on-prem resources from single pain of glass used to monitor and maintain cloud resources.
- Data Retention. Retain CloudWatch metrics data in OpsRamp.
- Application Monitoring. Complement EC2 monitoring and extend monitoring capabilities for enterprise applications.
Obviously, we are far from the shallows now (yeah, I went there) and there is a lot more to discuss. If you want to take control of your IT operations, bring better visibility, oversight, improved performance and availability to both native cloud and on prem infrastructures give PTP a call and lets discuss how we can help.