What is Cloud APM?

This blog post will talk about Cloud APM, namely:

• What is Cloud APM?
• How Cloud APM Works
• Primary Features of Cloud APM
• The Benefits of APM
• How Silk Optimizes Data Infrastructure in the Cloud

What is Cloud APM (AKA Cloud Application Performance Management)? 

The cloud can be expensive. And when you’re paying that much for cloud, you have certain performance expectations and want to be sure that everything is working properly.

That is the role of cloud application performance management (APM). Cloud APM software is designed to allow you to monitor everything in your environment including the application, its infrastructure, and workloads to ensure that it meets expectations around performance, availability, and user experience. Cloud APM applies this to the cloud, offering visibility into application performance across public, private, and hybrid cloud environments.

However, the ability to monitor your environment is of little use if you can’t do anything about the issues that you detect. Cloud APM solutions enable you to identify the root cause of the problem and help you to fix it. This restores optimal performance as quickly as possible and minimizes the damage and cost to the organization.

How Cloud APM Works 

Fast performance is essential to a positive user experience. An administrator’s core duties include identifying and fixing any issues in the company’s environment that could sour a user’s experience. The main goal of cloud APM is to provide administrators with the tools that they need to ensure that a company’s infrastructure is working properly and that users have a positive experience.

Visibility is a serious issue in the cloud, and cloud APM solutions probe every corner of an organization’s environment. Everything that they find is then presented in a dashboard to the administrator so that they know what is going on in their network and systems. This integrated visibility enables administrators to quickly identify any issues in their cloud-based applications that are hurting performance, user experience, or functionality. A cloud APM solution will also include functionality to help determine the cause of these issues and resolve them, restoring applications to optimal performance.

Primary Features of Cloud APM

Sometimes, the M in the APM acronym is said to stand for monitoring instead of management. Effective performance management requires extremely deep visibility into what is going on within an environment. As a result, APM solutions poke their noses into everything.

An APM solution should provide insight into every component of an organization’s environment from the back-end servers all the way to the end user.  Accomplishing this requires different types of monitoring capabilities, such as:

• Database Monitoring. Applications run on data, which means that they need quick, reliable access to databases. Monitoring database performance enables an APM solution to identify any issues related to data access.
• Cloud Monitoring. Cloud environments are unique with quirks that do not exist in on-premises data centers. APM solutions should provide deep visibility into the performance of the cloud service provider’s environment.
• Real-Time User Monitoring. Positive user experiences are essential to customer satisfaction and a company’s bottom line. A cloud APM solution will collect performance metrics from a user’s session to identify any issues that need fixing.
• IoT Monitoring. IoT devices are everywhere, and they are increasingly a vital part of business operations. This means that, if they break, everything breaks. An APM solution will monitor the activity of these devices and help with remediating any issues.
• Server Monitoring. Utilization of server resources, such as CPU and disk space usage, impacts the performance of the applications running on them. APM solutions will monitor these metrics to determine if servers are overloaded or experiencing issues that could impact user experience.
• Network Monitoring. Users engage with your business over the network, and it can be a significant contributor to performance issues. APM solutions will monitor network performance to identify inefficient routing, dead links, and other issues that could impact application performance.

With this level of monitoring, an APM solution provides depth and context to administrators. This enables them to quickly respond to issues without wasting time collecting and analyzing data on their own.

The Benefits of APM 

An APM solution may seem like just another tool that administrators have to deal with.  However, APM solutions provide a number of benefits that are essential to an administrator’s ability to do their job, including:

• Comprehensive Visibility. An integrated APM solution provides deep, comprehensive visibility into the performance of business-critical applications. This ensures that your company knows exactly how well its applications are performing.
• Real-Time Alerting. For many companies, downtime – or even a small dip in performance – can mean a loss of revenue. APM’s real-time alerting ensures that administrators know immediately if something is wrong, enabling them to quickly identify and fix the problem.
• Automated Reporting. APM tools generate reports that offer data related to performance analysis. This helps IT teams and the company figure out what is and isn’t working and take steps to optimize performance.

This combination means that an administrator always knows what’s going on in their environment, is immediately aware of problems, and has access to historical data for long-term planning.

How Silk Optimizes Data Infrastructure in the Cloud 

The cloud is a vital part of most organizations’ infrastructure. The scalability, availability, and other features that it provides are often too good to pass up. However, the cloud has its downsides. Many companies find that their cloud deployments cost more than expected. And if a company is bringing their workloads from on-premises infrastructure, they’ll find that the cloud doesn’t necessarily offer the same ultra-high level of performance that their workloads need.

The Silk Platform makes it possible for cloud customers to get the database performance that their business-critical applications and workloads in the cloud demand without busting through their cloud budget. With 10x faster performance than customers can achieve on native cloud alone, cloud customers leveraging Silk don’t need to buy additional cloud resources to achieve this level of performance.

With mission-critical data services — such data replication, deduplication, thin provisioning, and zero-footprint clones – cloud customers can get more out of their current cloud resources than ever before, making it possible to cut their cloud budget by as much as 30%.

And when it comes to monitoring resources across a hybrid cloud environment – including both cloud and on-prem resources – Silk offers a single pane of glass to all environments and machine learning analytics to easily monitor the performance of all resources, ensuring that your workloads and applications aren’t experiencing performance degradation.

Ready to get started with faster performance in the cloud? Visit the Silk platform overview to learn more.