End-to-end monitoring the answer to inceased complexity issues

Matt Haberle, business operations manager EMEA, LogicMonitor, tells the audience at Computing's Cloud and Infrastructure Summit North, that monitoring can help the pain associated with complexity and outages

End-to-end monitoring can help reduce the pain cause by increased complexity and outages.

That's the opinion of Matt Haberle, business operations manager EMEA, LogicMonitor, speaking at Computing's Cloud and Infrastructure Summit North.

Haberle began by highlighting the challenges that cloud can bring, especially when cloud providers experience outages.

"In an outage, retailers aren't able to service their customers, which can cost billions of dollars."

He referenced a major Amazon S3 outage which occurred in 2017, and BA's technical hitch which resulted in hundreds of cancelled flights.

"AWS couldn't tell you about their S3 outage it as it depends on S3 to do so. Then there was BA cancelling hundreds of flights, affecting tens of thousands of people.

"The point isn't to dramatise outages, but IT matters more than ever. Congratulations, you are important, the business depends on you, and outages cost billions of pounds and losses of productivity!"

Haberle explained that outages are driven by rapid pace of change, with new technologies explored and deployed quickly, which results in increased complexity.

"This can also result in a lack of knowledge. The famous phrase is 'What you don't know won't hurt you', but that's not the case in IT. What the dev team does affects the ops team and vice versa.

"There's always a mandate to move faster and deploy more quickly, and businesses are prioritising agility and not efficiency."

He presented the idea of end-to-end monitoring as at least part of the answer.

"LogicMonitor is a SaaS-based monitoring paltform. We're expected to be up 24x7x365 as we're SaaS based."

Haberle said that the ideal is to get as close to the 'single pane of glass' view as possible.

"When you can get as much of your infrastructure out of one view, that leads to breaking down silos, leads to all teams looking at the same data, and reduced time to resolve critical issues. When you have that, things get warm before they get hot and catch fire. Getting visibility is key to be able to manage today's dispersed environment."

He added that his firm also monitors connectivity to the cloud.

"We leverage AWS APIs to monitor connectivity to the cloud. Whether you're using Google, AWS, Azure or something else, you have to monitor the same things that you monitor on premises, and also things like service limits. We use our monitoring system to tell us when we're approaching service limits, the availability of cloud services, and even ROI. Monitoring ROI for the cloud is important, and we do it by leveraging AWS APIs, and it's the same for Azure and Google."