Twitter is not a SaaS Monitoring Solution

The crowd can help IT, but only if the right information is shared

A few weeks ago I was trying to update some files I have stored on a cloud storage service (that will remain nameless). I had moved my files there a while back as a way to make it easier to access them from my various devices and to avoid losing them during the next inevitable hard drive failure. For the most part I’ve been happy with the service, but on this day, I was unable to access the site.

Not good, as I was rushing to make some changes and send the files to a colleague.

Frustrated by my situation, I asked a co-worker to see if he was also having problems. He was, so we did the next logical thing you would expect. We went to the service provider’s status page to see what they had to say. According to it, the service was healthy and there were no current service or maintenance notices.

#nowwhat?

Twitter! Of course. Whenever services like YouTube or Hulu have outages, users light-up Twitter with comments and laments. Sure enough, a quick Twitter search showed that, yes, there was a widespread problem that had started only a few minutes prior, and already there was a trending hashtag.

This example shows what’s great about Twitter. It is an immensely powerful platform for creating instant virtual communities sharing information and opinion around a topic of common interest. The Twitter community as a group was able to do a better job than the service provider itself of informing users that there was a problem with the service. I and the other storage service users — at least the ones also on Twitter — had formed an impromptu global network of monitors, watching the service from hundreds of thousands of access points. Together could confirm for each other that there was a service-wide outage.

#problemsolved?

Well, not really. Yes, I could see a number of people on Twitter reporting that they couldn’t access the service, but this was all anecdotal information (along with a fair amount of opinion). I had no idea who these other users were or where they were located. For all I knew we might all be customers of the same internet service provider and maybe the problem was there and not with the storage service itself. In addition, while I could go to Twitter to confirm that I wasn’t the only one experiencing an outage — even as the service provider’s status dashboard said everything was okay — I was still searching for evidence after the fact. There was no practical way for me to be notified proactively, nor was I able to reliably see service performance degrading prior to the outage.

Herein lies the problem for organizations looking to leverage SaaS applications — particularly mission critical email, collaboration, and document storage — as part of their IT infrastructure. While it may be okay for me to use Twitter to monitor Hulu, you obviously can’t operate a business this way. Organizations need the same level of visibility and troubleshooting capability for SaaS apps that they’ve come to rely on for traditional on-premise applications. This includes:

Proactive issue detection and alerting
Quantitative data on application performance
Ability to accurately measure service level attainment v. target goals
Ability to identify problem sources so the time to isolate and fix is minimized

That last one is particularly tricky for SaaS since most of the datacenter and network infrastructure is outside organizations’ IT perimeters. You can’t directly see or touch the server or network equipment and neither can your traditional monitoring and management tools. It’s not surprising, then, that we often hear from IT admins that they have had to resort to using Twitter because otherwise they are flying completely blind. It’s not enough, but at least it’s something.

#saasvisibility

With CloudReady Monitor we are addressing this SaaS monitoring blind spot by leveraging the same power of the crowd that makes Twitter such a great service. As with Twitter, the concepts behind the design of CloudReady are simple but the power of the solution is significant. It all starts with monitoring “sensors” you deploy behind your firewall at the locations where users access their SaaS applications. These sensors act like users, constantly running transactions against the service and collecting data on transaction and network node performance. This synthetic transaction model is important as it allows CloudReady to proactively detect and notify you of any outages or performance anomalies BEFORE they impact your users.

Next, CloudReady collects this quantitative real-time performance data from all sensors (yours as well as other CloudReady users’ sensors) into a global database maintained as part of our cloud service. Using our management console you can access this data to gain visibility into the health of the full service delivery chain between you and the SaaS provider. For example, you can:

View current status, alerts, network statistics, and performance trends for one or more of your own sensors to determine if you have service issues affecting a particular location or subnet, so you can point and fix faults in your own infrastructure and get users back online quickly
Analyze your sensor data with the rest of the crowd to determine whether service issues are systemic to the application provider or the result of downstream internet service provider problems; you may not be able to fix these directly, but with this information you know which service provider to call and can provide them with details to speed their time to resolution
Confirm exactly what service levels you are getting from your application service providers, with detailed outage data needed both for internal reporting and for provider service level guaranty refund requests

Like Twitter, CloudReady provides a platform for global information sharing communities to form around common goals, in this case the goals every IT shop has to keep their application users online and happy. But unlike Twitter, CloudReady is based on sharing of real-time quantitative data that provides specific insights into the performance and availability of SaaS applications and the networks connecting users to them. With CloudReady organizations get as much, and in many ways more, visibility into their SaaS application performance as they have had with their on-premise applications.

So, as powerful as Twitter is, it definitely is not a SaaS monitoring tool. IT departments need a better solution; one that leverages the same power of the crowd as Twitter, but gives them real application performance data from which to work. CloudReady Monitor is that solution.

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