Cloud and SaaS Monitoring Myths
Why Monitoring SaaS, UCaaS Is Critical in the Age of Cloud Apps
The Core of Your Business Runs Online. Monitor What Matters Most
There’s been plenty written about how the cloud and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) has changed everything – for both organizations and users. However, to be successful in the cloud, IT must pay close attention to the quality of service users are getting from SaaS applications, the Service-Level Agreements (SLAs) they get from their vendors, and fully monitor the end-user experience.
You're Still On the Hook for Ensuring Uptime, Reliability, and Performance
As organizations have adopted use of cloud-services like Microsoft Office 365, Information Technology teams might think they are no longer responsible for service levels or uptime.
The fact is that if your users can’t access a cloud-based service, they’re not going to call Microsoft or Salesforce. They’re going to call the IT help desk (maybe even you) directly and the IT team will be expected to diagnose and fix it ASAP.
Users don’t care whether the problem is located in infrastructure owned and operated by their IT department, the ISP, or the cloud service provider. If they aren’t having a good experience, IT will take the heat.
How do you avoid this? Here are six myths that can derail your use of the cloud due to lack of monitoring. Falling for them can put you on a path to protracted SaaS outages and frustrated users.
SaaS providers not infallible. While Service-Level Agreements are great, how do you know they’re being met? SLAs only cover outages that the provider can control, i.e. their own networks, servers, and applications, and not the ISP or networks that connect you.
Status dashboards, Twitter, and RSS feeds only cover the service provider’s infrastructure, not your side. They provide generic information across all the tenants and are slow to update; they aren’t real-time monitoring solutions.
Consuming cloud apps isn’t the same as managed services. MSPs often run dedicated infrastructure for each customer and take care of the monitoring. If you buy directly or through a reseller, you have take care of end-to-end monitoring yourself.
Most legacy management solutions, e.g. SolarWinds or Microsoft SCOM, are designed to monitor systems with direct access. They’re not built to monitor web services or provide active monitoring of the user experience from behind your firewall to the service provider and back.
That might be okay for less critical apps, but for collaboration like email or Microsoft Teams, they become mission-critical. Mean-time-to-resolution (MTTR) for cloud and service outages is key.
CapEx and OpEx benefits for IT don’t mean a thing if the Quality of Service (QoS) and Quality of Experience (QoE) harms the business. When the business suffers an outage, it will be IT’s fault.
Don’t be fooled by these SaaS monitoring myths. Moving to the cloud doesn’t mean monitoring goes away, but it does fundamentally change the requirements.
You have to be able to monitor SaaS apps and troubleshoot infrastructure you cannot touch – the end-to-end service delivery chain from your premises, through the various internet service providers, to the application provider and back.
You need to be able to quickly detect, isolate, and resolve issues affecting cloud application performance before they negatively impact your users and your organization.
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