capability. With ground tools, you’re watching component availability when
you should be testing service capability.
Third, traditional cloud management tools do not evaluate the maximum
potential of your service. Your application is your consumer. What are the con-
sumer’s limits? Can you generate throughput models about how many compute
transactions are executable in a particular time period, in a particular config-
uration, in a particular cloud location? Traditional utilization metrics do none
of this, as their measurements are relative to the whole. In the cloud, you need
to test a workload profile and measure the maximum total potential through-
put, to enable true capacity planning.
Achieving “Mastery of the Cloud”
If your cloud management tools are not measuring the right cloud perfor-
mance metrics, cloud users end up confused about whether their cloud pro-
grams are doing what they should. Users wonder why cloud is costing them
more than they had expected, and they have no way to go back and see if there
was growth in application and user demand, or simply a decrease in service
performance. They end up questioning every move, every decision made, as
there is no transparency or accountability with either the cloud or application
teams. Did the team do a bad job putting together the original ROI model? Did
the workloads change? Are more customers using the company’s app and
drawing down more cloud resources? Or is the cloud just simply not generating
the performance that was promised?
Cloud operations teams are looking for transparent service knowledge – what
is often referred to as “mastery of the cloud.” They want to know what their
applications are demanding, and what they need to buy, so they do not end up
56 | THE DOPPLER | SUMMER 2018