How Do You Measure Cloud Performance?

Posted on April 19, 2012

Posted by Gerben Meijer in Cloud Computing- How To 0 Comments

The performance of your cloud-based infrastructure impacts day-to-day business operations, and it will ultimately affect business growth and competitive advantage. Select a cloud that delivers on the performance metrics your business demands—from secure access and threat detection, to speed, uptime and capacity.

Cloud performance can have a direct impact on revenue. Take, for instance, an ecommerce website: If the website goes down or slows, customers can’t place orders or submit payments, and they may turn to another outlet that can respond faster.

Measuring Cloud performance

In fact, CA Technologies estimates that IT downtime accounts for $26.5 billion in revenue each year, or roughly $150,000 per business.

So how do you ensure maximum performance of your cloud solution? In a broad sense, we recommend that you firstidentify the metrics that matter to you, and then select a cloud provider that provides both service level agreement (SLA) assurances and performance visibility to meet your needs.

Achieving this requires a detailed SLA that ensures cloud infrastructure performance indicators are met. You’ll also need to make sure your organization has a handle on its network and application performance. These components work directly with the cloud infrastructure, and have a direct effect on the end-user experience referenced in the ecommerce example above.

Key Cloud Infrastructure Performance Metrics

Cloud computing performance can be measured in several ways. Common metrics include:

Uptime and Availability—In terms of business and operation continuity, consider factors that influence your cloud’s uptime, such as scalability, failover and backup systems.
Speed—How fast will applications launch? What input/output operations per second (IOPS) does your business operate with currently, and what does it need to perform better? Ask about promised computing speeds, and the technologies behind them.

Determine the performance levels your business requires. Then, make sure details of achieving these performance requirements can be configured into your cloud-based infrastructure and are detailed in your provider’s SLAs.

Cloud SLA Assurances

What promises are you looking for in your cloud computing SLA? Some critique the cloud market as one that offers “vanilla” SLAs, which are more broad and standardized, and therefore harder to enforce.

For example, most cloud providers offer at least 99% uptime outside of scheduled maintenance hours. If services are not delivered upon, the provider will take a penalty or offer a credit (often toward service fees) as performance insurance.

However, it may be hard to prove the cloud provider’s SLA promise is not met when management platforms are unable to isolate the instance to the cloud infrastructure—away from outside factors like your own network connectivity or application performance.

Ensuring your cloud’s SLAs are actually met requires transparent, detailed and continuous monitoring and reporting capabilities.

Cloud Computing Visibility

Gain insight into your cloud’s performance—and added cloud control—by choosing a cloud provider with detailed reporting dashboards and user interfaces.

Ensure that you’re able to use the platform to perform root-cause analyses, should a problem arise.
Use your control dashboard to set thresholds and alerts that guarantee performance is maintained at all times, alert your team whenperformance falls, and auto-remedy performance issues quickly.

Depending on your cloud infrastructure needs and potential provider offerings, you may also consider having aneutral third-party evaluate performance and provide additional insight into top cloud candidates. Examples of this type of service include vendors such as CloudHarmony and CloudSleuth.

What Steps Have You Taken?

What cloud performance metrics matter most to you, and what steps are you taking to ensure that performance is maintained? Share your thoughts below.