Cloud Migration Part IV: Assessing Cloud Performance with DEM

In our previous installments of this blog series, we’ve explored why and how organizations are moving to the cloud, how to plan a cloud migration, and the importance of internet networks to the cloud. Now comes the fun part: assessing the performance of your new cloud services.

Depending on which types of cloud services you are using, your monitoring scenarios will be somewhat different. But all cloud services can be monitored with synthetic monitoring, ensuring that you are delivering a consistent experience to your internal end users or customers.

Let’s look at some specific cloud monitoring use cases with Catchpoint:

SaaS: Catchpoint Synthetic Monitoring allows you to automate typical user interactions with your SaaS applications and monitor page load, response, and transaction times. Catchpoint Real User Monitoring can pinpoint what those typical interactions are and find specific problems. Our 700 global points of presence can monitor performance from wherever your users are, wherever the SaaS instances they’re accessing are. Our network monitoring can monitor the quality of internet services being used to deliver the SaaS application from internet backbones around the world. This includes DNS and acceleration services that support the delivery of the application as well as internal network services. We can help you detect whether performance issues are on your end or the SaaS provider’s. This is extremely important in holding your SaaS providers to their service level agreements.

IaaS: We monitor where your IaaS instances are located and diagnose internet network issues that may affect performance of these cloud services. Performance is monitored down to the end-user level. If you are using APM tools in your cloud instance, we can tell you whether the added overhead of deploying instances of those tools in your cloud instances is affecting the end user experience, whether those users are internal or external.

External DNS: DNS is the lifeblood of the internet, resolving web domain names to their underlying IP addresses. If this resolution doesn’t happen in a timely fashion, your website and applications will load very slowly or not at all, no matter how well they’re architected and designed. Because of its importance, DNS is a frequent target of malicious attacks, including distributed denial of service attacks, which seek to crash DNS servers under more requests than they can handle, and DNS poisoning, which seeks to hijack web domains by linking them to the wrong IP address.

Catchpoint synthetic monitoring can test and compare the availability and performance of multiple DNS providers to help you select the ones (you should always have a backup DNS provider) that will perform best for you, once again mapped to where your customers or users are. This may be one of the most important use cases of synthetic monitoring. You can’t detect DNS problems with real user monitoring—if DNS doesn’t work, no users will come to your site to monitor.

CDN: Catchpoint monitors these services around the world for availability and performance. You can compare them to each other and compare how much they can accelerate delivery of your site in the geographies where you have the most users or customers. Many organizations deploy a multi-CDN strategy to maximize their sites’ speed and reliability. This can increase CDN coverage and give those organizations backup CDN services in case one CDN fails. Whether you are going single-CDN or multi-CDN, our testing can help you pick the CDN or combination of CDNs that work best for your users or customers.

To learn more about how Catchpoint’s digital experience monitoring can help your cloud migration projects, download our ebook, Using Digital Experience Monitoring to Guide Cloud Migrations. If you’re already in the cloud and want to monitor the performance of those applications and services for your end users, download our newest cloud performance management ebook, Using Digital Experience Monitoring for Cloud Performance Management.