I think folks are getting carried away with the on demand aspects of cloud computing.

One of the key benefits of Clouds is the promise of a simplified management console or API.

Hopefully some of the guys who burn themselves on the large public cloud facilities (Amazon, Google) will not be turned off from these benefits that can accrue if people setup “private” clouds.

Regards,
Alok

It is exactly because it wouldn’t come as part of the product offering that makes it more authentic.

Regardless of whether an entity is a corporate enterprise, social network or even whether the application is hosted internally at a large service provider or at one of the cloud offerings, the real stakeholders in any organization need to maintain an objective awareness of how critical online applications are serving users.

This is important for some of the reasons mentioned above and many others like:

- SLA Management
To monitor the service delivery of your service provider or to
deliver proof of performance to your customers

- Operational Management
To proactively be notified when there are issues with key functionality

- Trending and Analysis
To understand performance of the various pieces of application
functionality and how that varies over time and throughout the day

- Rapid triage
To use the diagnostic information capture by these tools to rapidly
identify and address issues affecting users

Ken Godskind
VP, Web Performance Evangelism, AlertSite
http://www.alertsite.com

Another important aspect of such a service is that it helps resolve SLA agreements in a contract. I am sure that buyers of cloud services would want to ensure that SLAs are met, and if they aren’t, credits are applied to their account.

When Netflix had problems last week, its service department pro actively notified customers and promised to credit accounts if there were delays. Cloud service providers must learn from this great example and use tools such as Cloudstatus for a competitive advantage.

- Ranjit

Good points but you know it must be something that comes as part of the offering and still need second opinion so to speak.

While this is a distinct possibility, it probably would not be in the interest of customers to have their provider also doing the monitoring. It’s a bit too much like grading your own paper :)

Companies like AlertSite (and Keynote and Gomez) provide completely independent external perspectives of web application performance and service delivery that should be a part of the operational tools that any company that has important interactions with customers through the internet leverages.

Ken Godskind
http://www.alertsite.com