The Ultimate Guide to Effective Cloud Migration Monitoring
Cloud-related skills are among the most sought-after technical skills on the market. No wonder because as new cloud platforms have become affordable, the need for in-house servers is slowly dying out. When transferring to a cloud, your organization will receive the same benefits, but at a lower cost and with a much lower risk of unpredictable downtime as cloud data lakes are highly redundant.
If your company is about to shift from in-house storage to a cloud-based one, use this article as a guide on how to monitor the transition. Moving huge amounts of data is a process that rarely goes flawlessly from the beginning, and you don’t want to find problems once the process is over.
Plan your migration well
Planning in business is one of the most important things, as having a proper business plan helps reduce risks. The first step towards successful monitoring of cloud migration is knowing what you will do while transferring data. You need to get acquainted with the architecture of the cloud system you’re migrating to. It may have and probably does have dependencies that were not a part of your in-house setup. Those need to be accounted for.
You also need to study the productivity and resource utilization of different cloud instances in your environment. With in-house systems, especially those with limited resources, processes are often tailored to the hardware limitations. Those limitations will probably differ in your cloud solution, and you need to know what you have to change.
Once you gather enough information about the system you’re migrating to and its differences from the one you already had, you will have a clear cloud migration roadmap and know what to focus on.
Know what to monitor
Each business and platform will have a slightly different set of key areas that require attention during cloud migration monitoring. However, most migrations will have several similar areas that you need to focus on. These include:
Infrastructure
The first thing you should monitor in cloud migration is the correct infrastructure usage. Since some dependencies and processes can change depending on the platform you are using, you want to make sure that everything goes according to plan when it comes to the correct placement of objects within the new infrastructure. Above that, you need to monitor that everything is functioning smoothly and no resource bottlenecks are formed as your initial plan may have been weak.
Another point to focus on is how much storage and processing power are used. Not having enough storage room is obviously a downside, but having too much available can eat into your budget. That aspect has to be monitored as well.
Outside availability
Correct configuration within the platform is just as important as your solution being available to connected apps and platforms. If you’re using outside apps that are crucial for the functioning of your business automation or business analytics, you need to monitor how well these apps are communicating with the cloud platform you’re moving to.
Traffic
If what your organization is migrating is not simply an internal business intelligence solution but a service, your engineering team will have to take a closer look at traffic. When Spotify migrated to the cloud from their on-premise servers, the development team closely followed user interaction with the new cloud system.
The main focus was on requests arriving correctly and on time and being processed without errors or maintaining the same error rate as the previous solution. The end goal of cloud migration is to cut data management costs while keeping the quality of the services you provide the same or better, so monitoring this aspect of the migration is crucial.
Cost
The financial aspect of cloud migration is important, so cost is the next thing to monitor. The whole idea behind transferring your database to the cloud is that you can do it without unnecessary resources and cutting costs since acquiring new processing power or storage room is seamless and not as expensive as with on-premises solutions.
Most major cloud storage providers like AWS have tools dedicated to monitoring costs that your organization incurs during the migration process and after.
Security
Lastly, a very important aspect that should be monitored during cloud migration is the security of the whole system. Cloud is often on the edge of security tech, but every system designed to be secure can be ruined with incorrect implementation. That’s why your team has to follow closely all security procedures and requests coming and going within the network to ensure all security protocols and best practices are implemented correctly.
One of the most important skills in cloud computing tech will come in handy here – cloud collaboration. Most cloud migrations are not one-sided, as two teams usually work together. Collaborating to improve cloud security is one of the most important things both teams can do.
Cloud migration monitoring tools
When it comes to cloud migration monitoring options, your choice is not that broad, but the features you get with each tool are enough to ensure a seamless transition. If you’re working with one of the three cloud giants, AWS, MS Azure, or GCP, you can use their respective free monitoring tools. All of these are sufficiently well-made to provide for all monitoring needs and are tailored to the respective platforms.
The other choice is using third-party cloud migration tools like Carbonite or Cloudscape. The benefit of using those is that you may receive a more customizable solution. Remember that it will take more work to set every aspect of monitoring in place, especially if the company has not done integrations with your new platform yet.
The ultimate cloud migration tip
As with many other things in business and life, planning is the most crucial thing in the cloud migration process. No amount of monitoring can save you from a situation bordering a disaster if the initial plan is poor.
When Spotify migrated from their on-site servers to Google Cloud Platform, it took them two years of planning. You may have a smaller amount of data to move, and it may take a bit less time than that, but when you do not cut costs on planning, you will not end up paying twice.
