Desperate Times call for Sensible Measures
Cloud Application Monitoring for Remote Workers
With the onset of the Covid-19 virus spreading through the planet at a phenomenal rate, businesses have been forced to respond with an unprecedented new business model. For many, it’s not possible remain operational, however, for the online business community; help is at hand.
Many digital businesses are able to sustain satellite workers all working in synergy remotely to ensure the continuity of business operations. Which means more than ever, the resources of IT infrastructure of organisations are being tested to the limit, and it’s our job to keep the cogs turning.
What is an APM?
Application Performance Monitors (APMs) are a pinnacle tool for the tech community and their key function is to detect and diagnose issues with performance in order to enable the level of service needed or to match the demand.
Traditionally an APM would be running “on premise”, which is great. However, there are times when having access to a cloud based solution makes the whole world a much smaller place!
Why do we need an APM and how does Cloud help when working remotely?
In terms of business needs, an APM is key to us as it reduces the time resolve problems. Meaning that issues relating to performance and productivity are fixed sooner and more importantly, the potential negative impact to the business is reduced or negated.
Luckily for us, working away from the office is no longer an issue as we can utilise cloud based APMs such as FusionReactor Cloud to monitor our systems and then give us the information before issues get out of hand.
Barring the outbreak of a worldwide pandemic, it has been known for the Tech community to work from home, or on location when attending expo events. So having a Cloud based interface is absolutely vital to smooth running.
What can we do with a Cloud APM?
Cloud APMs offer the ability to view metrics and other data so that we can remotely monitor servers for activity, usage and much more. It also enables us to monitor our applications and transactions, as well as affording us the functionality to set alerts to conditions we want or really need to know about quickly.
Perhaps this is the most useful feature from a cloud APM. Powerful alerting capabilities, allowing notifications to be sent to us in a number of different ways, enables us to be responsive. This promotes efficiency, prevents potential problems and promotes productivity.
Alerts can be configured to be sent with a selection of options depending how you prefer to work, from Slack, HTTP web hooks, right down to an email, the options of how you want to get those notifications are vast.
Monitoring Applications with a Cloud based AMP allows you to monitor all of the applications in your scope, and if you’re monitoring multiple server instances all running the same application, then Cloud APM will aggregate all of the data together.
The interface can deliver us information remotely on operations, processes, threads and transactions which may be critical for you to see. Not only see, but you may need to know when a particular condition is occurring, and be alerted to take action if that happens.
In short, cloud based APMs are vital to the smooth running of online systems and applications, but especially where you need to work remotely, or have remote workers who need the high level of in-depth insight that a cloud APM is able to bring.
Hopefully this short read is a helpful introduction to the cloud based APM. Of course the current situation really is unprecedented. However, the long-term benefits of this system are clear. Not just from a green-perspective but also from an occupational well-being front; allowing the potential to give more flexibility to staff working from home.
