Cloud management a catalyst for Monitoring as a Service

Weighing MaaS pros and cons

New MaaS offerings also appeal to IT pros who feel increased pressure in this era of cloud computing to make private infrastructure faster and simpler, and to manage it with fewer staff.

For Mangahigh, an online mathematics education software maker based in London, an internal infrastructure managed with cloud-based MaaS is the best of both worlds: traditional IT and cloud.

Mangahigh uses Boundary Inc.’s Software as a Service (SaaS) for network monitoring, New Relic for application monitoring, and another MaaS tool called Server Density for server monitoring on an infrastructure hosted by PEER1 Hosting. The company has also sent some workloads with AWS and Rackspace in the past, but generally, Chief Technology Officer John Webb said that at this point, he doesn’t trust public cloud infrastructure for much more than transitory workloads.

When it comes to monitoring, however, Webb said that sending out monitoring data doesn’t present a security risk for his company, and that on-premises monitoring software has been a challenge to use with a small staff. “If you’ve got a dedicated resource or team of people to look after those things, then they’re brilliant, but quite often these things require quite a lot of management and configuration,” he said.

There’s also the cost factor. “We don’t want to have to invest thousands of dollars into server hardware that’s running monitoring systems, because that’s taking the focus away from what our systems admins should be doing,” Webb said.

Others remain on the fence about deploying a MaaS product. One issue is that it’s impossible to customize these tools on the fly, according to Michael Ryom, a VMware specialist working in government in Europe who has tested a new MaaS tool from a startup called CloudPhysics that is currently in public beta. “If I see something missing from the product, I have to go to the vendor and say, hey, would you like to make this for me? I can’t just write a script” he said.

There are also concerns surrounding control and latency. “If you can’t tolerate monitoring data leaving the four walls of your company, it might not be a good idea,” said The Virtualization Practice’s Harzog. “Or if you need one-second-level fidelity in monitoring metrics, it takes far more than one second to get from one data center to the cloud and back.”

IT pros cited other concerns about SaaS in general, including the possibility of losing the Internet connection to a service provider, the possibility of relatively disengaged vendor service and support, and downsizing of internal IT staff.

Traditional vendors embrace MaaS

One of the major makers of traditional monitoring tools has a new approach when it comes to monitoring for its Infrastructure as a Service offering. Hewlett-Packard Co. will develop new MaaS tools for monitoring the HP Cloud Compute and HP Cloud Storage services it launched last year. “It’s essential for the end user of a cloud service to be able to get real-time data on what they’re consuming as part of that cloud service, because that has a direct impact on billing,” said Dan Baigent, senior director for business development at HP Cloud Services.

CA Technologies also has taken a service-based approach to IT monitoring associated with cloud computing in recent years. It acquired Nimsoft in 2010, just before it released its first SaaS product, Nimsoft Monitoring On Demand. CA Nimsoft officials declined to disclose the number of customers that use the service. While there are still privacy concerns, enterprises that have embraced cloud computing already tend to be more likely adopters of Nimsoft Monitoring On Demand, said Dan Birck, senior principal marketing manager for CA Nimsoft.

Other vendors with MaaS offerings include AccelOps, BMC, ManageEngine, LogicMonitor and IBM.

Beth Pariseau is a senior news writer for SearchCloudComputing.com and SearchServerVirtualization.com. Write to her at bpariseau@techtarget.com or follow @PariseauTT on Twitter.