Traditional web design, digital media, and managed hosting are going through a significant transformation thanks to the cloud and the flexibility and agility it can bring, all at a lower price. Web design and online media shops who also host and manage their customer’s websites are finding it much more cost effective and time efficient to forego traditional hosting and colocation options for the myriad of public cloud offerings including Amazon Web Services (AWS) EC2, Rackspace, HP Cloud, Linode, and the wide variety of emerging OpenStack providers. This presentation covers five key challenges to monitor website and web server performance in the cloud that web design agencies will face. Presented by @copperegg http://copperegg.com

1. Website Design, Digital
Media, and Web Hosting
Top 5 Monitoring Challenges in the Cloud
http://copperegg.com

2. Web Design & Hosting Evolution
• Cloud driving massive transformation for traditional web
design, digital media, and hosting
• Flexibility and agility
• All at a lower price
• Hosting in the cloud proving to be more cost effective and
time efficient
• Opposed to traditional hosting and colocation options
• Choosing Amazon Web Services (AWS) EC2, Rackspace, HP
Cloud, Linode, and the wide variety of emerging OpenStack
providers
• But…migration to cloud has created a new set of operational
challenges for monitoring
• Traditional tools cannot meet the challenges
2 http://copperegg.com

3. Top Five Monitoring Challenges
Website designers, digital media and web hosting shops face five
key challenges to monitor website and web server performance in
the cloud:
1. The Speed Factor – The Critical Measurement Step
2. Seeing it All – Maintaining Full Visibility
3. Troubleshooting New Performance Bottlenecks
4. Managing Multi-Customers, Multi-Sites – Controlled Scaling
5. Migrating, Testing, and Launching
3 http://copperegg.com

4. 1. The Speed Factor –
The Critical Measurement Step
• Build-Measure-Learn feedback loop
• At the core of Eric Ries’ book The Lean Startup
• Can build and deploy faster in the cloud – good news!
• But you need to measure – early and often
• Effective cloud monitoring is the glue that links fast deployment
with fast learning
• Gives you the detailed analytics at a fine enough granularity to make
data actionable
• Build faster, measure faster, and learn faster than your
competition
• Things change second-to-second in the public cloud
• Your monitoring needs to keep pace
• No shortcut to success here so don’t try to leapfrog measurement and
monitoring – the more you measure the faster you’ll go.
4 http://copperegg.com

5. 2. Seeing it All –
Maintaining Full Visibility
Cloud server instances share the underlying physical server with an
unknown number of others – and new cloud monitoring tools provide
you with the power to see it all in one view:
• Server instances: Linux (Ubuntu, CentOS, RHEL, and more), Windows,
MacOS, and FreeBSD for all your server types including Apache, nginx,
Drupal, IIS, MySQL Varnish, Redis, and numerous other app and DB
servers
• OS metrics, system details, processes, I/O, and more
• Web page performance, API health, TCP port availability for detailed
response time measurement, return code checks, URL-based
availability and health checks
• Linkages between the server health and the web applications they
support for correlated diagnostics
5 http://copperegg.com

6. 3. Troubleshooting –
New Performance Bottlenecks
• Need to find problems fast and become more proactive
• Due to high rate of change and underlying complexities in the cloud
• Stay proactive and watch for telltale signs:
• Website downtime, for example, is often preceded with sporadic response
time spikes where the site stays “up” but begins to slowly degrade and
slowdown.
• Server-side hard failures are often preceded by a softer burst in disk I/O,
network traffic, or memory growth.
• CPU Steal and IO wait to know if your suffering shared cloud virtualized
resource contention
6 http://copperegg.com

7. Tips and Tricks
Use cases and critical tips and tricks for web designers and
hosters:
• Proper Cloud Instance Sizing
• Track Memory, CPU, Disk I/O, CPU Steal, IO wait to understand
when your current capacity is at risk and you need to upgrade
instances or add on instances.
• Determining Root Cause between Server, Network, and App:
• Monitor for spikes and deviations in web application response time, in
particular data transfer time (application issues), time-to-first byte
(server issues), and connect time (network issues).
• Connect Web Deploys with Web Performance Issues
• Auto-annotate the time of each deploy so related performance issues
can be directly correlated to the deploy that triggered them.
7 http://copperegg.com

8. 4. Managing Multi-Customers, Multi-Sites –
Controlled Scaling
• Tagging allows all customer sites, URLs, APIs,
servers, TCP ports, and whatever additional
components you are managing to be organized by:
• Customer Name, Location
• Dev, Test, Prod
• Database, Web, App, API
• Allows for organized response and assignments to
different operational teams or users for triage or
oversight
• Can even give your customers a view of their own
8 http://copperegg.com

9. 5. Migrating, Testing, and Launching
• Use a solution that can span across enterprise, colocation,
hosted, private, and public cloud environments
• Guarantee that the monitoring solution does not lock you into
one cloud provider as clouds change and the promise of an
Open Cloud should allow more cloud mobility in the future for
you and your customers
• Try out freemium offerings for cloud monitoring while in the
dev/test phase, and as you spin up and spin down instances
after launch
• Choose solutions that scale their pricing on a per-use basis,
using a utility-based service to monitor you utility-based
service
9 http://copperegg.com

10. Top Five Monitoring Challenges
• Accelerate your businesses and gain serious competitive
advantage through intelligent use of the cloud
• Website design, digital media, and hosting organizations
reaching new heights of success and customer growth with
cloud
• Control the cloud and make it work for you & your business by
conquering these 5 new challenges:
• The Speed Factor – The Critical Measurement Step
• Seeing it All – Maintaining Full Visibility
• Troubleshooting New Performance Bottlenecks
• Managing Multi-Customers, Multi-Sites – Controlled Scaling
• Migrating, Testing, and Launching
10 http://copperegg.com