For large organisations, monitoring and managing cloud services such as SharePoint in the Cloud, Salesforce and other SaaS applications can be something of a challenge.

So often, issues with cloud services are identified by individuals within a large number of separate groups, including network administrators, data centre managers and colleagues responsible for application configuration, deployment and monitoring. So how does this process (not) work?

Firstly it tends to be a reactive – it’s only when a problem has already occurred that IT teams are alerted. Then, as the problem is often not beyond their control, it can take longer to resolve.

Secondly it doesn’t allow a view of the service as a whole – it is only when one area has determined that they are not the source of the issue that it is escalated to a different team. And with SaaS these could be across multiple networks and providers.

Time for a Different Approach

SaaS needs an approach that proactively tests the system as a whole, monitoring a variety of criteria with useful metrics that highlight issues immediately.

To do this, you need to test your SaaS applications continuously so that you’re quick to identify issues that affect your users. You need to compare current performance against expected and historical trends.

Monitoring server related services and end-to-end network path health, checking DNS entries and exercising your ADFS/SSO service will flag potential problems as they arise and allow you to resolve issues in a timely manner.

Sound complicated? Happily we represent CloudReady, a great product that enables you to monitor service health for all of your SaaS apps easily and effectively.

The following diagram gives a good idea of the information that will be available at your fingertips with CloudReady.

Please contact us to trial CloudReady yourself.