No Cloud out-of-control!

In the era of Cloud adoption, every customer is moving workdloads to different Cloud providers, in order to reduce IT costs/time-to-market and in order to maximize flexibility, availability and security. In this complex process, it's really important to monitor business critical applications not only from "Infrastructure" point of view but also from "User Experience" point of view. Oracle Application Performance Monitoring (APM) is the right service in order to succede in it.

Yesterday, at Oracle Open World 2017, Bridge Consulting & Unicoop Firenze spoke at the session:

CON7055 - How Monitoring in Oracle Management Cloud Helps Troubleshoot Customer Issues

where we explained how to setup APM to monitor web applications and external public websites.

Unicoop Firenze is adopting the Cloud for two main purposes:

1. Test Environments (database/application servers on-demand, validate new releases, training environments)
2. Disaster & Recovery (Data Guard on Oracle Public Cloud IaaS)

The as-is production environment of Unicoop Firenze is based on Oracle Engineered Systems Exadata & Exalogic and it is monitored using Oracle Enterprise Manager & Real User Experience Insight. The new requirement is proactively validate the user-experience also for the new cloud environments and APM solved this customer need.

The solution has sereval game changers. Firstly, it's simple: to start monitoring your business critical applications, you just need to deploy APM agents in the applications servers and that's all; the information is sent to the cloud using secure protocol and you can analyze the performance using your web browser. Also, if you need to monitor your public website on Internet, nothing must be deployed inside your on-premise data center; you can use the two pre-defined locations on APM (Chicago and Amsterdam) to check the status and the performance of the website.

Secondly, it's scalable because it's a cloud service. So you don't need to take care of sizing the infrastructure of your monitoring solution.

Thirdly, APM is proactive! Thanks the synthetic monitoring, it's possible to continously validate application functions defining synthetic tests. There are three types: HTTP ping (to check host:port availability), Page Load (to analize specific URL) or Scripted Actions (to re-play a recorded transaction using Selenium scripting).

Fourthly, multi-layered performance analysis: you can view the user-experience (sessions, pages, server requests, ajax calls), application servers performance or database calls (SQL or PLSQL statements).

Finally, APM is integrated with Log Analytics, so you can drill down the database/application server logs when a performance issue or a critical error occurs and you can use Big Data algorithms to correlate events from different log files.

In summary, Application Performance Monitoring Cloud Service solved the Unicoop Firenze new requirements in the migration to the cloud, providiving the necessary tools in order to monitor business critical applications from infrastructure to user-experience point of view, no matter what in on-premise or in the cloud!