The Doppler Quarterly Fall 2019 | Page 39

Having an effective alerting strategy in place must be a priority for any organization with a significant number of workloads in the cloud. That much is clear. While cloud pro- viders manage many alert-related tasks on your behalf, you still want to be notified if things start trending in the wrong direction, or at least when something fails. What is not always clear is the form an alerting strategy in the cloud should take. It will vary from what you are used to in on-premises environments, where IT application own- ers and users are responsible for creating and managing all the alerts. It will also vary depending on the type of cloud services you are consuming – platform as a service (PaaS), software as a service (SaaS) or infrastructure as a service (IaaS). In addition, if you are doing what most organizations are – mixing and matching cloud formats, imple- menting multicloud and/or using a blend of cloud and on-premises resources – those situations introduce a whole new set of variables. The important thing is to have an alerting strategy for the cloud that aligns with your service-level agreements (SLAs), and makes skillful use of the resources you have at hand. In a previous article, we described the types of alerts you should implement to ensure you are managing your cloud environment properly and getting the highest level of per- formance. There are informational alerts – such as letting a department know how many servers are running. There are velocity alerts – notifying you when, say, a server is a few FALL 2019 | THE DOPPLER | 37