There are many areas in which existing monitoring, and orchestration fall short. Subsequent to the discussions in response to my previous posting there were some interesting and appropriate concerns raised.

The added complexity of the addition of the hybrid cloud into the equation regarding monitoring dictate that hypervisor, hardware, and connectivity make reliance on specific platform a quandary that requires massive consideration prior to the willingness to undertake such a purchase. If you accommodate for one of these things, but not all of them, you’ll find yourself open to a tool that simply doesn’t do what you need it to. Let’s say that you’ve chosen a tool that relies on a specific hardware platform, but then choose a third party provider that uses different switching gear, or different host servers. What would your solution be in this case? The answer is that your solution won’t solve anything, and becomes shelfware. So, what becomes necessary in this case is a full-evaluation of your potential solution, along with an eye toward the future growth of your environment.

Can your management layer provide insight into the hybrid data center? If so, does your solution rely on standard MIBs, via SNMP? Will it give accurate predictive monitoring of server/switch/storage through this tunnel? How does it handle the migration of workloads or does it at all? What if you’re trying to monitor variable hypervisor stacks? Will you be able to interact from your internal hypervisor to an external OpenStack environment? What about the storage on the other end? Will you gain insight to your own storage? How about that on the other end?

As I’ve stated, any monitoring solution that relies on a specific hardware platform, not APIs or SNMP; a system that relies on literally anything proprietary will only work if your systems comply with these standards. You’ll need to be willing to comply with lock-in in order for these systems to work for you. This is a key consideration of any purchasing decision. Of course, today’s architecture may fit into any proprietary rule set, but what about the future. Does management want to invest in such a massive undertaking (not only the investment in software, but systems, and manpower) with short-sightedness? Remember, this is a capex as well as opex investment. Often, the operational expenses can far outreach those of the capital investment.

In my opinion, the future of the cloud world is still uncertain. OpenStack has changed the game, yet its future too is uncertain. The fragmentation in this nascent technology leaves me wondering where its future may lie. And again, I’m still not sold on the cost model. This particular business needs to solidify, and engage in deeper standards, meanwhile allowing for full-stack OpenStack models to be created with the inclusion of a support model that doesn’t leave the customer in the lurch.

I wonder what this means for the future of these products. Should an organization invest in a single stack? I wonder…