Precise delivers performance monitoring for cloud apps

Applications may be affected by contention for resources when running in the cloud

Precise Software has launched a tool to monitor transaction performance in cloud-based environments, aimed at maintaining quality of service (QoS) levels for applications running in private clouds.

To be unveiled at VMworld in San Francisco this week, Precise for Cloud is designed to address the biggest customer concerns when migrating mission-critical workloads to a cloud-based infrastructure.

"The old problems don’t go away when you move to the cloud. While the cloud promises to pull CPU cycles out of thin air as required, this is just a fraction of the problems that prevent applications from scaling gracefully," said Precise executive vice president Zohar Gilad.

The very nature of cloud infrastructure means that mission-critical workloads are no longer running on dedicated systems, he explained, and contention for resources with other workloads becomes a very real risk.

"Customers need to make sure that when they transition to the cloud, there is no degradation in service for their mission-critical applications," he said.

Precise for Cloud is designed for VMware vSphere infrastructure, although Gilad said that support for Microsoft's Hyper-V and Citrix Xen may be added in the future.

However, tight integration with vSphere is key to some of the features of the tool.

For example, Precise for Cloud supports persistent monitoring of every transaction and virtual machine within the cloud infrastructure. This means that performance data is preserved for analysis, long after a specific virtual machine that a workload was running on no longer exists, according to the firm.

The software also correlates events in the cloud infrastructure with workload performance, so that a dip in response times can be traced to a virtual machine being migrated to a different host, for example.

Precise for Cloud will be generally available within the next 90 days, according to Gilad. Licensing details have yet to be disclosed.