Traditional tools employed for managing performance have typically been point solutions supporting a specific technology area. Because cloud services are delivered as one offering, the ability to collect data from different sources, overlay that data in one interface, and view performance metrics as a whole becomes extremely important for identifying and addressing service impacting issues.

But before organizations can identify , they need to understand how applications perform and the resources they require. By monitoring and baselining performance, organizations can understand the peak utilization hours across resources in order to determine the appropriate services or resource categories that must be defined within the cloud to support the application effectively.

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Once the apps have been migrated, IT needs to continue to monitor the cloud for changes or deviation of baselines to determine if more resources are required. In some cases, resources can be dynamically applied at certain times of the day to keep up with peak demands, then released when those peak times have passed, making those resources available for other applications.

Leveraging virtualization in the cloud enables organizations to dynamically reallocate or move virtual machines (VMs) to resources when needed. However, moving VMs to different resources can present problems for IT in terms of maintaining visibility of the VM and assessing the impact of the move, because some tools will treat a moved VM as new and history can be lost.