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For more than two decades, IT teams have been deploying application performance management tools to monitor and manage on-premises applications and infrastructure. But when organizations move to the cloud, these APM strategies need to evolve.

Cloud APM requires an organization to track more metrics than on-premises APM. There are also additional considerations to weigh for collecting and analyzing metrics data when dealing with cloud-based environments.

At first glance, cloud environments and on-premises environments may not seem radically different as far as application monitoring is concerned. Cloud applications still run on servers -- usually, anyway -- and handle transactions in ways that are typically similar to on-premises apps.

You can use certain monitoring approaches both on premises and in the cloud. For example, the RED method emphasizes the collection of metrics related to transaction rate, error and duration.

Cloud environments, however, pose additional challenges. When planning which metrics to monitor, IT teams will need to account for the following:

All of these differences impact the approach that teams need to take to monitor and manage applications in the cloud.

For virtually any type of cloud environment, you'll want to track the following types of metrics:

When you have a detailed look at what's happening, you'll be in a better position to prevent complications.

Depending on how you deploy and manage your applications, you may also want to consider the following types of metrics to help monitor your cloud applications and optimize the end-user experience:

The specific metrics you'd collect in each category will depend on which types of cloud services you use and which metrics they expose. These metrics vary from one cloud platform to the next, but they are usually well documented by cloud providers. You can read all about the metrics exposed by Amazon EC2 or Azure Virtual Machines, to name just two basic examples of cloud services.

Whatever the specific cloud metrics you ingest into your APM tools, your key focus should be to collect information that helps you understand the state of complex, distributed cloud environments.

You should also strive to correlate data of different types and compare data across different clouds and services. This way, you can achieve full visibility into the performance -- and cost -- problems that may arise in the cloud.

When you have a detailed look at what's happening, you'll be in a better position to prevent complications and improve the performance of a cloud deployment.

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Metrics that matter in cloud application monitoring - TechTarget