Business success of companies heavily depends on the availability and performance of their client applications. Due to modern development paradigms such as DevOps and microservice architectural styles, applications are decoupled into services with complex interactions and dependencies. Although these paradigms enable individual development cycles with reduced delivery times, they cause several challenges to manage the services in distributed systems. One major challenge is to observe and monitor such distributed systems. This paper provides a qualitative study to understand the challenges and good practices in the field of observability and monitoring of distributed systems. In 28 semi-structured interviews with software professionals we discovered increasing complexity and dynamics in that field. Especially observability becomes an essential prerequisite to ensure stable services and further development of client applications. However, the participants mentioned a discrepancy in the awareness regarding the importance of the topic, both from the management as well as from the developer perspective. Besides technical challenges, we identified a strong need for an organizational concept including strategy, roles and responsibilities. Our results support practitioners in developing and implementing systematic observability and monitoring for distributed systems.
@cite_14 conducted a survey of 62 multinational companies on public cloud adoption. While use of public cloud infrastructure is on the rise, barriers like security, regulatory compliance, and monitoring remain. Regarding monitoring, the survey has shown that half of the companies rely solely on their cloud providers' monitoring dashboard. Participants noted a crucial need for quality of service monitoring integrated with their monitoring tool.
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Cloud Computing is radically changing the way of providing and managing IT services. Big enterprises are continuously investing on Cloud technologies to streamline IT processes and substantially reduce the time to market of new services. The current Cloud service model enables companies, with a low initial investment, to easily test new services and technologies, like IoT and Big Data, on a "ready to go" virtualized infrastructure. However, large organizations are still facing multiple challenges in migrating business-critical services and sensitive data to Public Cloud environments. To investigate the current adoption of Public Cloud services, we interviewed IT managers and cloud architects of over sixty multinational organizations. The survey assesses both business and technical issues and requirements of current and future Cloud strategies. Our analysis shows that Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) are not yet perceived as fully able to address critical points in security, regulatory constraints and performance management. Hence, to control their public cloud services and to overcome such limitations, multinational organizations must adopt structured SLM approaches.