Cloud environments are routinely more challenging from a management perspective than traditional data centers. They usually have more of everything - more users, more applications and more data. But they also have less - less margin for error as they run with a tighter set of operating standards and less hardware as they typically run more VMs on each host.

These highly virtualized infrastructures also abstract physical resources from the virtual server instances they support, making standard troubleshooting techniques less effective. The usual resource management tools do an adequate job when you can locate problems and identify root causes. But when IT administrators don’t know where to look, chasing a dynamic network or system problem with these static tools can be a frustrating and expensive exercise.

In this video interview George Crump talks with Virtual Instruments about these issues and how realtime infrastructure monitoring can be an essential part of a cloud data center’s management suite.