ICT Cloud Report: APM, Cloud Bursting, and Cloud Advantages

This report provides a comprehensive overview of various aspects of ICT cloud computing. It begins by explaining management pack templates in System Center-Operations Manager, detailing their components like monitors, rules, and tasks. The report then explores the infrastructure of a management group, including operational databases, management servers, and data warehouse databases, and describes the process of object discovery and monitoring. Furthermore, it delves into Application Performance Monitoring (APM) software, its functionalities, and how it aids IT administrators in managing application performance. The report also examines cloud bursting, its advantages for enterprises needing dynamic computing capabilities, and discusses the associated issues. Finally, it outlines five key advantages of connecting to the cloud via the public internet, emphasizing efficiency, cost reduction, and data security, among other benefits.

Running head: ICT CLOUD
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Name of the Student
Name of the university
Author note

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Task 3
The management pack templates comprise of the monitoring setting for the
applications and the services. When such management packs are imported to any
management group, the System Center- Operations Manager starts monitoring the objects on
the basis of default configurations and set thresholds which are pre-defined in the
management packs (Greene, 2016). Each of the management packs consist of any of the
following or sometimes all of the following elements:
1) Monitors that give directions to an agent for tracking the state of the various parts of any
managed component.
2) Rules that provide directions to the agents for collecting the data related to performance
and discovery, sending alerts as well as events and many more.
3) Tasks that provide definition of the activities executed by the console or the agent.
4) Knowledge in this case provides some textual advice in order to aid the operators in
diagnosing and fixing problems.
5) Views offering customized user interfaces to monitor and manage the components.
6) Reports defining certain specialized ways helping to report on certain informations about
the managed components.
7) Objecting the discoveries that in turn identify those objects that need to be monitored.
8) Running As profiles that allow running the different rules, monitors, discoveries and tasks
under the purview of different accounts present on different computers.

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There are a number of templates in Operations Manager Management Pack that are listed as
follows (Pearl, 2015):
a) SQL Azure
b) Power Consumption
c) .Net Application Performance Monitoring
d) Windows Azure Application
e) Windows Service
f) Web Application Availability Monitoring
g) UNIX/LINUX Process Monitoring
h) Web Application Transaction Monitoring
Task 4
A management group comprises of at least three elements in its infrastructure that
include the operational database, the management server and the reporting data warehouse
database (Hambrick, 2015). Below is the discussion of the three elements of the
infrastructure:
1) Operational Database – Operational database is an element of infrastructure in the
management group that consists of a database based on SQL Server. This database consists of
all the data required for the created management group configuration. This database is also
utilized to store the monitored data that is collected and processed from the selected
management group. This database is generally used for short term storage of data and the
average life span of the data stored in the database is 7 days.

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2) Management Server - The management server is used for the administration of the selected
management group and can also be utilized as a communication medium with the database.
3) Data Warehouse Database – This is also an SQL server based database that is generally
utilized to collect and store monitoring and alerting data. Unlike the operational database, the
data warehouse database can be used to store data for long term and most data entered in this
database are copied from the database of Operations Manager. As a result, this database can
effectively be used for keeping track and record of currently available data (Doig et al.,
2015).
The process of the discovery of the objects and monitoring is as follows:
a) The administrator is responsible for configuration of the Operations Manager for searching
the computers to manage.
b) The computers that are currently not being managed but fulfill the determined specific
criteria are identified.
c) Installation of an Operations Manager agent is done on the computer that is discovered.
d) The agent sends a request for the configuration data after which the management server
sends agent configuration data from the installed management packs comprising of the
classes needed to be found out.
e) The agent then makes a comparison of the configuration data to the data in the computer
and any object as such which it discovers is identified and the management server is feedback
the information.
f) Once the comparison is done, the selected management server forwards all monitoring
logics from the management packs (applicable for the discovered objects only) installed to
the agent.
g) Applying the monitoring logic, the data is returned to the management server by the agent.

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h) In case any change is detected in the discovered objects, the updated data is fed by the
agent to the management server and following this, the management server updates and sends
the updated monitoring logic (Korableva, Kalimullina & Kurbanova, 2017) .
Task 6
IT administrators need to ensure the application users need to meet certain performance
standards that are essential in providing quality user experience (Ahmed et al., 2016). In
order to aid these IT administrators, Application Performance Monitoring (APM) software
has been developed that is solely utilised for monitoring the performance of an application. In
addition to performance monitoring, this type of software provides the IT administrators with
specific data related to quick discovery, identification and solutions to the issues and
problems that can have negative impact on the performance of the application. The IT
administrators are now able to use APM tools very effectively and efficiently for tracking
application performance over a specific period of time that also allows them to study various
system dependencies for the performance of the applications. Furthermore, the IT
administrators are able to develop application performance metrics using the APM tool that
help to identify problems in one or more applications running in the same network ((Bauer et
al., 2016). APM tools can collect a wide range of data including data throughput, memory
demands, CPU utilization, bandwidth consumption and others. The advanced APM tools are
able to combine all these data from different monitoring silos and correlate these data and
information using the hardware statistics, log files and usage reports of the network
throughput. For displaying the required information, a dashboard is used that conveniently
allows the IT administrators to collect, read and gather data in order to save them from error-
prone and memory-dependent manual correlation. The APM tools are also efficiently used
for collect and quantify all the data that have major roles to play in determining the overall
performance of the organisation. In the initial stage of action, the APM tool generally

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considers the application hosting platform, its memory demands and disk read or write speeds
and accordingly, the APM tool mines information from the analysis. At the same time, the
APM tool also tracks the utilization of the central processor including the number of
operations per second running in the processor. When there is high memory usage in the
processor, the APM tool identifies the issues in the application performance and also
determines the amount of short term data stored in the central memory unit of the CPU. On
the other hand, an APM tool ensures that the services provided to the customer are up to a
certain defined level and the problems are identified that are related to the performance of the
application (Larrea, Joubert & Fuson, 2015). Application performance is monitored or
tracked by making use of different categories such as load time and the response time of the
application. At present, with the advent of technology the applications become complex and
distributed therefore. It is required to monitor the performance of the application in order to
provide a greater level of satisfaction to the end user.
Task 11
For performing the computational experiments at a larger scale and in the less amount
of the time. The enterprises are looking for the dynamically expand the computing
capabilities by the temporary addition of resources of the cloud (Dib, Parlavantzas & Morin,
2014). Infrastructure of the computation can be infected in the minutes without any
investment which are related to the long-term. Research is required for the identification of
the properties which are in the application in the best to determine the stable benefits of the
cloud bursting. Example includes, there are several situations where the transfer of the cost
which are necessary input data. This outweighs the simple waiting of the resources which can
become in-house availability (Guo et al., 2014). For better understanding and quantifying the
general issues, it can perform the analysis which are concrete in nature, the value of the cloud
bursting for the huge applications for the processing and the derive of the environmental

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results. In the very specific manner the comparison between the three versions of the
applications. The dimension of the fault-tolerance, correctness, usability of the economics,
usability and speed related to run-time are very important. The application related to the
cloud bursting which is primarily effective as thee developers are able to design the
application so that it’s Input-Output behaviour which does not preclude the remote cloud
execution.
Issues related to the cloud bursting
The lack of the required infrastructure which is hindering an ideal cloud bursting
infrastructure. Cloud bursting makes the small businesses be dependent on the reliability of
the internet connection (Guo et al., 2013). When there is no internet connection then it will be
very difficult for a person to access the application. If the internet connection is suffering
from poor service or the slow speed then the cloud bursting application is suitable for the
businesses.
Impact on the current cloud system
By combining this one with on-premises cloud resources and by using the cloud
bursting for managing this one, the pu8blic cloud is serving on the demand, overflow of the
capacity, and also the need of the over promising which is costly for meeting the demand
which is temporary in nature. Hybrid clouds are useful for these types of cases. The empirical
use of the cloud bursting is offering the community which is related to the science and also it
is giving the affordable solutions for taking the data spikes having the high volume. Banks
are using a bulk number of the cloud bursting applications in their cloud system (Nair et al.,
2013). The reason is that they processes the huge amount of the data like the return of the
interest rates, and the risk associated with weighted assets. The data is not personal but it
requires short bursts of the computational power for meeting the requirements of the

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compliance. Many banks are not justified for their capital expenses for investing of the on-
premise of the capacity for the processing of the data that only comes when the hardware is
remain idle in most of the time. On the other hand, a 24*7 technology is the stack of the
cloud racks which has too much expense in the sector of the operation. Cloud bursting is only
the perfect strikes which balance between the capacity of the storage and its cost which gives
the data scientists the space of playing and gaining the new insights. The basic steps of the
data science team take this when the cloud bursting is used for the movement of the data into
the cloud and it will spin the storage and the process tranche of the data. It will shut the cloud
application and takes the results to the home.
Task 12
Five key advantages of reliably connecting cloud across the public internet are as
follows:
a) Efficiency and Reduced Cost- By the use of the cloud infrastructure, there is no need to
spend a lot of money on purchase and maintenance of equipment. This reduces the costs
related to the capex and there is no need to invest on hardware, utilities or a data center in
order to establish a business. Large IT teams are not required to handle the cloud data center
operations as an individual can certainly enjoy his cloud provider staff’s expertise. Cloud
reduces the costs that relate to the downtime (Chou, 2015). Since the downtime is rare case in
the cloud systems there is no need to spend money as well as time on fixing some of the
potential issues that are related to the downtime.
b) Data security- Data security is one of the primary concerns of businesses irrespective of
the size and the industry as any firm’s revenue can be devastated by data breaches and
cybercrimes affecting loyalty of the customers and associated brand positioning. Cloud also

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offers many different advanced features related to security that in turn guarantee that the
volumes of the data are securely handled and stored (Ren et al., 2015). The cloud based
storage providers incorporate baseline protections for the platforms and the data that is
processed for example authentication, encryption and access control. In the public cloud there
are added protections to the cloud data and the access to the same is tight.
c) Scalability- In case of connecting cloud across the public internet the area of usage
increases. Large range of scalability reduces the risks that are associated with the in-house
issues of operation and maintenance. Scalability is considered to be the primary advantage of
cloud (.Rittinghouse & Ransome, 2017).
d) Mobility- Cloud computing serves as a medium to access corporate data via the
smartphones and the devices that in itself is a good way to ensure that none is left out from
the advantage of using internet (Sen, 2015).
e) Disaster recovery- Data loss is a primary concern for all along with that of security of data.
Storage of the data in the cloud or the public cloud is a guarantee that the data is available to
the user as and when required even in cases when the electronic gadgets are damaged or
destroyed (Etro, 2015). The services based on Cloud enable quick recovery of data for almost
all kind of emergency scenarios that include natural disasters as well as power outages. The
infrastructure of public Cloud helps prevent loss as relying upon the traditional approaches
the data remains stored on the office computers locally.

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