Collecting, analyzing and acting on data is essential, whether you’re planning a full-scale migration, moving a few applications and services, or optimizing your cloud deployment post-migration. The right analytics can help you carry out a preliminary assessment, plan a successful migration and monitor performance.

With a clear picture of your existing deployment and your migration requirements, you’ll be able to choose the most cost-effective cloud model and the right instance for different workloads.

However, collecting the right data can be complex, time-consuming and subject to error using manual methods. So, it’s essential to use tools to automate the process and act on data that’s up to date and accurate.

Accurate Assessment

An effective assessment gives you an accurate picture of your current infrastructure, covering compute, storage and network resources. You’ll need up-to-date information on performance and application dependencies within the infrastructure.  This data will help you determine the right instances, capacity requirements and other factors that deliver optimum performance at the best cost.

Automated tools like VTG’s ZENfra^TM integrate initial assessment with development of a strategic migration plan and pre-migration to ensure a successful end-to-end transition. These tools automate the collection of data from log files, eliminating the complexity of data capture and reducing the risk of human error.

At the assessment stage, it’s important to carry out a comprehensive performance analysis. Running the assessment over a period of weeks can help you identify peaks and slow periods.

That way you have to rely on average performance figures, which could lead to costly over-provisioning or reduced performance at peak times. With the right data, you can compare your requirements with available cloud options to identify the right cloud configuration and make significant savings on costs.

Comprehensive Planning

Planning is one of the most demanding, phases of cloud migration. You need accurate data to identify the right order for migrating different applications so that you take account of cloud suitability, dependencies and resource requirements.

By analyzing dependencies and resource requirements, you can assess the potential impact of any changes that might occur during migration. In complex application environments, for example, there may be a large number of upstream and downstream dependencies. By using application mapping tools, you can automate the discovery of relationships and dependencies between applications and the IT components that support them.

Migration scheduling is also important. By planning a phased migration, you will group applications and resources correctly and ensure continuity of service to your users.

Optimum Performance

Analytics can help maintain performance and minimize costs in your chosen cloud environment. Continuous monitoring is essential to ensure availability and reliability under all operational loads.

Data on usage patterns, for example, can help you identify compute or storage resources that may be underutilized or subject to costly scaling. By monitoring usage patterns, you can identify opportunities to scale more efficiently and control your costs.

Performance analysis will help you determine if cloud migration has achieved your targeted performance gains and is delivering the right user experience.

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