Windows Azure gets real-time application performance monitoring

Regardless of the benefits that cloud computing can bring to your production environments, a key to delivering applications to your end-users is assuring that the applications are performing the way they should be. And no web services platform can be successful without the tools for developers and IT to look into running applications that can report on the behavior of application components and the progress of data through the application.

That's why the announcement that New Relic's web application performance monitoring tool will be available on the Windows Azure platform is important. The New Relic tool allows a view into the depths of running applications which is really the only way that developers or IT managers can find the bottlenecks that impact the end user experience that can't be attributed to much more easily solved, and identified, external problems.

When the performance of the physical server or storage takes a hit due to hardware issues, it is fairly simple to diagnose the hardware problem and address them even in a brute force manner (replace the offending part). Network issues can become more complicated, but the tools for monitoring and following the flow of network traffic are well established and rerouting network traffic around identified network bottlenecks is an operational process that all network administrators are very familiar with.

While the news is that New Relic will be running on Windows Azure, the monitoring software is from a well-established company that already has more than 20,000 customers and a history of delivering on the promise of real-time web application monitoring. For Azure to be a successful platform, vendors such as new Relic need to be convinced to come on-board. The cloud implies a broad variety of services from the user's choice of vendors, and Microsoft will need to continue to prove that they will not be simply their own Microsoft-centric walled garden.