With India projected to be the fourth largest base for startups (according to the NASSCOM 10,000 Startups Report), sprouting businesses require their services and websites to have high availability and response time from different geographies. This calls for a cloud monitoring and management solution to better construe user experience in real-time and address any availability challenges proactively.
Srinivasa Raghavan, Product Manager, Site24x7, a division of Zoho Corporation
In an email interview with DIGITAL CREED, Srinivasa Raghavan, Product Manager, Site24x7, a division of Zoho Corporation outlines the challenges encountered with cloud monitoring and management, and then explains how the Site24x7 service addresses those challenges.
Raghavan has been with the company for more than 16 years. He plays a critical role in decision making on product architecture, management, and engineering, and oversees the direction of the entire product suite.
Starting as a website monitoring service, Site24x7 has grown into a full-stack service, delivering server, synthetic transaction, application, network, log, and public and private cloud monitoring.
Some of Site24x7’s enterprise customers include Juniper, Endurance Technologies, TMF Group, Bajaj Finserv Ltd., Cisco, Disney India, and Bharat Petroleum Corporation. Managed Service providers (MSP) use Site24x7 to support their clients who include Infosys, Wipro, Cognizant, Accenture, TCS, IBM, and HCL.
Here are excerpts from the interview:
DC: How is the cloud monitoring and management space growing in India?
SR: According to a Markets & Markets report on Cloud Monitoring, the global cloud monitoring market is expected to grow to $1,976.9 by 2022, from $821.4 million in 2017. The APAC region is projected to grow at a higher rate fuelled by digital transformation programs like Digital India. The regional market’s response to global trends, especially startups and SMBs wanting to etch a mark on a global market has been fuelling the need for continuous investment in understanding the end user experience.
With India projected to be the fourth largest base for startups (according to the NASSCOM 10,000 Startups Report), these sprouting businesses require their services and websites to have high availability and response time from different geographies. This calls for a cloud monitoring and management solution to better construe user experience in real-time and address any availability challenges proactively. Supporting technologies, like AI and machine learning, further helps in breaking down the cloud complexities and in enhancing the user experience.
DC: What are the challenges in this space?
SR: In today’s fast-changing business scenario, the mantra “slow is the new down” appeals to both vendors and consumers alike. It’s important for organisations to have a quicker mean time to detect any bottlenecks and repair (MTTD & MTTR) before end users are affected. This can be achieved by gaining visibility into key infrastructure KPIs and monitor every tier of an organisation’s application stack. Although it’s crucial to monitor every tier, using multiple tools makes the task difficult as each tool’s requirements and functionalities may not align well with another, and user training could also be taxing. The need to build dashboards that integrate and manage billing cycles further adds to the complexities.
Editor’s note: Mean Time To Detect (MTTD) and Mean Time To Restore (MTTR) are metrics used to describe how long it takes to discover a problem and how long it takes you to restore service relative to the start of the outage.
A holistic view into the IT infrastructure utilising a single full-stack monitoring solution can simplify the management process, provide instant alerts, thereby proactively resolving issues before they impact performance.
A holistic view into the IT infrastructure utilising a single full-stack monitoring solution can simplify the management process, provide instant alerts, thereby proactively resolving issues before they impact performance.
DC: How does Site24x7 address these challenges? Can you give us some use cases?
SR: With public cloud adoption reaching a new high, there is a growing concern about website availability and uptime from different geographies. Site24x7, with data centres in eight different locations around the world, helps DevOps and IT teams to simulate user experience from different geographies to better understand and gain deeper insight into the organisation’s cloud and on-premise environment. IT teams can leverage Site24x7’s AI-powered monitoring capabilities and IT Automation tools to gain knowledge into all layers of an organisation’s IT infrastructure—servers, applications, databases, and third-party integration points—from a single console.
Site24x7 not only helps organisations embark on their digital transformation journey, but also in optimising their digital services. Site24x7’s recently launched CloudSpend service addresses cost optimisation issues with a holistic view of cloud expenditures across multiple accounts.
DC: Can you name some customers using this solution in India?
SR: With over 500 paid customers in India, ranging from startups, SMBs, to Fortune 500 companies, Site24x7 is used by businesses of all sizes and industry verticals. Some of Site24x7’s enterprise customers include Juniper, Endurance Technologies, TMF Group, Bajaj Finserv Ltd., Cisco, Disney India, and Bharat Petroleum Corporation. Managed Service providers (MSP) use Site24x7 to support their clients who include Infosys, Wipro, Cognizant, Accenture, TCS, IBM, and HCL.
The product also has a freemium version focused on startups since inception, so as to nurture the IT ecosystem.
More about Site24x7
Site24x7 offers unified monitoring services for DevOps and IT operations. It was born from the collective expertise of ManageEngine, an IT management software suite, and Zoho, a SaaS leader for business and productivity applications. Starting as a website monitoring service, Site24x7 has grown into a full-stack service, delivering server, synthetic transaction, application, network, log, and public and private cloud monitoring. Providing all these from a single console, Site24x7 helps IT and DevOps teams of all sizes break down the complex relationships between their IT infrastructure, applications, customers, and businesses.