What you can’t measure, you can’t (or hope to) manage.

As the public cloud becomes pervasive in hosting business critical e-commerce applications and IT infrastructure, monitoring the performance levels promised by cloud service providers in SLAs is critical. But from the plethora of public cloud services winking at you at every web click, which ones are the true star performers? The truth is you most certainly have to sign up first before you can know, and it could be costly to you if the SLAs can’t be delivered to meet your own requirement. Wouldn’t it be great if you could get this critical metric data before you sign on the dotted lines?

For PaaS & IaaS public cloud services, one company has done tremendous work in eliminating the guess work by independently monitoring public cloud services. This truly is a gift for evaluating public cloud service performances.

The cloud performance detective

CloudSleuth, a free cloud monitoring service from Compuware, does the detective work on public cloud performance. The vendor’s Global Provider View application uses the Gomez Performance Network (GPN).

With identical sample application hosted on several public cloud service provider networks, response time and availability of the application is continuously monitored from over 30 Internet backbone nodes across North America, South America, Europe, and Asia Pacific. The performance data can give a snapshot of user experience of cloud services across the globe. For example, you can identify which services would be best suited for global, regional, or local customer reach.

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A list of cloud services currently monitored is available here . Big players such as Amazon, Microsoft, and Google are listed along with others.

While CloudSleuth doesn’t have performance data for all PaaS & IaaS cloud services, customers can request service providers host a sample CloudSleuth application for independent measurement of their performance.