Digital transformation is more than a necessity for organizations. Especially during the recent pandemic, many businesses needed reliable SaaS-based solutions to ensure remote capabilities. SaaS enables software delivery on-demand, through the internet for all businesses irrespective of scale. This approach enables organizations to
- operate over the internet,
- on multiple devices including mobile,
- and leverage cloud services with minimal overheads and complexity.
With this innovative approach in mobile technology, you need to monitor the performance of applications for better results. The mobile SaaS market is booming and will reach $7.4 billion by the end of 2021. However, delivering a high-quality SaaS-based mobile experience is not easy and needs effective application performance monitoring.
So, here we will discuss SaaS monitoring, its importance, best practices to follow for optimal results, and the best solutions. Let’s start by understanding the fundamentals of SaaS monitoring platforms.
What is SaaS Monitoring?
SaaS monitoring is a practice to monitor the performance of SaaS-based applications, which allows organizations a complete overview of their system. Such a system can include cloud-based software, off-the-shelf software solutions, and even custom SaaS applications. Many organizations outsource their operational tasks leveraging third-party services from market giants like Salesforce or Microsoft 365.
Monitoring the performance of these operations can be challenging along with tracking of core services. A SaaS monitoring solution goes beyond your organization’s core services and offers a broader overview of software metrics related to your business.
What is the importance of Monitoring your SaaS Application?
SaaS application monitoring can help you optimize user experiences and offer real-time updates on the performance. While monitoring all your business services is crucial, SaaS monitoring needs to be thorough and data-driven for better performance enhancements.
Take an example of a SaaS-based CRM solution integrated into your organizational structure. Such a solution powers your sales and marketing, enhances customer support, and improves user engagement. Imagine the SaaS-based CRM application having downtime. Customers finding customer support systems down will lead to higher churn rates.
Several organizations that leverage DevOps to improve the efficiency and productivity of their systems rely on Saas-based solutions. However, outsourcing development tasks enable businesses to reduce the mean time to repair and improve deployment times of software; lack of monitoring can make a massive dent in their budget with higher costs.
You have a service level agreement to ensure that the solution delivers performance as per pre-defined standards. This is why you need a SaaS monitoring tool that can provide results and analytics with information that is compared with standards for understanding efficiency.
A SaaS monitoring tool goes beyond monitoring your application’s in-built tool, which is restricted to the SLA service provider’s network. The best part about SaaS monitoring is that it provides real-time information on software components, features, user’s browsers and even suggests recommendations for troubleshooting.
SaaS Monitoring Best Practices
When it comes to SaaS application monitoring, having a proper strategy can ensure higher accuracy. You need to define metrics and have standards in place to compare monitoring results for better performance analysis.
Going Past Need
When you are building a SaaS application monitoring plan, you need to think past the fundamental requirements. The first thing to keep in mind is the exact impact of performance on business activities. Your SaaS monitoring plan needs to have measures to reduce downtime, latency, and errors that can disrupt operations.
How can factors like latency or downtime impact the business, and what are critical components affecting them? These are the questions you need to have answers ready to formulate a SaaS monitoring plan.
Another essential aspect of the SaaS monitoring plan is to understand the impact of such a process on different project stages, the scalability of the application, and even capacity testing.
Early Strategy
Strategizing early for SaaS monitoring is essential for the adoption of cloud-based services and environments. Furthermore, tracking compatibility issues is difficult without a proper strategy for monitoring, leading to refactoring problems and higher costs.
One of the most important strategies is to leverage service level indicators (SLI). Based on the SLIs and adoption plans, you can establish objectives specific to higher availability and performance. With a SaaS monitoring strategy targeted towards these objectives, it becomes easy to track SLIs related to uptime and performance of applications.
Tier Level Management
SaaS solutions are often provided in a tiered model where tenants have access to different tier experiences. So, you need to build an architecture that will help monitor and control experiences at each tier level.
However, this practice is not just about maximizing the performance but also adjusting the consumption of computing resources. Thus, even if you have a robust system that can handle multiple loads of these tenants, you may choose to control resource allocation for some of these tiers based on specific business needs.
Here, you can integrate the SaaS monitoring tool with a throttling function that can control the computational power allocation as per need to different tiers. You can also configure functions for concurrency invocations for better performance triggered through SaaS monitoring platforms.
Data flow & Metrics Integrations
When your network exists across environments from multiple vendors, it becomes essential for SaaS network monitoring tools to treat data from different resources equally. Configuring your SaaS monitoring platforms to integrate data flows can help you generate a uniform metric presentation that enables a complete overview of the system.
Let’s take an example of the deployment of a document repository application on a hybrid cloud. What components will you need to monitor if your employees need to access the application from offices physically and remotely while at home?
Here are some of the major components to monitor through the SaaS log monitoring platform.
Local datacenters- Your applications are hosted on a cloud environment with several core services with a localized version of the app store on the on-premise datacenter. So, you need to monitor local datacenters to measure the performance of core services, compliance, and security.
Network- Leverage SaaS network monitoring to ensure seamless connection, latency, errors, and encryptions for safe data access
Trigger Functions- You need to measure the response of trigger functions to ensure that there is no delay in the execution of user requests.
Apart from all these best practices, you will also need advanced Monitoring as a Service(MaaS) for your projects. It is a solution that will help you with several tools for monitoring applications, servers, systems, or any other IT asset. For example, Cloudlytics’ Monitoring as a Service solution provides SaaS monitoring capabilities. Let’s understand how it helps with SaaS monitoring.
How Cloudlytics helps monitor your SaaS?
Cloudlytics is a SaaS monitoring platform that offers excellent tools to track all the essential metrics related to your application. The best part about Cloudlytics is its cloud intelligence engine which enables intelligent analytics and monitoring. The engine employs Artificial Intelligence algorithms to allow features like,
- Asset inventory automation
- Structural resource mapping
- Vulnerability and security assessment
- Compliance mapping
- Virtual network diagram
- Graphical analytics and comprehensive dashboard
Another aspect that Cloudlytics excels in is offering a complete overview of SaaS applications and systems deployed across multiple vendor environments.
Conclusion
Performance, security and uptime are essential to successful business growth, especially in cloud adoption. So, SaaS monitoring becomes necessary for your systems to analyze the metrics and make changes quickly. Solutions like MaaS from Cloudlytics can provide you with advanced SaaS monitoring tools that enable higher business agility.
Also Read: What is SaaS Security?
