Grant Glading, Head of Sales and Marketing at Interlink Software, on moving to the cloud without losing visibility of performance and service health.

In part three of this series, we showed you a number of methods and tools for accessing key metrics and logs from a Pivotal Cloud Foundry deployment. Some of these tools help PCF operators monitor the health and performance of the cluster, whereas others allow developers to view metrics, logs, and performance data from their applications running on the cluster.

So far in this series we’ve explored Pivotal Cloud Foundry’s architecture and looked at some of the most important metrics for monitoring each PCF component. In this post, we’ll show you how you can view these metrics, as well as application and system logs, in order to monitor your PCF cluster and the applications running on it.

In the first part of this series, we outlined the different components of a Pivotal Cloud Foundry deployment and how they work together to host and run applications. In this article we will look at some of the most important metrics that PCF operators should monitor. These metrics provide information that can help you ensure that the deployment is running smoothly, that it has enough capacity to meet demand, and that the applications hosted on it are healthy.

Pivotal Cloud Foundry (PCF) is a multi-cloud platform for the deployment, management, and continuous delivery of applications, containers, and functions. PCF is a distribution of the open source Cloud Foundry developed and maintained by Pivotal Software, Inc. PCF is aimed at enterprise users and offers additional features and services—from Pivotal and from other third parties—for installing and operating Cloud Foundry as well as to expand its capabilities and make it easier to use.

If you remember getting an Erector Set as a kid, I’m sorry. In a stocking full of toy building systems, an Erector Set is the proverbial lump of coal. The instructions are complicated, and the pieces are made of metal, connected together with tiny screws. Few children have ever completed one of these sets successfully.

If it hasn’t happened already, someone in your organization will soon ask you to explain your AWS bill. Depending on the complexity of your cloud environment, you will consider the bill to be something between a riddle and an incomprehensible and unbreakable code. We know, we’ve been there.