Monitoring the Cloud

One of the lessons learned by early adopters of cloud computing, even those who adopted with the majors, like Google and IBM, is that it's difficult to know how the applications are performing in the traditional IT sense. Are there I/O issues, for example? Or other resource stresses? Established internally managed systems have lots of monitoring tools to deal with these questions, but not so with cloud computing. At least the options in cloud computing seem to be more limited.

An article in InformationWeek surveys briefly some of these lessons learned by early adopters, and points to some of the possible solutions.