Performance monitoring is two-fold. There is proactive performance monitoring and reactive investigation. The majority of my posts and case studies reflect the latter. This post is more related to the former. Services on premise typically rely on SLAs, NetFlow, scripts, synthetic transactions and more to provide monitoring and alerting. While some of this is possible in the cloud to keep track of specific pieces, you first need a good foundation by knowing if the underlying technology by your cloud provider is operating as expected.