Does Cloud Computing Change Service Monitoring?

In these days when everybody is talking about Cloud Computing - and many vendors are changing their data sheets to say that the outsourcing services they provide are "cloud based" - many companies are asking themselves what the advent of Cloud Computing will mean for their investment in monitoring of the IT services that (somehow, sometime) will move to the Cloud.

The answer - as is often the case with any shifting paradigm - is: That depends. It depends on what type of monitoring you are doing today (and want to do tomorrow), and what type of Cloud Computing you will want to utilize.

Generally speaking, monitoring that is agent-less, and based on open/standard protocols will quite probably still work with few or no changes. E. g. monitoring web applications through "virtual users" is the same whichever technology or vendor actually hosts the application server.

Agent-based monitoring is subject to possible change to a greater degree, depending on the type of Cloud Computing being used:
For Infrastructure as a Service (i.e. the customer has access to the server, and provides the OS and application) or Platform as a Service (the customer has access to the OS and provides the application) agent deployment is more or less the same as with servers that are based in your own data center: It is up to the customer whether he wants to use an agent or not, but there may be restrictions on protocols and connections betweenm the agentinstrumented server and the management server run by the customer.
For Software as a Service (where the customer uses software provided by the vendor) agent-based monitoring is generally not possible, except in situations where the vendor will allow the customer some level of access to agents installed, maintained som operated by the vendor. But this is more likely in "traditional outsourcing", rather than in Cloud Computing.