Cloud monitoring is the process of observing, evaluating, and managing the health, performance, and availability of cloud-based applications, architecture, and services. Monitoring cloud computing often involves using automated or manual techniques and tools to determine if your cloud infrastructure is performing as expected.
Cloud monitoring is a vital component of cloud security and management. This process often involves observing your cloud environment in real-time and continuing to identify any issues that may affect service availability. Below the basic functions:
Overall, cloud monitoring provides engineers with a greater level of visibility into their cloud environment. Further benefits include the ability to:
Different cloud environments require unique monitoring methods. However, the basic principles remain the same. Still, the complexity of a cloud environment makes it difficult for some engineers to execute a structured cloud monitoring strategy. Start by assessing these five different types of cloud monitoring. Each type of cloud monitoring focuses on a specific component of cloud architecture. Monitor the following components and areas:
Those five areas are important to experienced cloud engineers, but what kind of insights do they look for?. Engineers can use various metrics, logs, and events to see how their cloud infrastructure is performing. In fact, using a third-party cloud monitoring tool can help you reduce Mean Time To Detection (MTTD) in deployment by 28% and Mean Time To Recovery (MTTR) by 22%, according to the 2020 State of Database Monitoring.
Aspects worth capturing and analyzing include:
The following best practices can help you to improve your cloud monitoring strategy:
You need to set thresholds that inform engineers when to react to issues and fix them before they become huge problems for your end-users. Start with simple, native tools that your cloud service provider provides before integrating a more robust cloud monitoring solution. Centralize your monitoring data and display it via unified dashboards and charts. This reduces the need for using multiple tools, services, and APIs to monitor different data.
It is possible to conduct monitoring manually. However, the process can be time-consuming and prone to human error. Monitor your cloud costs. Many tools lack complete cost visibility, especially within public and hybrid clouds. Implement a cloud-based cost intelligence solution to see the what, why, and how of your cloud investment. A tool that displays data in a way that makes sense to your business, such as cost per customer, team, or product, is even better.
Monitor end-user experience. Crash reports, response times, network requests, and page loading details are some metrics that can help you do so.
Run regular chaos tests on your cloud monitoring strategy and tools. Improve your cloud-based applications, services, and architecture as you collect, analyze, and gain insights from more data.
So, what are some of the best cloud monitoring tools available today to use with these best practices?
More than two dozen tools provide cloud monitoring as a service. Cloud monitoring tools offer many similar features, but some will offer features that are more tailored to your organization’s monitoring strategy than others. Let’s take a look at the top cloud monitoring tools available right now.
Dynatrace also offers full-stack monitoring, including app, cloud, and hybrid environment monitoring. You can also monitor real-user behavior on your online assets with it, so you can tailor your digital strategy to provide more fulfilling customer journeys. Dynatrace also shows real-time and historical logs and events for microservices, containerized, application, services, serverless, and Kubernetes.
With Dynatrace’s open source project support on GitHub, you can easily connect it to your stack and improve cloud observability using over 400 integrations. Dynatrace is available as both a SaaS offering and as an on-premises solution.
For running cloud-based applications and services in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) ecosystem, CloudWatch is a great place to start. It provides a big picture view of AWS services, metrics, logs, and events, such as Amazon EC2, Amazon RDS DB, and Amazon EBS Volume instances.
CloudWatch was developed to respond to customer complaints about lack of visibility, particularly into AWS resource utilization. You can therefore expect it to offer proactive resource utilization.
Datadog may suit you if you want to do large-scale application performance monitoring (APM) and boost visibility into your infrastructure with end-to-end tracing. Additionally, Datadog can also track, view, and analyze logs, metrics, and events from networks, containers, databases, third-party tools, services, and more.
In addition, you can monitor synthetics, security, and real users in real-time. You can also set up alerts using its incident management tool to tell when your cloud environments aren’t functioning correctly.
New Relic is a modern, top-to-bottom, and visually stunning tool for monitoring your mobile, web, cloud, and on-premises environments. It also supports real-user, synthetics, logs, distributed tracing, and multi-cloud monitoring.
New Relic offers elegantly visual insights with Grafana Dashboards. It also displays the specific method calls for different app sizes to help discover incidents’ root causes.
The tool provides one of the most powerful querying languages (NRQL), as well as a comprehensive free plan to test it in a live environment before you subscribe.
Azure Monitor is a native monitoring tool for workloads running on the Microsoft Azure Cloud. It also supports custom metrics for external monitoring. With it, engineers can collect, analyze, and use telemetry-based insights to optimize Azure and on-premises environments.
You can expect a platform well-specced for gathering insights about infrastructure, apps, and services. The tool also monitors your application’s networking layout, services, and activity and will alert you when something is off. If you enjoy BI support, you’ll be pleased to see that it is included here, along with powerful workbooks for dashboarding.
With Sumo Logic’s cloud monitoring tool, you can capture and analyze all three types of telemetry (events, logs, and transaction traces) for security, operations, and business intelligence.
Sumo Logic can collect indicators of compromise (IoC), machine learning analytics, and real-time user activities so you can identify any security or operational issues before they affect your end-users. Its ability to analyze over 200 petabytes of data and complete over 20 million searches daily makes Sumo Logic ideal for enterprises or fast-growing startups.
The solution has multi-cloud support, and while it doesn’t offer as many integrations as the likes of New Relic, AppDynamics, and Datadog, it still provides enough to meet most needs with more than 150 integrations.
SaaS software helps capture, index and correlate real-time data in a searchable repository, from which it can generate graphs, reports, alerts, dashboards and visualizations. Splunk uses machine data for identifying data patterns, providing metrics, diagnosing problems and providing intelligence for business operations.
Splunk is a horizontal technology used for application management, security and compliance, as well as business and web analytics.
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