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Cloud monitoring tools enable you to keep track of your cloud resources and services. Typically, cloud monitoring is implemented to ensure optimal performance, billing, and security. You can use one tool or a combination of many. However, make sure the solution you choose meets key requirements, including native cloud integration, cloud-aware pricing and scalability.
In this post, we’ll examine top cloud monitoring tools offered as native first-party utilities and third-party monitoring solutions. We will also show how NetApp Cloud Insights can help you leverage the power of insights to improve cloud performance and billing.
In this article, you will learn:
- What is cloud monitoring?
- Top cloud monitoring tools:
- Key requirements for cloud monitoring
- Strategic Cloud Monitoring NetApp Cloud Insights
What Is Cloud Monitoring?
Cloud monitoring is a set of practices that help you ensure the performance, security, and availability of your cloud services and applications. You can use monitoring to optimize infrastructure, identify service outages, and detect vulnerabilities or threats.
When monitoring cloud resources and infrastructures, there are three main categories of monitoring. These include:
- Performance monitoring—ensures that resources and services remain accessible and that performance meets user expectations or workload requirements. This category can help you identify bottlenecks or insufficient resources, optimize configurations, and detect application errors.
- Cost monitoring—ensures that resources are used efficiently and that costs are optimized. This category can help you identify forgotten resources, resources with unused capacity, and services that are being underutilized.
- Security monitoring—ensures that access to data, accounts, and applications are secured and that infrastructure and applications remain up to date. This category can help you ensure compliance standards, identify cyberthreats, and track malicious activity.
Learn more about gathering log data for your monitoring tools in our guide: cloud logging (coming soon)
Top Cloud Monitoring Tools
There are a wide variety of both native and third-party tools available for monitoring your cloud operations. Depending on your cloud environment, you may find a single, generalized tool you prefer or use a combination of specialized tools. To ensure you are monitoring your environment comprehensively, consider the following tools.
NetApp Cloud Insights
NetApp Cloud Insights is an infrastructure monitoring tool that gives you visibility into your complete infrastructure. With Cloud Insights, you can monitor, troubleshoot and optimize all your resources including your public clouds and your private data centers.
Google Operations
Google Operations is a Google Cloud Platform tool that you can use to monitor, troubleshoot, and optimize application performance. With it, you can collect traces, logs, and metrics across your cloud resources and applications. Google Operations includes built-in dashboards and alerts, real-time log analysis, and an Application Performance Management (APM) suite.
Microsoft Azure Monitor
Azure Monitor is a tool designed for use with Azure resources that you can also use to ingest external data. It includes features for collecting metrics and logs and can be applied to monitoring infrastructure, applications, and networks. Azure Monitor includes access to an array of analytics and machine learning tools and can integrate with both Event Hubs and Logic Apps.
Amazon CloudWatch
Amazon CloudWatch is an AWS monitoring service that you can use to gain visibility of your applications and resources in AWS and on-premises. You can integrate CloudWatch with over 70 AWS services and use it to collect and analyze both metrics and log data. You can also use the service, in combination with CloudWatch Events to trigger automated actions and workflows.
Oracle Application Performance Monitoring
Application Performance Monitoring is a vendor agnostic tool that you can use to monitor on-premises, Oracle Cloud, multi cloud, and hybrid cloud environments. It includes features for monitoring browser performance, application performance, and resource performance. You can use this service to collect and evaluate metrics and perform contextual log analytics.
Cisco CloudCenter
Cisco CloudCenter is a vendor agnostic management and monitoring solution designed for use with multi cloud environments. It includes features that support the creation and management of multi cloud policies, infrastructure automation, cost optimization analyses, and centralized performance monitoring.
Riemann
Reimann is an open source tool for monitoring distributed systems. You can use it to aggregate event data from across your infrastructure and applications into single data streams. You can integrate Riemann with Graphite for visualization of data or view system overviews from the Sinatra app interface.
cAdvisor
cAdvisor is an open source daemon that you can use to monitor your container deployments. It enables you to collect, aggregate, process, and export data related to resource use, network statistics, and isolation parameters. You can use cAdvisor through the web-based UI or via REST API.
Graphite
Graphite is an open source monitoring tool designed for cloud and on-premise resources. You can use it to store, visualize, and share time-series data and metrics. You cannot use this tool to collect data directly, but it does include a large ecosystem of compatible collection agents and integrations.
Prometheus
Prometheus is an open source monitoring utility that you can use to collect, aggregate, analyze, and visualize metrics data. It is the default monitoring tool for Kubernetes deployments and can integrate with a wide range of infrastructures, resources, and applications. You can use Prometheus client libraries to instrument applications, store and query time-series data, and visualize system health.
Key Requirements for Monitoring Cloud Apps and Infrastructure
When selecting cloud monitoring tools, you need to make sure that the tool you select meets a few key requirements to ensure compatibility and value. Some important requirements to focus on include the following.
Comprehensive visibility
The distributed natures of cloud applications, users, and resources, requires you to monitor many more components than traditional infrastructures. Look for tools that can centralize and correlate data from across your systems and provide end-to-end tracing.
If your IT team has to patch together information from multiple tools they are more likely to overlook issues. Lack of centralization also increases response times, leaving you vulnerable or down for longer.
Native cloud integrations
Ideally, you should look for tools that can natively integrate with your existing systems and providers. The more agents, plugins, or custom integrations you need to include, the more points of failure you introduce. Additionally, any time a component updates, you stand to lose compatibility.
Cloud-aware pricing
Traditional on-premises monitoring systems are often priced according to the number of devices or users you intend to monitor. This pricing structure doesn’t work well for cloud resources, however, due to their dynamic nature. Look for solutions with flexible pricing or those that enable you to float costs from month to month.
Request data capturing
Cloud resources and applications involve request data that may not be captured on event logs or by metrics. For example, eCommerce customers may create many back and forth requests that pass through load balancers, mobile devices, or content delivery networks before getting to your microservices or database. If you cannot monitor these dynamic components with request tracing or packet capture your visibility is incomplete.
Scalability
Cloud environments produce significant amounts of data, particularly once you add Internet of things (IoT) or other streaming devices. Additionally, user volumes can fluctuate widely, particularly with customer facing applications and services.
Any monitoring tool you choose needs to accommodate the vast amounts of data your workloads and users generate. This means scaling bandwidth and processing to ingest data in real time and scaling databases to store collected data.
Strategic Cloud Monitoring with NetApp Cloud Insights
NetApp Cloud Insights is an infrastructure monitoring tool that gives you visibility into your complete infrastructure. With Cloud Insights, you can monitor, troubleshoot and optimize all your resources including your public clouds and your private data centers.
Cloud Insights helps organizations reduce mean time to resolution by 90%, prevent 80% of cloud issues from impacting end users, and reduce cloud infrastructure costs by an average of 33%. It can even reduce your exposure to insider threats by identifying risks to sensitive data.
In particular, NetApp Cloud Insights helps you discover your entire hybrid infrastructure, from the public cloud to the data center. With NetApp Cloud Insights you can optimize cloud costs and save money across your environment, by identifying unused resources and right-sizing opportunities.
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