How can you ensure real-time monitoring and alerting in your hybrid cloud management tool?

Prior to establishing your monitoring and alerting system, it's essential to formulate your goals and strategy. Here's a concise explanation: You should identify the specific Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) relevant to your hybrid cloud environment that require monitoring. Determine the frequency at which data collection and analysis should occur. Define thresholds and baselines for alerting to pinpoint deviations from normal operations. Additionally, establish the procedures for receiving and responding to alerts. By addressing these questions, you can design a monitoring and alerting plan aligned with your hybrid cloud's objectives and requirements.

CONTRIBUTION #24 Choosing monitoring tools is a crucial step and it may have big impacts in the future. Hybrid multi/cloud can be a real complicated architecture to secure, especially when the on premises have legacy and heterogeneous resources. And also when the company has native multi cloud and multi tenancy resources, the security efforts will be huge and a monitoring tool that can be interoperable with all these architectures and resources needs to be deployed. It has to provide real time monitoring, auto-discovery of the resources, unified dashboard, communication services and scalability to adapt with any expected or unexpected expansion of resources. It needs also to provide secure channels to collect and monitor hybrid resources.

Choosing the right monitoring tool for a hybrid cloud is crucial. The tool should be compatible with multiple cloud providers and your on-premises infrastructure, ensuring seamless integration. Scalability is key, accommodating the growing demands of your hybrid cloud workloads and data volume. Essential features to look for include multi-cloud visibility, a centralised dashboard, custom metrics and dashboards, auto-discovery and mapping capabilities, and effective anomaly detection. These attributes will help you effectively monitor and manage your hybrid cloud environment.

Establishing uniform and all-encompassing monitoring policies is essential for effective hybrid cloud management. This entails defining consistent metrics, thresholds, and alerts for workloads regardless of their deployment location. It's crucial to monitor not only performance and availability but also cost, security, and compliance across your hybrid cloud. By adhering to these uniform policies, you can eliminate blind spots, discrepancies, and monitoring gaps, ensuring a robust and dependable monitoring and alerting system.

Achieving a proactive response to issues and incidents requires the automation and optimisation of alerting workflows. It involves using tools and features that filter and prioritise alerts based on factors such as severity, impact, and urgency. Additionally, these workflows should route alerts to the relevant teams and individuals for swift resolution and escalation if necessary. Moreover, they should trigger predefined actions and remediations based on established rules and scripts. This ensures that issues are addressed promptly and efficiently.

Integrate GitOps into your workflow with Flux and Prometheus. This way we can monitor and alert the devs and admins if something goes wrong in real time.

Periodic review and refinement of your monitoring and alerting system are essential for ensuring its alignment with your hybrid cloud objectives and best practices. Gathering feedback from stakeholders, users, and customers is crucial for evaluating the system's effectiveness and efficiency. Furthermore, analysing data and trends collected through the system can help identify areas for improvement and optimisation. By consistently reviewing and refining your monitoring and alerting system, you can ensure it remains in sync with your hybrid cloud strategy and continues to meet your evolving goals and expectations.

Don't think about your future tool as a one size fits all. Different companies have different needs and what worked for someone else might not work for you. As usual for any heterogeneous environment, with multi cloud and on premise mix, don't limit yourself to a product : aim for compatibility, interoperability and market availability of people with the skills to design, implement and maintain your monitoring stack.

A consideration beyond just “monitor & alert”! There is mention of automated discovery but this could be taken further by achieving wholistic “visibility” of the entire hybrid infrastructure, end user experience, traffic flows & traffic transitions like VPN, SDWAN, NAT, load balancer VIP, firewall policy, UC and VPC to mention a few. Here is the opportunity to get a lot more than monitor & alerts. It is the opportunity to achieve long term visibility to help all teams with troubleshooting, capacity planning, security planning, threat hunting and most importantly reducing business disruption. Ensure your tools listen comprehensively to everything your infrastructure can tell you!