How can you troubleshoot cloud systems with confidence?

Understanding the overall infrastructure and application architecture would be most foundational part in effectively troubleshooting the cloud system/application. Some of the questions I’d ask to understand the overall architecture is: ? What is our current cloud infrastructure? ? How is this being deployed and managed? Like Terraform , Cloud Formation etc. ? How is the application run on top of this infra? ? Try and have a detailed look at the deployment pipelines if there is any. ? Understand the key pieces of infrastructure or application components that the team owns. Like yes the application is running on Kubernetes. But am I responsible for the application or the cluster?

To troubleshoot cloud systems confidently: 1. Understand your system's architecture. 2. Implement robust monitoring and alerts. 3. Collect and analyse logs and traces. 4. Maintain up-to-date documentation. 5. Utilise testing and staging environments. 6. Track changes and use automation. 7. Collaborate effectively with your team. 8. Have an incident response plan. 9. Consider third-party tools for additional insights. 10. Prioritise security practices. 11. Invest in team training. 12. Conduct a thorough root cause analysis. 13. Document issue resolutions. 14. Continuously improve your processes.

In the cloud architect role, you will be responsible for maintaining architecture for the organization’s software, hardware, and applications needs. An important task in this role is establishing best cloud practices across the company. Success in this role will be displayed by identifying and selecting the most cost-efficient cloud providers while ensuring easy access to data storage.

Consider possible impact from your data center changes and also the SaaS services you are consuming. Think about authentication and authorization, DNS forwarding challenges, network connectivity and white listing requirements.

To effectively troubleshoot cloud systems, gain a deep understanding of your cloud architecture and its components. Consistently monitor system performance for early issue detection. Use a methodical approach to isolate and resolve problems, and continually learn from each experience. Stay updated with evolving cloud technologies and best practices.

Enterprises can monitor their clouds totrack and verify the organization’s assets are working as designed. For example, imagine an enterprise application running on the cloud. Ensuring all users can access it without excessive latency or other issues would be impossible to do manually, requiring continuous testing and oversight. In this instance, you can use cloud monitoring and automate the process to check uptime, speed, and access.

Monitoring Cloud involves monitoring Cloud hosting cost also. Setup Budget alerts, limit on resources, governance on PaaS SKUs which could be used, availability schedules, reserved instance utilization so that we can take full advantage of the Cloud without incurring excessive cost.

There are hundreds of tools to automate this process and even the ability to create highly customized tools. Each situation is different and typically the most flexible tool that has the best ROI is the correct choice. Not everything needs to be monitored just the things that impact core areas of focus such as a posative security posture, system stability, and overall proformance. It might also be important in some situations to consider specific concerns such as file or change audits. But a strong focus on what most important keeps things from getting lost in the noise.

A implementa??o de uma solu??o robusta de monitoramento é fundamental. Utilizo como ferramenta o Azure Monitor para obter insights em tempo real sobre o desempenho e a saúde dos sistemas. Isso me permite detectar rapidamente anomalias e responder antes que se tornem problemas maiores.

A monitoring system should offers real-time data collection, complete aggregation, drill down storage, and easy to understand analysis in one pane of glass.

When troubleshooting cloud systems, it's key to have a systematic process in place. I often lean on methods like OODA or DAIIV for an organized approach. Using tools such as ping, traceroute, and cloud-specific commands helps in efficiently gathering and verifying information. It's also crucial to document and share your troubleshooting journey for future reference and team learning.

Adoto uma abordagem metódica para solucionar problemas, come?ando pela identifica??o do problema, seguida pela coleta de dados, análise, hipóteses e, finalmente, testes e implementa??o de solu??es. Por exemplo, ao enfrentar um problema de desempenho, come?o verificando métricas de CPU, memória e I/O para identificar gargalos.

The first step in the troubleshooting process is to describe the problem completely. Without a problem description, neither you or a trace can know where to start to find the cause of the problem. This is the key to figure out root causes.

Strong post change or post issue remediation and continued improvement of that documentation is key. The methods on gathering and disturbing it are also important for a typical co managed system. If you make a change that has a negative impact analysis of that impact and change through tooling or logs helps everyone better understand and improve the change process in the future.

Adoto uma abordagem metódica para solucionar problemas, come?ando pela identifica??o do problema, seguida pela coleta de dados, análise, hipóteses e, finalmente, testes e implementa??o de solu??es. Por exemplo, ao enfrentar um problema de desempenho, come?o verificando métricas de CPU, memória e I/O para identificar gargalos.

Documentation is the key for mentoring your team to take the new challenges. Though certifications are good, environment specific knowledge and company specific architecture foundation knowledge is pretty critical. Use confluence and sharepoint effectively and capture details from installation, troubleshooting and performance triage sessions

I'm a strong believer in keeping your skills sharp, this is more imperative with cloud systems as they are typically more up to date and probe to a faster change life cycle. The shift of azure ad to entra ad and the changes to a company it were imactful in confident navigation of the system. When you can and would be able to adjust quickly it can impacte how you effectivley communicate an issue or resolution verbally or through documentation.

A tecnologia de nuvem está em constante evolu??o, ent?o é importante manter-se atualizado com as últimas tendências e atualiza??es de servi?o. Dedico tempo para a forma??o contínua, participando de webinars, lendo documenta??es e obtendo certifica??es relevantes.

Having the right knowledge to start with is key. Monitoring and logging systems help provide this. AWS offers cloudwatch as an easy method of monitoring applications and servers until you are ready to deal with the big boys like Prometheus. Also there are online videos, search for "confidence"

Identify a good APM tool and implement if the Cloud vendor does not have monitoring tools available natively. The tool should be able to be used for Incident and proactive monitoring and should have capabilities to integrate with the alerting/ ticketing system.

Infrastructure as Code ( Iac) is definitely needed for provisioning and managing cloud environments which would keep them consistent across Dev, test, UAT and Production. Using Cloud portals will result in mismanagement, errors and will make the cloud journey painful in the long run. Following Iac makes the troubleshooting process easier.