Cloud Monitoring.

What is Cloud Monitoring?

Cloud monitoring describes a reviewing, monitoring, and managing series that controls a cloud workflow. Cloud monitoring can use manual and/or automated monitoring services or tools to verify a cloud is operational.??

Types Of Cloud Monitoring.

• Website monitoring:?This refers to the process by which technicians monitor traffic, availability, resource utilization, and other key performance metrics across cloud-hosted websites to ensure optimal uptime and functionality.
• Database monitoring:?This technique requires technicians to monitor database queries, access requests, data integrity, availability, and the consumption of cloud database resources. This is especially important because the vast majority of cloud applications depend on databases, meaning even a brief period of downtime can take systems completely offline. Proactive database monitoring tools, such as uptime detectors, can go a long way toward ensuring a high level of responsiveness and that issues with database stability are expediently resolved.
• Virtual machine monitoring:?This refers to the process by which technicians monitor virtual machines (VMs), which are themselves software computers that provide the same functionality as physical computers, and other virtualized infrastructure. Technicians track the users, traffic, and status of each VM to ensure that it is running at peak operating levels.
• Virtual network monitoring:?For cloud network monitoring, technicians keep a watchful eye on the connectivity and operational health of the network components to ensure that virtual networks aren’t overwhelmed with traffic and that vital connections don’t go offline. This type of cloud monitoring is often performed by a?network operations center.
• Cloud storage monitoring:?The process by which technicians monitor storage resources and processes provisioned to VMs, services, databases, and applications. Many organizations will use cloud monitoring solutions to automatically track performance metrics, processes, users, databases, and available storage and use advanced analytics to derive insights from the data they generate.

Cloud Monitoring Best Practices.

1.?Decide the most important metrics and events

The first and foremost thing you need to do as part of monitoring your cloud’s health is to establish the events you will be monitoring and the metrics against which you will be monitoring them.

This is important as in a complex cloud environment, there may be multiple metrics you can measure.

However, all of them may not yield useful insights. Hence, it is absolutely necessary to choose only those metrics that help in meeting your organization’s goals. Some metrics/KPIs you can consider include

• Service/system availability
• Response time
• Latency
• Security threats
• Mean time to repair (MTTR)
• Mean time between failures (MTBF)?

2.?Choose the right cloud monitoring software

The cloud industry today is filled with several cloud monitoring tools that come with different features and cater to different organization needs.

While some of them are full-stack tools that can help you monitor the entire range of services and workflows, others help you monitor only specific parts of your cloud stack.

Hence, you need to first understand how a tool you are exploring fits with other tools you have and your overall monitoring workflow.

In fact, if your organization already practices DevOps, you may already have some tools that can also be used to monitor cloud.?

The following are a few good features to look out for:

• Easy installation and configuration
• Has a non-complex user interface and customizable dashboard
• Provides you a unified view of your cloud environment
• Allows you to automate tasks, set up alerts and notifications???
• Has a smooth integration with other APM and DevOps tools
• Has a pricing model that suits your needs

3.?Monitor all your cloud infrastructure from one platform

Your organization maybe using a mix of on-premise, cloud or a hybrid infrastructure.

Monitoring all of them from a single platform is not only a convenient way of working but also gives you better visibility of your entire environment.

Bringing together data of your different environments on a single platform allows you to calculate uniform metrics so that you can correlate problems and find appropriate solutions in an easier way.

Modern monitoring platforms like Azure Monitor allow you to set up a unified monitoring dashboard which can pull out data from the various infrastructures you have.

4.?Automate monitoring tasks

As you monitor your cloud environment, infrastructure and applications, you are bound to come across several events that tend to repeat over time.

Hence, it is a good idea to automate as many monitoring tasks and actions as possible. For example, if the activity on a certain cloud instance exceeds the threshold, an additional instance should be automatically added.

Similarly, if the activity goes down below a threshold, an instance can be shut down, which will save resources and costs.?

Automating such repetitive tasks allows you to reduce spending time valuable on several routine tasks.

Amazon CloudWatch, New Relic, CloudMonix, Datadog and Microsoft Cloud Monitoring (OMS) are some of the best tools available in the market today that can help organizations automatically monitor and achieve cloud processes effortlessly.

5.?Track end-user experience

Besides monitoring the cloud infrastructure, it is also necessary to monitor the end user’s experience of using the cloud application.

Some of the common problems users face while using such applications include service outage, application crash and slow page loading.

These are bound to significantly affect the success of the application. Monitoring the application layer of your cloud infrastructure helps you take the necessary steps to improve your cloud application performance.

You can make use of application performance monitoring (APM) tools such as AppDynamics and New Relic, which allow you to measure how your cloud application performs while running on a user’s device.??

Some of the metrics you may want to measure include frequency of use and response times, which provide you a good idea about your application’s performance.

6.?Test for cloud failure

How about hacking your own cloud environment or making it fail? These kinds of forced failures of your cloud environment or infrastructure can help you test your monitoring tool in the way it responds to breach or outage.

It also helps in evaluating your tool’s alert system when certain thresholds are met.

There are several tools such as Chaos Monkey and Gremlin are tools that are designed to deliberately induce failures in the system so that engineers can build resilience.

7.?Monitor services and costs

Besides monitoring your cloud environment, it is also necessary to keep monitoring your cloud usage and related costs. One of the important features of the cloud is resource scalability.

Having said that, increased usage of resources can rapidly trigger associated costs. Additionally, idle resources on your on-premise servers may be fine but it does cost money if your cloud resources are idle.

These are situations where many organizations tend to get caught unprepared.

A good managed services partner can help your organization track how much of your activity is on the cloud, how much it is costing you and if you are exceeding your budget.?