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Organizations must remain aware of cloud operations to maximize performance, security, and cost-efficiency in this new digital ecosystem.
Monitoring can serve as the compass that guides firms toward operational efficiencies that lead to maximum earnings potential and ROI. But how can one make sense of such a dense web of measurements, tools, and best practices? This comprehensive tutorial on cloud monitoring will shed some light on its basics and benefits.
We provide eight concrete best practices designed to optimize cloud monitoring strategies.
Cloud Monitoring Definition
What is cloud monitoring? It measures, analyzes, monitors, and controls workloads within cloud tenancies against specific metrics and criteria.
Cloud monitoring uses either human-powered or automatic technologies to ensure its proper functionality. Cloud monitoring enables you to assess whether cloud-hosted applications meet their Service Level Agreement (SLA), identify security threats and capacity issues, and analyze expenses.
Which Cloud Services You Should Monitor?
Answering that question swiftly requires monitoring every service your organization utilizes - cloud services can include anything from server hosting services like Microsoft Azure to more obscure services like Microsoft Lync or even file storage solutions.
- Software as a Service providers like Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, and Salesforce; Infrastructure-as-a-service providers including Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft Azure provide these tools as solutions.
- Platforms as a service (PaaS) include managed web application firewalls, container services, API gateways, or DNS.
Functions as a Service (FaaS), such as AWS Lambda or Google Cloud Functions.
Database monitoring as a Service (DBaaS), such as Oracle Cloud, and Azure Synapse.
What Is The Process Of Cloud Monitoring?
How does cloud monitoring work? Amazon CloudWatch and Logs give real-time insight into AWS services; Google Cloud Platform's Google Cloud Operations Suite has its monitoring service, while Azure Monitor displays query logs alongside any accompanying query plans.
public cloud providers provide some basic metrics while showing query plans with each log entry. Your company likely utilizes multiple cloud providers and runs numerous accounts within them, with service metrics and logs accessible across them all.
Searching through millions of lines of logs, metrics, traces, and events while trying to pinpoint their root cause may appear impossible, yet modern systems make this task possible by collecting logs and key metrics from all cloud touchpoints before extracting only critical data, standardizing formats and indexing for efficient searchability with administrator capabilities.
Furthermore, such single platforms provide actionable insight into the overall picture of multi-cloud applications with intelligent trend analysis and anomaly detection dashboards.
Monitoring In The Public, Private And Hybrid Cloud
If your firm utilizes public clouds, cloud monitoring should become a top priority since cloud environments offer limited visibility into what goes on and can make oversight challenging.
With appropriate technology, cloud monitoring allows your firm to gather crucial data regarding end-user experience and resource use that could prove valuable in making informed business decisions.
Due to the control and real-time visibility that an on-premise infrastructure offers, monitoring a private cloud architecture is easier.
While monitoring may be more straightforward for companies using it, using appropriate technology will still assist with keeping track of metrics that help identify necessary improvements for continuous success. Mixed cloud infrastructure presents unique challenges. Data stored across different architectures creates security and compliance difficulties when accessing it, necessitating compliance auditing to access any piece.
Benefits Of Cloud Monitoring
Cloud monitoring is one aspect of observability - the practice of studying an output to assess an internal state - used increasingly in modern IT to gain a comprehensive picture of complex, distributed applications' health statuses.
As some or all of a company's workloads may reside on cloud service providers, cloud monitoring is integral to its observability plan. Cloud monitoring typically deals with custom metrics and logs; here are its primary advantages for your business:
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Cost Optimization: Monitoring your cloud footprint allows you to track resource use and, thus, lower costs.
For instance, monitoring could reveal that some virtual machines (VMs) only run at total capacity during business hours, saving money by shutting them off outside business hours.
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Performance Visibility: Cloud monitoring offers several other advantages when examining cloud performance data.
Imagine discovering your cloud applications were running slowly; expanding CPU or memory capacity might help, justified by monitoring the scaling-performance ratio; once this ratio reaches an equilibrium point, adding capacity or elasticity won't further boost performance - further exploration may uncover its cause.
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Benchmarking: Monitoring high-performing cloud applications helps create baseline standards.
When upgrading infrastructure or adding features to an app, these benchmarks serve as before/after comparative data for comparison purposes.
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Improved Security: Cloud monitoring provides another layer of defense.
A monitoring solution can detect anomalies, unauthorized attempts at access, DDoS attacks, and more by analyzing logs from applications, servers, API gateways, or firewalls, using this knowledge gained for security hardening efforts.
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Scalability: Cloud monitoring solutions can benefit every business or organization, regardless of industry size or activity levels.
Therefore, cloud monitoring systems must quickly scale as businesses expand in size or activity levels increase.
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Operational Efficiency: Solutions offer easy implementation with their infrastructure and configuration already set, eliminating time-consuming installation processes.
Furthermore, dedicated tools and hardware maintained by their host ensure your team won't have to dedicate precious hours or days toward maintenance activities.
Cloud monitoring solutions do not utilize resources within an organization's servers and workstations, helping prevent system disruption when local issues threaten an operation's viability.
Finally, these tools can be utilized by PCs, cell phones, and tablets. So, your firm can monitor applications remotely from almost any internet-enabled location.
The Critical Role Of Cloud Monitoring
Cloud monitoring is crucial to the health and efficiency of cloud ecosystems. Still, its significance can best be understood when considered against its alternatives: failure can create many serious complications that require constant management to protect the performance and security of these environments.
If cloud monitoring is neglected, it could create serious issues that are only made more apparent:
- Operational Disruptions: Without regular monitoring, operational concerns like performance lags or system downtime might go undetected until they cause major disruptions in business activities.
- Vulnerabilities In Security: Continuous monitoring helps detect and mitigate security threats to systems, but failure to do so could leave them open to breaches or cyber-attacks.
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Inefficiencies In Resource Utilization: Appropriate resource usage is vital to cost-efficient cloud usage operations.
Monitoring may lead to using superfluous resources that raise operational expenses and save money.
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Compliance Risks: Routine monitoring ensures compliance with regulatory standards.
Any noncompliance that slips past unnoticed can result in costly legal penalties and reputational damage.
Why Should You Monitor Your Cloud Costs?
Your cloud infrastructure grows with your business goals, and so do its expenses, which makes regular monitoring essential.
Doing this ensures you incur only what costs are required while not overspending on idle resources you no longer utilize, identify trends and potential issue areas as soon as they appear, take corrective actions when necessary, and ultimately save money in the form of corrective actions or cost-cutting measures. Why Should Companies Monitor Cloud Server Spend? There are multiple reasons for regular cloud vendors expenditure monitoring to maintain a healthy and cost-effective infrastructure:
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Budget And forecast: Monitoring cloud spending expenditures is an effective way for companies to identify and reduce excessive or underutilized resources, contributing to significant cost reductions.
By tracking expenditures in real-time, business operations may better predict future costs and adapt usage accordingly, helping them stay within their budget constraints.
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Improved Visibility: cloud cost monitoring and optimization systems offer enterprises detailed cost breakdowns to see where their money is going and identify cost-cutting opportunities.
Organizations required to abide by laws like HIPAA or SOC 2 can utilize cloud cost monitoring as a compliance check and avoid costly penalties by monitoring compliance through cloud cost monitoring solutions.
- Security: Cloud cost monitoring may also assist firms in recognizing and mitigating security threats, such as unused resources that lead to data breaches or other security problems.
- Improved Decision-Making: Organizations can make more informed decisions regarding their cloud infrastructure, whether scaling up or down, choosing various services or providers, or optimizing for cost reduction - provided they have an accurate view of expenses and utilization.
- Chargeback: Chargeback methods allow customer experience and internal stakeholders to bill for their use of cloud resources, improving cost allocations responsibility while optimizing resource allocation more effectively.
How Frequently Should You Monitor Your Cloud Costs?
Regular evaluation of cloud expenditures is essential to staying within budget, so how often should you review their costs? Answering that question depends on various variables, including company size and cloud consumption pattern.
As a good general guideline, we advise checking cloud investment costs at least weekly to detect unexpected cost increases while taking proactive steps to ensure costs stay within their budgetary allocations.
Conclusion
Cloud monitoring is essential in successfully overseeing cloud resources. It offers valuable insight into your operations, helps maintain peak network performance levels, and can significantly lower expenses.
Consider that successful cloud monitoring requires continuous effort. Your monitoring requirements may change as your company develops and expands, so staying informed, adjusting to change quickly, and striving for improvement can ensure your cloud operations always run efficiently while meeting cost targets cost-effectively.
