Cloud Monitoring

Introduction 

The cloud refers to software and services that operate over the internet rather than on your server or computer. By embracing the cloud, enterprises can find alternative strategies to reduce expenses while ensuring the constant availability of their services.  

More and more enterprises are adopting the cloud to explore cost-saving options and ensure their data and systems are accessible to users anytime, anywhere. In fact, Gartner predicts that by 2026, 75% of enterprises will adopt a digital transformation model predicated on the cloud as the underlying platform.  

However, the cloud is a highly intricate environment. To maximize the benefits for your enterprise, it is crucial to have complete visibility into every aspect of its operations. This is when cloud monitoring can take the lead. Cloud monitoring has become more important than ever, so here’s everything you need to know in detail.  

What is Cloud Monitoring?

Cloud monitoring is a practice of evaluating, reviewing, and managing the operational activities and infrastructure within the cloud premise. The cloud monitoring solution keeps an eye on the entire cloud infrastructure and provides central access and control. It is essential to monitor the cloud for IT enterprises when the infrastructure is deployed on cloud premises and is heavily dependent on cloud services.  

The role-based access allows admins to monitor the operational status and health of the cloud traffic and elements. Although the cloud offers infinite services, it is essential to strategize the monitoring practices based on organization and cloud infrastructure. Organizations often choose cloud monitoring to manage public clouds like AWS, but other cloud services can also take advantage of monitoring.  

There are distinct types of clouds, such as private, public, and Hybrid. Private clouds are used the most in private organizations as it offers more control and feasibility to the internal IT departments. However, the more complex and different the organization’s infrastructure is, the more crucial it becomes to monitor and maintain its smooth performance and security.

What to monitor on Cloud?

The organization needs to monitor all the metrics of operations on-premises. On top of that, with the available cloud services, the activities can function on cloud premises as well. Once the organization is dependent on the cloud, there are various metrics to monitor over cloud infrastructure – transactions, security, networks, application deployment, DevOps operations, etc.  

Here are some of the types of cloud monitoring that organizations must consider.  

Virtual Machines: It has become easy to deploy operations with the help of cloud and Virtual Machines. With more functions and machines, monitoring the virtual infrastructure and virtual machines is vital.  

Cloud Storage and Database: Since the cloud makes it easy to store data irrespective of where you are, it is vital to monitor the database infrastructure, availability, consumption, and resources.  

Website: Hosting a website on the cloud is a regular practice now. Therefore, monitoring the traffic, availability, and resource utilization should be a standard practice to maintain a smooth user experience on cloud-hosted websites.  

Virtual Network: Just like on-premises networks, monitoring virtual networks, connected devices, traffic, network health, and performance can be one of the things to monitor when an organization opts for a virtual network.  

How Does Cloud Monitoring Work?

Cloud monitoring involves collecting and analyzing data from cloud resources to ensure optimal performance, availability, and security. It gathers metrics, aggregates and stores the data, analyzes it for patterns and issues, generates alerts, and provides visualizations and reports. Monitoring helps identify problems and take timely action for efficient cloud management.  

Cloud monitoring helps organizations offer real-time insights into various departments of the enterprise. This improves the visibility across the infrastructure and enables running networks, servers, and applications smoothly. It also helps to blend the large amount of data distributed across various locations, track the traffic and consumption of cloud-hosted resources, identify potential anomalies, and resolve them before they cause unrepairable damages.  

Benefits of Cloud Monitoring  

Unified Dashboard: Monitoring tools provide one unified dashboard from which the IT admin team can gain insights into the entire organization and monitor every activity, transaction, and communication across the network. It makes it easy to monitor and ensure a smooth user experience and avoid any potential damage.  

Security: One of the primary reasons to monitor the activities on the cloud is to secure the cloud-hosted infrastructure. With sensitive information and customer data, avoiding data breaches and maintaining customers’ confidence is necessary. Monitoring the cloud can make organizations achieve that.  

Performance: With the help of monitoring, the cloud activities not only help maintain the infrastructure’s health but also help monitor base-level transactions and metrics.  

Scalability: Monitoring the cloud activities help an organization grow with infrastructure. The on-demand facility enables enterprises to add new servers or workstations independently.

Custom Alerts: It is critical to get alarmed, especially when something has gone wrong in the organization. The monitoring tool’s proactivity alerts the admin team about potential errors. In addition, the root cause analysis and monitoring techniques help them resolve, and thus, the organization can offer a smooth user experience and be saved from hazardous damage.  

Read: Features & Benefits of Cloud Monitoring  

Cloud services are everyone’s go-to solution for IT organizations. Now, what comes next is to monitor the activities to ensure all the activities are taking place ideally and the enterprise is up and running all the time. Following some cloud monitoring best practices can help you leverage better and keep things up and on point.  

AIOps powered by Motadata, one intelligent and advanced monitoring tool, can help organizations monitor their cloud activities and deployments. The next generation AIOps uses technologies like Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning to forecast potential errors and suggest changes to optimize the applications.  

Gain full visibility into your cloud resources with a powerful cloud monitoring solution; sign up for a 30-day free trial today.