Cloud computing is a wise investment for any company, regardless of size. Usually reasonably priced, cloud technology brings many advantages and helps smaller businesses compete with their larger counterparts.
However, like any other investment, you must protect it and ensure it meets your expectations, does the job you want, and brings it in at a reasonable price. For this, you need cloud monitoring and management tools.
This article highlights some of this year’s best cloud monitoring software. We will also discuss cloud monitoring tools, why they’re needed, how to choose the most effective tools, and best practices. Finally, we share an online cloud computing bootcamp to help professionals boost their skills through practical experience with various cloud management tools
Let’s begin with a definition.
What Is Cloud Monitoring?
Cloud monitoring is a series of practices and strategies that help ensure cloud services and applications’ availability, performance, and security. Customers use monitoring to optimize their cloud infrastructure, identify service outages, and spot vulnerabilities or threats. There are three main categories of monitoring:
- Cost monitoring. Cloud monitoring ensures that resources are used efficiently and costs are optimized. This can help clients identify forgotten or unused resources and underutilized services.
- Performance monitoring. This monitoring ensures that resources and services stay accessible and performances meet user expectations and workload requirements. This category helps identify bottlenecks and insufficient resources, optimize configurations, and detect application errors.
- Security monitoring. This category ensures that access to data, accounts, and applications is secured and infrastructure and applications remain current. This category helps identify cyber threats, ensure compliance standards, and track malicious activity.
Also Read: Virtualization in Cloud Computing: Everything You Need to Know
Why Do You Need Cloud Monitoring?
In IT, engineers monitor everything that directly or indirectly affects success, whether low-level performance metrics like server-side logs or high-level performance indicators such as CPU utilization. Here’s why you need cloud monitoring:
- Data is distributed across many locations. Cloud monitoring ensures that your data is always secure, available, and accessible to authorized people at the appropriate time. This feature is essential for worldwide companies with data flowing across many distributed, multi-cloud environments.
- Breaches are a sad fact of life. Cloud assets draw the most cyberattacks. Cloud monitoring can help avoid such issues by letting IT engineers pinpoint suspicious activity and immediately act.
- Compliance isn’t voluntary: Cloud technology is found in every sector of modern life (e.g., business, entertainment, finance, government, healthcare). Thanks to proper cloud monitoring, organizations can always ensure they comply with all regulations and thus avoid penalties.
The Top Cloud Monitoring Tools
Amazon Cloudwatch. Amazon CloudWatch monitors and manages systems, providing valuable, timely insights into optimizing resource utilization, monitoring applications, understanding and responding to system-wide performance changes, and creating a unified view of operational wellness.
- Features:
- All information is available on a single platform.
- Offers the most comprehensive and in-depth knowledge regarding AWS Resources.
- Cross-application, infrastructure, and service visibility.
- Pros:
- Compatible with AWS products.
- Troubleshoots difficulties and automates operations to improve apps.
- Uses logs, metrics, and events to assemble data.
- Cons:
- Dashboard customizing ability needs work.
- Alerts and alarms must be manually constructed.
- Doesn’t allow alarms and alert information transferring.
- Pricing: Has a free tier; paid tiers are varied, and pay as you go.
Middleware. Middleware is a full-stack monitoring platform that lets developers use AI to monitor their cloud infrastructure.
- Features:
- Over 100 integrations.
- Single unified dashboard tracks and monitors all critical parameters (e.g., metrics, logs, and traces) in one place.
- Real-time anomaly detection.
- Pros:
- Scalability, reliability, flexibility, and speed.
- Provides a unified view of all metrics, allowing correlation of various aspects of application performance at any given time.
- Supplies real-time data aggregation, collection, storage, and analysis across all infrastructure components, including applications, servers, and databases.
- Cons:
- Premium and enterprise-level pricing packages with extensive feature roll-out have yet to be launched.
- Pricing: Varies widely, and there’s a free level. Consult site.
Also Read: Understanding Cloud Access Security Brokers: Safeguarding the Cloud Frontier
PingSafe. PingSafe’s a full-stack Cloud-Native Application Protection Platform (CNAPP) created with cloud security and posture management in mind. It lets users monitor, assess, and improve cloud infrastructure performance, collecting observability data and enhancing organizational visibility.
- Features:
- Seamless integrations with JIRA, Slack, PagerDuty, and more.
- Offers CI/CD integration and multi-tenancy support.
- Detects over 800+ secret types and supports over 20 industry security regulations and standards.
- Pros:
- Offers performance, scalability, reliability, and speed.
- Easily improves application availability, performance, and real-time security analytics.
- Collects data and analyzes cloud metrics, including infrastructure components, databases, services, and IT systems.
- Cons:
- Additional premium features haven’t been released.
- Pricing:
- Pay-as-you-use pricing model with customizable rates.
Dynatrace. Dynatrace is a full-stack observability solution featuring a user-friendly interface that monitors cloud apps, infrastructure, and logs. Once deployed, this tool provides a single operating agent managed by the Dynatrace UI, making monitoring enjoyable and easy to use.
- Features:
- Monitor actual and simulated users.
- Diagnostic tools make memory dumps, exceptions, CPU analysis, and top database and web queries possible.
- Integrates with Docker, Kubernetes, and OpenShift.
- Pros:
- Intuitive, powerful top-to-bottom view of the entire stack.
- Straightforward agent installation with user interface (UI) help for new users.
- Monitor cloud services logs and apps with a sophisticated integration library.
- Cons:
- The serverless offering is restricted compared to other serverless alternatives on the market.
- Options may initially seem intimidating.
- Business metrics analysis is restricted.
- Pricing:
- Pricing is based on features; pricing information becomes available once you join.
Also Read: What is Cloud Migration? Definition, Types, Process, and More
New Relic. New Relic is among the most recently introduced cloud monitoring tools suitable for cloud infrastructure monitoring. This tool provides help in real-time knowledge of cloud apps and cloud servers. It also helps database performance monitoring by performing SQL queries.
- Features:
- Customizable dashboards.
- Set your cautions and alerts.
- View error rates, sluggish transactions, website load times, and a running server list in one location.
- Pros:
- Excellent information granularity.
- Easy to install and adapt.
- Use multiple tools to build your alert metrics.
- Cons:
- The mobile application needs work.
- Initial metrics exposure may seem confusing.
- Pricing:
- It depends on features based on monthly and annual compute units or host-based pricing.
AppDynamics. AppDynamics provides cloud-based network monitoring solutions in software-as-a-service and on-premise approaches, allowing customers to examine the whole stack performance that powers the services.
- Features:
- Cloud infrastructure monitoring offers insights into network components, servers, and databases, providing information on usage, status, and flow between each part.
- End-user monitoring uses real-time, synthetic, and Internet of Things (IoT) monitoring on smartphones and browsers.
- Business-oriented dashboards and features visualize and analyze relationships between performance and business-related data.
- Pros:
- Offers very specific environmental information.
- Provides sophisticated language features like automated leak detection and JVM-based stack object instance tracking.
- All connections between system components, business activities, environment aspects, and endpoint response times are visible.
- Cons:
- Agent must be manually downloaded and initiated during installation. There’s no online installation and configuration function.
- The free plan does not include some fundamental data (e.g., system CPU, memory, and network consumption).
- Pricing is considered complicated, costly, and opaque.
- Pricing:
- There’s a 15-day free trial. Multiple pricing levels range from $6/month to $95/month per CPU core.
LogicMonitor. LogicMonitor offers a quick, easy way to set up a server monitoring architecture. Its major standout feature is the automatic discovery capability, which employs several protocols to locate and monitor devices and applications quickly.
- Features:
- It uses SNMP, jFlow, NetFlow, sFlow, WMI, NBAR2, and IPFIX for monitoring.
- It provides a comprehensive picture of your network, making browsing and diagnosing problems easy.
- Offers intelligent alerts, root cause analysis, and network topology mapping.
- Pros:
- A dashboard can be personalized and preserved.
- Cloud-based application performance monitoring.
- Can monitor assets in hybrid cloud settings.
- Cons:
- Reporting needs to be tweaked and improved.
- Pricing:
- Contact vendor.
Also Read: What is Cloud-Native? Exploring Applications, Architecture, and Benefits
Three Open-Source Cloud Monitoring Tools
Consider these three open-source cloud management tools if your organization is on a tight budget.
LibreNMS. LibreNMS is an auto-discovering PHP/MySQL/SNMP network monitoring system supporting hardware and operating systems like Cisco, Linux, FreeBSD, and more. Its main features include:
- Customizable alerting system
- Dedicated API that lets users manage, graph, and retrieve data
- Unique billing system that generates bills for ports on the user’s network based on usage
Pandora FMS. Pandora FMS is a comprehensive cloud monitoring solution that helps users monitor applications, distributed environments, servers, networks, UX, and more.
Zabbix. Zabbix is a well-used cloud monitoring tool that was launched in 2001. It can employ agents that collect cloud-monitoring data, which helps monitor cloud-based VMs. Zabbix also easily interfaces with Amazon CloudWatch to directly obtain metrics from cloud environments.
How to Select the Best Cloud Monitoring Tools
Selecting the correct cloud monitoring tool can mean keeping ahead of issues or always playing catch-up. This involves choosing a tool that fits your organization’s needs, aligns with the company’s current cloud monitoring strategy, and provides the right balance of ease of use, features, and scalability.
The best cloud management tools provide a complete overview of the cloud environment, improve decision-making, boost operational efficiency, and save money in the long run. Choose tools that best suit your company’s unique needs, factoring in budgets, ease of use, scalability, and third-party tool integration.
Look for these vital features when shopping for your next cloud monitoring tool:
- Alerting and reporting. A good tool provides real-time alerts based on set conditions and should offer you automated, customizable reports for important insights into the system’s health and possible issues.
- Cost management. Certain cloud monitoring tools have features to help track cloud spending, even providing recommendations for cost savings or alerts regarding potential cost overruns.
- Customer support and community. Cloud management tools that offer robust customer support, regular updates, and a thriving user community can give your organization valuable assistance and insights and share best practices.
- Monitoring comprehensiveness. Look for cloud management tools that offer a comprehensive, real-time view of the entire cloud infrastructure, including databases, applications, servers, and network performance.
- Integration and compatibility. Your cloud monitoring tools should be compatible with the company’s cloud platforms and seamlessly integrate with other systems in the organization.
- Scalability and flexibility. As the business grows, cloud monitoring tools must scale and adjust to the organization’s evolving needs without experiencing performance degradation. This feature is especially important if you have a multi-cloud environment or hybrid cloud infrastructure.
- Security features. Pick a tool that monitors for security threats and can integrate with existing on-site security information and event management (SIEM) systems.
- User-friendly interfaces. The software’s interface should be simple to navigate, featuring visual data representations and customizable views that facilitate fast decision-making.
And speaking of best practices…
Also Read: What Is Cloud Cost Optimization, and How to Do It?
Cloud Monitoring Best Practices
Moving to a hybrid or multi-cloud environment offers many advantages for scaling enterprises, especially when creating a more agile operation. Follow these basic cloud monitoring best practices to get the most benefit out of your cloud-based deployments.
- Increase automation. Cloud monitoring automation gives organizations a noticeable increase in operational efficiency driven by intelligence and predictive golden signals. Organizations enjoy better visibility and control over their infrastructure stack via monitoring solutions deployed in private, public, and hybrid cloud environments. This additional transparency lets teams optimize all areas of their organization, including application availability, resource management, website performance, and more.
- Monitor end-user experiences. Although it’s crucial to create better internal efficiencies around process management, every business’s primary goal should be to monitor and address all levels of user experiences. Gathering insights on improving application performance and user availability can significantly impact the bottom line and overall sustainability of products and services. There are two ways organizations can deploy digital experience monitoring:
- Synthetic monitoring. Also called active monitoring, synthetic monitoring offers a simulated end-user viewpoint to give feedback on application performance under different conditions. This process allows you to benchmark and baseline your connected infrastructure and how it reacts to heavy workloads and complex processes before applications are deployed. This process helps maximize overall reliability and availability.
- Real user monitoring (RUM). Real user monitoring employs “real” user metrics to better understand the overall digital experience. RUM collects all user activities in real time. It follows the user’s journey while measuring how application performance metrics, backend services, server load times, and other key performance indicators are behaving.
Synthetic and real user monitoring in complex infrastructures and hybrid cloud deployments work together to give complete visibility into the digital experience. This includes providing detailed network, back—and front-end performance analyses, and deep user insights to help organizations isolate and address critical issues.
- Move to a unified platform. Balancing on-premises and cloud-based system needs can be a struggle that leads to a lack of communication, inefficiencies, and service instability. If you move all infrastructure aspects to one unified monitoring platform, you can efficiently centralize all your KPI management into one place, with complete visibility into performance optimization.
Expand Your Cloud Computing Skills
If you’re interested in improving your cloud computing skills, consider this post graduate program in cloud computing. This 32-week online bootcamp teaches you the latest in cloud computing and DevOps tools, frameworks, and best practices. You’ll also get hands-on experience with cloud management tools.
Glassdoor.com shows that cloud computing professionals may earn a yearly average salary of $97,731. If you’re looking for a career change or want to upskill for your current position, check out this highly effective online course.
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