As convenient as it is for development teams to work on cloud and hybrid cloud environments, complexity makes its way into the infrastructure through siloed components and interdependent layers of IT. Monitoring such infrastructure to the core helps the administrators get a clear view of their cloud and enhances cloud performance and IT efficiency.
What is cloud monitoring?
Cloud monitoring is the scrutiny of performance, availability, and security of cloud-based infrastructure, applications, and services in real time. It involves using dedicated tools to collect and analyze real-time data on resource usage, application performance, and potential security threats. Monitoring the cloud environment helps admins ensure that cloud environments operate efficiently by identifying and resolving issues promptly, and aids in optimizing costs and resource allocation.
Why get a dedicated tool to monitor cloud environments?
Cloud monitoring is a mandatory practice for any enterprise that is migrating to the cloud or adapting hybrid cloud technology. It takes a lot of time and expense to monitor an entire cloud ecosystem manually without any dedicated tool in hand, let alone a hybrid cloud. A cloud performance monitoring tool would help the IT team monitor the cloud to the last detail and analyze performance accurately.
How can a cloud performance monitoring tool make an admin's job easy?
A cloud performance monitoring tool can assist the admin team in numerous ways to improve cloud performance and enhance user experience. Here are a few of the benefits cloud monitoring tools can bring to the table:
Unified interface: While cloud services like AWS offer native monitoring interfaces, deploying a dedicated tool that supports monitoring for multiple technologies from different vendors is far more helpful for the admin teams. Such tools help administrators access and analyze performance data for every instance simultaneously from a centralized environment, enhancing management and enhancing operational efficiency.
Core-level visibility: A robust monitoring tool that can dive deep into the IT infrastructure brings even the smallest details into clear view for administrators. It uncovers hidden issues within the ecosystem—often referred to as "unknown unknowns"—which enhances observability. This deeper insight enables the IT team to make well-informed decisions and respond proactively to potential challenges.
Proactive management: Monitoring key performance metrics in real time and analyzing performance trends keep admins updated on the behavior of the cloud environment. This helps the IT team to identify potential threats and downtime beforehand, allowing them to take precautionary actions to avoid such interruptions to performance and availability of the cloud.
Cost control: Cloud services like AWS can be expensive. By monitoring resource usage patterns and correlating them with resource allocation with the help of a tool, IT teams can plan and reduce unnecessary spending and ensure cost-effectiveness.
Adaptable to dynamic infrastructure: Cloud infrastructures are designed for scalability, and performance monitoring tools help admins manage this effectively. The tools can trigger automated scaling actions based on predefined thresholds or performance patterns to accommodate fluctuating workloads.
Seamless user experience: Visibility into the cloud helps admins ensure a seamless and hassle-free user experience. This includes reducing response times, boosting cloud availability, improving application reliability, and delivering consistent performance to end-users.
How to get the most out of a cloud monitoring tool?
No matter how efficient of a performance monitoring tool you employ for your cloud infrastructure, you should know how to yield it. Here is a little head start on how to get the best performance out of your cloud with a monitoring tool.
Find a tool that doesn't need you memorizing command lines. CLI fits a limited cloud environment. Make sure the monitoring tool you choose is adaptable and extensible to meet your demands if you want it to handle an expanding cloud environment.
Make use of deep insights and visually represented analytics to identify possible bottlenecks and slowdowns in advance. Optimize and balance the load as needed.
Use code level analysis to identify and fix incorrect codes and challenging algorithms once and for all.
Administrators may view the entire infrastructure on a single screen thanks to dashboards. When optimized and sorted based on priority, dashboards can be a great medium to study and correlate metrics in order to map dependencies, which helps in planning for and improving overall cloud performance.
Classify alarms based on their level of severity and reduce alert noise. Configure adaptive thresholds for dynamic measurements to prevent false alerts. This makes it easy for the administration staff to prioritize issue resolution and act in time.
Use smart alerts to automate alert escalation based on severity. Depending on the severity of the alarm, configure response actions that need to be triggered. This takes half the workload and expense off the IT team.
Get the most out of KPI trend analyses and performance forecasting. Analyze the forecast reports and allocate resources effectively. Make well-informed decisions while planning capacity and costs.
Most importantly, find a tool that aligns with the dynamic nature and the size of your cloud architecture. Adapt a monitoring interface that would provide you with the features to monitor multiple services from different vendors. Make sure you are not involving any third party agents for integration, that they might open the doors to complexity and perplexity while monitoring numerous instances in real time.
ManageEngine's Applications Manager is one of the popular recommendations when there is a need for a cloud monitoring tool. It offers application performance monitoring and observability support for IT enterprises. All it needs is a one-time input for configuration, and one can monitor their instance at a go.
Along with cloud and hybrid cloud monitoring, the tool extends monitoring support to more than 150 technologies including VMs, ERPs, databases, load balancers web applications, web services and websites; needless of any external agents. Give the feature-rich catalogue a try by downloading a free trial and check if it suits your requirement.
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