Every business is using the cloud in one or another manner these days. Due to the many economic benefits, cloud computing is quickly becoming popular and widely used for delivering services over the Internet.
As the number of cloud users increases day by day, data centers are growing in terms of hardware resources, virtual resources, and traffic volume, thus making cloud operation and management more intricate.
If a part of your infrastructure is in the cloud, you have to monitor it.
This article will walk you through the types of monitoring functions of the cloud and the best tools to ace your business needs. But before that, it is crucial to roll your eyes at a brief introduction to cloud monitoring.
What is Cloud Monitoring?
The practice of reviewing, controlling, and managing the operational workflow within a cloud infrastructure is known as cloud monitoring. It uses manual or automated IT monitoring and management techniques to ensure that a cloud infrastructure or platform performs optimally.
Cloud monitoring is the tool for controlling and managing cloud infrastructure by collecting information from different probes, aggregating related information, filtering the unrelated/unwanted data, and analyzing or evaluating the cloud performance. It also takes control actions in the interest of performance improvement in the cloud.
How does Cloud Monitoring Work?
It is essential to ensure everything works together seamlessly to optimize the cloud performance. Monitoring of the cloud includes functions such as:
- Website monitoring: Tracking the processes, traffic, and resource utilization of websites hosted by the cloud
- Virtual machine monitoring: Monitoring the virtualization infrastructure
- Database monitoring: Monitoring processes, availability, queries, and consumption of cloud database resources
- Virtual network monitoring: Monitoring virtual network resources, connections, devices, and performance
- Cloud storage monitoring: Monitoring the storage resources and their processes provisioned to virtual machines, services, and applications
Let us dive a bit deeper into these monitoring functions.
Website monitoring
It is crucial for ensuring the availability and performance of a website. Website monitoring tools help track processes, traffic, availability, and resource utilization of cloud-hosted websites. Using these tools, enterprises can measure page loading time, monitor end-user experience, and test website performance concerning different regions or devices.
Virtual machine monitoring
Virtual machine monitoring is a technique for keeping track of virtual machines and ensuring they are available and performing well. These monitoring tools can alert administrators when a specific threshold gets hit. It shows whether users are productive or not, and helps administrators resolve issues proactively before they escalate further.
Database monitoring
To maintain consistent accessibility, database monitoring technologies are used to track and measure database performance. Using database monitoring tools, enterprises can monitor processes, perform queries and measure the availability and consumption of cloud database resources on a real-time basis. The metrics provided by the database monitoring tools are used to ensure the high availability of database infrastructure.
Virtual network monitoring
Virtual networks are used extensively by organizations to improve their networking capabilities by enabling devices to get connected virtually across different locations. Unlike physical networks, which rely on connections to connect devices, virtual networks rely on software to do so. However, unless virtual networks are monitored and configured, they can cause performance issues. Virtual network monitoring tools help gain a complete overview of your virtual networks and understand the key issues causing performance bottlenecks. With virtual network monitoring tools, enterprises can ensure efficient management of resources for improving connectivity and accessibility.
Cloud storage monitoring
Cloud storage monitoring tools help track cloud-based storage resources and interlinked processes such as databases, applications, services, and virtual machines. It is also easy to understand and predict utilization trends and plan capacity for the future.
Enterprises can analyze their storage buckets and get alerts when specific thresholds cross with cloud storage monitoring tools. With cloud storage monitoring tools, enterprises can detect performance issues proactively before they escalate and cause any downtime. These tools are also used to get insights into weekly or monthly storage-related trends useful for making informed decisions such as forecasting and planning for future growth.
Cloud Monitoring Tools
You may decide to deploy some of the following cloud monitoring tools depending on the services of the cloud provider you use or the type of cloud used:
1. Amazon CloudWatch: This is a tool for the AWS environment that provides enterprises with data and insights (required to get a holistic view of applications and services that run on the AWS server).
2. Azure Monitor: It is a cloud monitoring tool for Microsoft Azure that enables enterprises to analyze the performance and availability of applications.
3. Google Cloud Monitoring: It is a cloud monitoring solution on Google that supports the monitoring of hybrid and multi-cloud environments.
Wrapping Words
Cloud monitoring organizations use various metrics and approaches to guarantee that systems provide benchmark levels to access desired outcomes. We hope this article helped you to have a clear vision of cloud security monitoring.
