Cloud Monitoring

Cloud monitoring solutions must, in real-time, ingest metrics and events from cloud database, storage, virtual machines, networks and cloud-hosted monitoring systems such as Amazon CloudWatch. The solution must also be able to integrate and correlate cloud event data with data from on-prem technologies such as servers and storage and network devices to deliver a full picture of infrastructure health and to successfully troubleshoot incidents. OpsRamp is a multi-tenant SaaS platform that helps IT teams view on-prem and multi-cloud infrastructure in one place and support the digital operations lifecycle from discovery to alerts to resolution. OpsRamp supports monitoring of private cloud and virtual resources (VMware) along with AWS, Azure and Google Cloud.

Any monitoring program begins with understanding the goals and outcomes you want to achieve. Start with the high level business KPIs such as to increase customer session times on the website, and work down from there with IT metrics such as availability/uptime, latency, capacity, response time, throughput, mean time to resolution (MTTR), and so on for your key cloud-based applications and services. Monitoring the end-user experience, sometimes called digital experience management (DEM) is critical today, as is cloud spend management to avoid cloud waste and sprawl.

With hybrid infrastructure, many organizations are striving to achieve a single dashboard and/or platform to track and manage all their infrastructure regardless of whether it is in the cloud or on-premises. The cloud monitoring solution should integrate smoothly with any data center and private cloud monitoring tools for a unified view. Modern cloud monitoring tools include rich automation capabilities so that IT professionals can eliminate time spent on tedious workflows and fixes (such as adding virtual machines or storage, decommissioning underutilized instances, restarting servers after updates and correcting common, repeatable issues). Finally, modern IT organizations incorporate some form of stress testing or chaos engineering into their practices to ensure the resiliency of cloud environments under different workloads and scenarios.