What Is Cloud Monitoring? Definition, Uses, and Benefits

One of the greater innovations of the modern century has been the introduction of the enterprise cloud system. The digital age ushered in a surplus of data that needed to be adequately stored, secured, and managed by organizations. Cloud computing presents a safe, scalable, and affordable option to house data more efficiently. According to Statista, the global cloud-managed services market size is anticipated to reach over US$ 164.0 billion by the end of 2027. However, cloud-based infrastructure can be complex, and modern cloud networks often cover a large number of functions. This can become a challenge for many businesses that need to have full visibility and control over their cloud-based infrastructure. In this blog article, we explore the concept of cloud monitoring, look at different cloud monitoring services, and understand the cloud monitoring tools available. We also touch on the benefits of cloud monitoring solutions and how cloud security monitoring can protect data. Then we list some of the cloud monitoring best practices to keep in mind for an improved system. First, let’s try to get a better definition of cloud monitoring.

What Is Cloud Monitoring?

We can understand that cloud infrastructure can have vulnerabilities and become difficult to maintain without the right expertise. Cloud monitoring can be described as a set of manual or automated practices, solutions, and processes that allow you to assess, measure, evaluate, and manage your cloud setup more effectively. Cloud service monitoring will ensure that all cloud-based websites, servers, and networks operate optimally while providing analytical insights about potential risks, flaws, or capacity issues.

Cloud monitoring services are continuous and will consistently give an organization a transparent and thorough view of its cloud environment. This can help companies detect anomalies, predict outages, and improve security. Cloud monitoring tools offer a variety of services that are systematic and proactive to maintain a healthy cloud system.

How Does Cloud Monitoring Work?

As mentioned above, cloud monitoring is a continuous process which means that it happens in real-time to provide the latest updates as soon as possible. This ensures that any change, improvement, or prevention is done quickly and efficiently. Cloud monitoring solutions will also actively measure and visualize application and network-layer performance across hybrid, private, and public cloud services. Depending on your cloud setup and the type of cloud you have, different metrics, logs, and analytics will be used to collect information and evaluate processes. We’ll now mention a few of the different cloud monitoring tools available right now.

Cloud Monitoring Tools

Cloud monitoring tools come in all different shapes and sizes and offer different services for different cloud environments. With these monitoring tools, cloud environments can be secure, elevated, and used to glean useful insights. Whether it's evaluating cloud security managed services or analyzing other cloud-based applications, these tools can provide an almost unlimited scope of function and service. Some of the top cloud monitoring tools on the market today include:

• AWS CloudWatch – This is a tool offered by Amazon Web Services that provides cloud monitoring solutions for on-premises, AWS, and other cloud environments. AWS CloudWatch offers visualization tools, automated alarms, and a dashboard with actionable insights.
• Better Stack – With this tool, organizations can ensure a more efficient working space with redefined log management. The platform features real-time Live Tail, automated parsing, and a visual query builder. The tool is also easy to integrate, provides data encryption, and features SQL-like log queries.
• Microsoft Azure Monitor – This tool ensures analysis and response to telemetry from cloud and on-premises environments. The cloud monitoring service aggregates data across your system to provide correlations for actionable insight. It aims to optimize performance and availability while supporting diverse resources and custom sources through its APIs.
• Google Cloud Operations – Previously called Stackdriver, this tool provides integrated monitoring, logging, and tracing across systems on the Google Cloud platform. With real-time logging and analytics, the tool offers combined monitoring and troubleshooting to enhance performance and prevent downtime.
• Datadog – The Datadog tool uses a Software-as-a-Service platform that features Internet of Things add-ons, custom metrics, and full-stack observability and monitoring. Its tag-based analytics and machine learning alert tools provide elevated risk notifications and troubleshooting to diagnose issues faster.

Types of Cloud Monitoring

Cloud monitoring solutions are made up of different services that each have a specific purpose. This means that a company might only need a certain type of cloud monitoring to ensure a healthy cloud environment. These are some of the most common types of cloud monitoring systems used:

• Website Monitoring – This is a form of monitoring that tracks the traffic, user stats, processes, availability, security, and resource usage of cloud-hosted websites.
• Database Monitoring – Using this, companies can ensure that database queries, processes, and more are performed optimally. It ensures review availability, resource consumption, and data integrity. It can also monitor connections to show real-time usage data. Access requests can also be tracked as well to improve response times.
• Virtual Machine (VM) Monitoring – With VM monitoring, users can observe VM performance, traffic, users, and capacity. This service is usually scaled out as a virtual server that hosts several virtual desktops and can also monitor the operating status of every VM.
• Virtual Network Monitoring – This technique creates virtualized networking components like firewalls, routers, and load balancers. This gives the organization valuable insight into the virtual network.
• Cloud Server Monitoring – Using this form of monitoring will track metrics on server performance, memory, hosts, containers, and availability to correlate it with app performance.
• Security and Compliance Monitoring – This will analyze security functions across cloud environments to notify the organization about weaknesses, vulnerabilities, or areas of non-compliance.
• Cloud Storage Monitoring – This form of monitoring will analyze and track storage resources, processes, performances, users, and databases. It can also be used to track multiple analytics simultaneously and is often used to host Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solutions.
• End-User Experience Monitoring – Companies can use this to measure and track customer satisfaction by analyzing page loads, links clicked, rate of network requests, traffic, crashes, user stats, and more.
• Application Performance Monitoring – This is a cloud monitoring service that measures app availability, performance, usage, and security to provide real-time visibility into the status and performance of applications. APM is also used to monitor distributed cloud-based apps end-to-end with a single pane of glass and is often also used to understand the business impact of applications.

Cloud monitoring solutions can work in different ways but the main goal is always to create a safer, efficient, and elevated cloud network. Let’s go through some of the main benefits of cloud monitoring services.

Benefits of Cloud Monitoring

Cloud monitoring offers a variety of benefits for organizations of different sizes. Cloud environments can often be difficult to maintain and protect with evolving cyber threats and enhanced features being introduced daily. Some of the top benefits can be listed as follows:

• Proactive Responses: With cloud monitoring solutions, you can ensure a proactive and continuous response for your cloud infrastructure. This includes an immediate incident response that will detect and notify you of any anomalies or potential issues. This allows you to react quickly and save data and systems from being damaged or breached. Automation will also help to easily find threat patterns and predictable vulnerabilities in the future.
• Remote Control: Cloud monitoring can be done remotely from anywhere and will provide full visibility on a user-friendly dashboard wherever you are.
• Maximized Efficiency: Through cloud monitoring, processes can be made to run smoother and more efficiently with optimized resource utilization. Companies can properly assess server loads, memory usage, network performance, and more to improve operational efficiency.
• Enhanced Performance: Cloud performance monitoring will ensure that systems are not lagging or crashing often. This will elevate the general performance and ensure a stable user experience.
• Scalability: A cloud monitoring service will grow as your business grows and can easily adapt to the demands of a larger infrastructure as time goes by.
• Enhanced Security: Security monitoring in cloud environments will ensure the privacy and safety of client data. Cloud monitoring can and will examine security protocols for vulnerabilities, weak spots, or places where security can be improved. This will also prevent your company from being a victim of cyber-attacks in the future.
• Informed Analytics: A basic goal of cloud monitoring is to provide actionable and real-time analytics that can improve the organization. Using cloud monitoring will give you better visibility of the network, logs, and performance metrics to make informed decisions regarding the future of the organization.
• Cost-Effectiveness: Cloud monitoring is usually a subscription-based process which makes it more affordable for those who might not always need it in place. This means that cloud monitoring is available for small to medium-sized businesses as well – which makes cloud solutions more accessible by default. Using cloud monitoring will also save you from the costs of a data breach or downtime by ensuring robust security and performance.
• Benchmarking: Benchmarking is a way to create a baseline for your organization. Cloud monitoring will help users establish their unique benchmark to compare data and performance metrics.

Cloud Monitoring for Disaster Recovery

When it comes to proper BCDR – Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery, many companies rely on their cloud environment to provide effective and secure data backups. These are some of the steps that experts have rounded up to effectively monitor and test cloud disaster recovery:

1. Assess your cloud service provider.
2. Define your recovery objectives.
3. Implement monitoring tools.
4. Conduct regular tests.
5. Update your strategy.
6. Review your strategy.

We’ll now take a look at how cloud monitoring looks across the different types of cloud environments that can be used today.

Public, Private, Hybrid Cloud, and Multi-cloud Monitoring

Cloud-based infrastructure comes in different forms to suit the needs of different organizations accordingly. Many businesses use on-premises, cloud-based, or combinations of IT infrastructure to manage their data. Cloud monitoring can help to simplify and secure these complex structures for a better user experience and enhanced visibility. We’ll now look at each cloud system and see how cloud monitoring would work for them.

• Public Cloud Monitoring: The public cloud offers very little visibility for most users, which makes it difficult to monitor. This is also why cloud monitoring is essential for any organization using a public cloud. Usually, public cloud monitoring is done through third-party cloud providers that use their specialized cloud monitoring tools.
• Private Cloud Monitoring: The main difference between public and private cloud environments boils down to privacy. While public clouds use shared hardware, private clouds offer more control by designating specific hardware to each user. When it comes to private cloud monitoring, the private cloud needs to be monitored to ensure proper workload configurations and performance. While there is better visibility for private clouds, monitoring tools can focus on specific metrics and analytics to improve infrastructure further.
• Hybrid Cloud Monitoring: The hybrid cloud offers a best-of-both-worlds situation by combining on-premises or private data centers with public cloud infrastructure. Hybrid cloud solutions often have unique challenges when it comes to cloud monitoring solutions due to data being in different places and forms. While hybrid clouds can offer enhanced security by isolating data, they can also cause visibility issues when it comes to monitoring. This is why hybrid cloud monitoring solutions often integrate with cloud platform data to bring key performance indicators forward in a seamless way.
• Multicloud Monitoring: When it comes to multicloud monitoring, organizations use a combination of several on-premises and cloud-based solutions. Naturally, this creates a more complex web of cloud networks to navigate and monitor. Management and configurations through third-party platforms that often operate under different SLAs can make security, compliance, and monitoring very difficult. Application performance management will then come into play to help maintain a consistent user experience by monitoring for the golden signals of latency, traffic, errors, and saturation. With these unified standards, multicloud monitoring can be put into place more effectively.

Cloud server monitoring tools can be used across different cloud-based structures and systems to ensure an elevated, secure, and effective network.

Cloud Monitoring Best Practices

Cloud monitoring is an essential part of any cloud-based infrastructure. Organizations need to have a cloud monitoring strategy and plan in place to ensure the best health of their cloud system. These are some of the best practices that companies can implement to ensure effective cloud monitoring:

1. Track Cloud Usage: Try to monitor your cloud usage and fees to assess where you can scale back and cut costs as needed. This will prevent you from overspending and overestimating your specific needs.
2. Identify Key Metrics: The point of cloud monitoring is to find and assess performance as its core. Your organization needs to find out which metrics are important and need to be consistently measured. This will help to sort through data-driven insights in a more productive way.
3. Report to One Platform: Use a single platform to report all data from different sources. This ensures a consolidated view that allows you to create uniform reports.
4. Maintain Trigger Rules: When dealing with data, ensure that you have a threshold that will automatically trigger the right solution if data activity goes above or beyond the rule.
5. Separate Centralized Data: Monitoring data should be stored separately from proprietary apps, however, the data should still be centralized to ensure easy access.
6. Monitor User Experience: Remember to review user experience by assessing the metrics like response time and frequency of use.
7. Test Your System: Set up simulation tests to see how your system reacts to an outage or data breach to ensure that the right protocols are in place if the real thing happens. This can also point out vulnerabilities and areas where improvement is needed.
8. Increase Automation: Automation is a major aspect of cloud monitoring and can provide real-time operational efficiency.

Cloud monitoring comes in various types and can fit different cloud environments as needed. With so many cloud computing tools and solutions available, it can be difficult for organizations to find the right cloud platform for their business. The Sangfor Cloud Platform offers a holistic approach to cloud infrastructure that is simple, elastic, and secure. With effectively managed cloud solutions that do more for your data, Sangfor can provide an authentic, safe, and evolved cloud platform that will elevate your company. For more information about Sangfor’s cloud computing or cybersecurity solutions, please contact Sangfor Technologies today.