Cloud monitoring is the process of evaluating the health of cloud-based IT infrastructures. Using cloud-monitoring tools, organizations can proactively monitor the availability, performance, and security of their cloud environments to find and fix problems before they impact the end-user experience.
Ideally, cloud monitoring works in real time alongside its on-premises and hybrid counterparts. This helps improve visibility across the entire environment, including storage, networks, and apps. Key capabilities of cloud monitoring tools include tracking the consumption and traffic of cloud-hosted resources.
Also included, and critical to cloud monitoring, are the ability to measure and visualize application and network-layer performance between hybrid cloud, private cloud, and public cloud services. These tools are important for unifying large volumes of data across distributed locations, identifying anomalies and their root causes, and predicting potential risks or production outages.
The proliferation of modular application architectures has resulted in a complex matrix of interservice communication across infrastructures and networks that enterprises do not own or control. Much of this communication traverses the internet, which has evolved into a mission-critical transport for enterprises. A lack of visibility into connectivity between users' communication across a cloud environment puts enterprises at risk of delivering poor digital experiences that adversely impact revenue, brand reputation, and employee productivity.
The cloud has many moving parts. A variety of automated tools track different areas of performance. Some tools are built right into cloud services; others are offered by third-party platforms. Either way, the best cloud-monitoring solutions include custom metrics. You should be able to monitor specific areas of the cloud stack as well as the environment as a whole.
Use APM to monitor distributed cloud-based apps end to end in a single pane of glass. Beyond basic infrastructure health metrics, APM drills down to the business transaction and code level. That way, you can understand the business impact of your applications and more quickly diagnose problems.
More than half of application-performance bottlenecks originate in the database. Using database-performance management, you can monitor the queries, availability, usage, and data integrity of the databases your cloud applications rely on. These metrics show the precise moment a database goes down so you are equipped to speed up resolution.
Virtual machines (VMs) are often scaled out in IaaS (Infrastructure-as-a-Service) solutions. Through integrations with platforms like OpenStack, a monitoring solution can track real-time metrics on users, traffic, and determine whether to add virtual capacity. Think of it as traditional infrastructure monitoring with the added benefit of managing cloud apps.
Use this tool to correlate infrastructure performance to application performance, ideally in the context of business transactions. With contextual visibility, you can troubleshoot and diagnose the root cause of server performance issues faster in live production environments. Server monitoring is also designed to introduce little overhead.
Cloud monitoring | Server monitoring | Multi-cloud monitoring
Building cloud services capable of supporting millions of requests is no small feat. EUM helps by capturing critical web and mobile app performance metrics like crashes, page-load details, and rate-of-network requests. The ideal EUM tool aggregates metrics across all transactions and automatically scales up or down to handle load changes. In addition, it should also be able to present the real-time visibility into the end user's experience of SaaS and internally hosted applications. It should also include the dependent components that comprise the service delivery chain.
More of a strategy than a type of product, unified monitoring provides complete visibility into your entire IT infrastructure, including components running in the cloud. This one-stop, vendor-neutral toolkit distills your IT infrastructure into a common view, which ops teams can use to triage issues faster.
Learn more about Cisco products and solutions related to cloud monitoring.