Data overload from observability tools can lead to noise, burnout, and blind spots. Yes, cloud monitoring tools promise visibility. But the reality is that too much raw telemetry can actually hurt. This is especially true if you don’t have context.
Indeed, the average enterprise generates 9.6 million observability events each year. Half of all organizations send more than 10 million events on an annual basis. That’s a lot of noise. Which means it will be hard to spot actual issues.
The bottom line?
Cloud infrastructure is a complex, ephemeral beast. It scales based on user demand, and it can change shape daily. Still, developers push updates to production.
Sure, uncertainty is the enemy of security and reliability. But getting more data is only half of the solution. You also need to have contextual visibility into key components across every aspect of your product.
Cloud monitoring tools are the total answer.
Here, we’ll outline the critical features you should look for when searching for cloud monitoring tools. We’ll also offer our recommendations for the best platforms currently available on the market. From there, you can decide which tool will best fit your needs.
Key Takeaways
- Contextual visibility is just as important as raw data. The best cloud monitoring tools do more than just collect telemetry. They filter, correlate, and prioritize events. So your engineering teams can act on what actually matters.
- Scalability and flexibility have to be non-negotiables for your company. As cloud environments expand across multiple platforms and services, you’ll want monitoring solutions that will adapt without making things more complex.
- Automation cuts down on both risk and workload. Platforms like DuploCloud reveal how automated monitoring is the answer to infrastructure management. You can cut down on noise and strengthen your compliance and security commitments.
What to Look for in Cloud Monitoring Tools
The ultimate goal of any cloud monitoring tool is to allow development teams to optimize application performance. It should also let you improve your security stance and keep your CI/CD pipelines humming along. While each tool’s included features will, of course, vary, the very best have a few features in common:
- Real-time monitoring: Obviously, any insight into your cloud infrastructure is good. But getting real-time performance monitoring and updates on activity lets you make instant, actionable decisions based on the data. For example, say you’re gathering logs on network bandwidth, CPU usage, and data throughput. This can tell you whether certain aspects of your cloud-based infrastructure are under heavy strain. When you have this info, you can spin up additional instances to improve your load-balancing cloud performance.
- Observability into the entire infrastructure: Modern applications operate in a variety of compute environments. These include public cloud, private cloud, on-premises, or a hybrid cloud. The best multi-cloud monitoring tools combine insight into all of these platforms into a single pane of glass. This provides a holistic glimpse into the health and security of your product.
- Robust alert systems: If you don’t know there’s an issue with your infrastructure, you won’t be able to act when you need to. You won’t be able to look at your cloud application monitoring tools around the clock. So your system needs to be able to alert you whenever performance hits critical thresholds. It should also use a variety of systems, like SMS text, email, and even phone calls. That way, you’ll be sure to get the update.
- Scalability: Infrastructure ebbs and flows with usage. This is especially true if you’re relying on Kubernetes to serve a fluctuating audience of global users. Cloud infrastructure monitoring tools should scale with that usage. They can automatically offer insight into new workloads and clusters as they’re added.
- Flexibility: Every project’s needs are different. What you need to know is that your workflow is covered. And it shouldn’t matter which cloud platform or tools you use to keep applications running. Look for cloud server monitoring tools that provide an array of integrations and configuration options. And if you’re starting from scratch, look for tools to monitor infrastructure before and after your migration.
Learn more about how DevOps automations can lead to cloud applications that deploy up to 10x faster while maintaining cloud security and compliance.
The Best Cloud Monitoring Tools
DuploCloud
What it is: DuploCloud is DevOps Automation software that simplifies crucial features. These include infrastructure provisioning, security, compliance, and diagnostics. And we streamline it all into a single, easy-to-use platform.
Cloud platforms covered: DuploCloud covers every major cloud provider, including Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and Amazon Web Services.
Features:
- State-of-the-art encryption and security protocols keep data safe from malicious actors.
- Advanced threat detection gives organizations the information they need. Then, they can respond to suspicious activity, performance spikes, or other malicious actions.
- Continuous monitoring and alerts offer instant and constant feedback on:
- infrastructure performance
- compliance policies
- potential misconfigurations
- Manages several key DevOps processes in addition to monitoring. This makes it a vital out-of-the-box solution for cloud-native application development.
- Automation-forward platform creates more streamlined development processes and improves security. It also delivers more informative reports.
- Integration with over 500 cloud services makes it highly adaptable to your business needs.
Amazon CloudWatch
What it is: Amazon CloudWatch is AWS’s built-in cloud monitoring tool. AWS monitoring collects data across a wide range of AWS services to provide detailed threat detection and response capabilities.
Cloud platforms covered: CloudWatch operates within the AWS suite of cloud services.
Features:
- Monitors data for performance issues across all AWS workloads. It alerts you when performance hits internal thresholds.
- Robust metrics logs allow you to dig deeper into infrastructure performance roadblocks to discover the root cause.
- Automatically scales operations to optimize performance with user-set actions.
- Integrates with over 70 AWS services to improve your ability to monitor performance across your entire infrastructure.
- Pay-as-you-go pricing is in line with other AWS offerings.
Azure Monitor
What it is: Azure Monitor is Microsoft’s cloud monitoring solution for Azure Cloud workflows.
Cloud platforms covered: Azure monitoring captures data within applications, networks, and infrastructure running on Microsoft Azure.
Features:
- Curated insights show you all the vital information at a glance and can be customized based on personal preference or organizational needs.
- Data visualization tables offer deep yet digestible views into infrastructure performance. They’re instantly accessible from Monitor’s portal.
- Built-in security monitoring and compliance checks, with over 100 certifications across dozens of industries.
- Flexible pricing scales with the amount of information Monitoring ingests. Capacity reservation options allow organizations to save money on upfront purchases.
Google Cloud Observability
What it is: Google Cloud Observability is a collection of cloud monitoring services. Google Cloud Operations is designed to log and respond to performance issues and threats discovered within applications running on its platform.
Cloud platforms covered: Observability with Google Cloud monitoring is built for applications and infrastructure running on Google Cloud environments. It can also support a hybrid or a multi-cloud environment.
Features:
- Choose your dashboard, with Ops Agent for VMs or Managed Service for Prometheus available. This depends on whether your focus is on virtual machines or Kubernetes orchestration.
- Create service-level objectives from automated parameters or define them yourself. Google can automatically respond to performance or data usage fluctuations.
- Integrates with a variety of Google Cloud products and services.
- Free trial available, with flexible pricing based on the volume of data ingested.
DataDog
What it is: DataDog offers monitoring as a cloud service. It’s ideal for enterprise customers with sizable budgets, with full visibility into applications, infrastructure, and logs in real-time.
Cloud platforms covered: DataDog supports multiple cloud platforms. This includes AWS, Azure, Google Cloud Platform, and more. It provides integration and monitoring across hybrid and multi-cloud environments.
Features:
- Unified Monitoring: DataDog integrates data from servers, databases, tools, and services to provide a single view for monitoring and alerting.
- Advanced Data Analytics: Utilizing machine learning capabilities, DataDog allows users to gain deep insights into performance metrics, trends, and anomalies.
- Custom Dashboards: Highly customizable dashboards enable users to visualize metrics, logs, and traces in real-time, tailored to specific needs and preferences.
- Collaboration Tools: Features such as team dashboards, shared views, and real-time alerts facilitate collaboration and efficient incident response.
Grafana
What it is: Grafana is an open-source cloud observability platform that offers end-to-end solutions for various cloud platforms.
Cloud platforms covered: Grafana is compatible with every single major cloud environment.
Features:
- Very flexible, pulling data sources from native AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud sources, as well as other platforms like Prometheus, Cloudflare, and much more.
- Gain observability into Kubernetes infrastructure, application performance, and usability on the front end to optimize performance throughout your product.
- Explore detailed data visualization, view logs, analyze metrics, and more within a single platform.
- Free accounts are an easy way to get started. And, depending on your use case, pay-as-you-go plans and bundles are available.
Observe and Automate With DuploCloud
In the end, you can’t lose with DuploCloud. We’re a cloud infrastructure monitoring tool. And because we don’t just offer unparalleled visibility into the health and performance of your product’s cloud infrastructure. We’ll also help you provision and maintain that infrastructure faster and more reliably than if you were to build it by hand.
Our DevOps Automation Platform uses an intelligent rules-based engine to:
- Adjust configurations based on demand.
- Manage complex cloud infrastructure.
- Alert you to misalignments with popular security and compliance control sets. These can include PCI DSS, SOC 2, and HIPAA.
Want to find out how to speed up cloud deployment times by a factor of ten?
Contact us today for a live 30-minute demo.
FAQs
What’s the difference between cloud monitoring and observability?
Cloud monitoring is tracking metrics, logs, and events. The purpose is to identify issues in real time. Observability, in contrast, goes deeper. It’s about understanding why something is happening by correlating your data across your systems. It finds root causes and provides context.
How do I choose the right cloud monitoring tool for my team?
You can start by evaluating your infrastructure setup. This could be single-cloud, multi-cloud, or a hybrid. Then, prioritize features like scalability, automation, and integrations. You’ll also want contextual alerts. Finally, make sure to factor in cloud costs, ease of use, and security certifications.
Why do teams struggle with “data noise” in monitoring?
Most organizations generate millions of observability events every year. If you don’t have the right filters and you’re not correlating data, your teams will be overwhelmed by alerts. This leads to burnout and missed deadlines. The right tool will reduce all that noise by highlighting the data that is the most actionable.
Can cloud monitoring tools help with compliance and security?
Yes! Many top tools like DuploCloud include built-in compliance checks and advanced threat detection. This makes it easy for you to align with frameworks like SOC 2, PCI DSS, and HIPAA. And you can still cut back on your manual auditing overhead.
