Expand observability across your entire cloud infrastructure with these tools
Cloud infrastructure is a complex, ephemeral beast. It scales based on user demand and often changes shape daily as developers push updates to production. Uncertainty is the enemy of security and reliability, but getting more data is only half the equation. You need contextual visibility into key components across every aspect of your product. Cloud monitoring tools are the answer.
Here, we’ll outline the critical features you should look for when searching for cloud monitoring tools and offer our recommendations for the best platforms currently available on the market.
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, improve their security stance, and keep CI/CD pipelines humming along. While each tool’s included features vary, the best often have a few features in common.
- Real-time monitoring: While any insight into your cloud infrastructure is good, getting real-time updates on performance and activity will allow you to make instant, actionable decisions based on the data available. For example, gathering logs on network bandwidth, CPU usage, and data throughput can tell you whether certain aspects of your cloud-based infrastructure are under heavy strain, allowing you to spin up additional instances to improve load-balancing performance.
- Observability into the entire infrastructure: Modern applications operate in a variety of compute environments, such as public cloud, private cloud, on premises, or some combination of these. The best multi cloud monitoring tools combine insight into all of these platforms into a single pane of glass that 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, to maximize coverage.
- Scalability: Infrastructure ebbs and flows with usage, especially if you’re relying on Kubernetes to serve a fluctuating audience of global users. Cloud infrastructure monitoring tools should scale with that usage, automatically offering insight into new workloads and clusters as they’re added.
- Flexibility: Every project’s needs are different. You need to know that your workflow is covered, regardless of 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 which deploy up to 10x faster while maintaining security and compliance.
The Best Cloud Monitoring Tools
DuploCloud
What it is: DuploCloud is DevOps Automation software that streamlines and simplifies crucial features — such as infrastructure provisioning, security, compliance, and diagnostics — into a single, easy-to-use platform.
Cloud platforms covered: DuploCloud covers all major cloud providers, 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 to respond to suspicious activity, performance spikes, or other malicious actions.
- Continuous monitoring and alerts offer instant and constant feedback on infrastructure performance, compliance policies, and potential misconfigurations.
- Manages several key DevOps processes in addition to monitoring, making it a vital out-of-the-box solution for cloud-native application development.
- Automation-forward platform creates more streamlined development processes, improves security, and 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’ built-in cloud monitoring tool. It 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 and 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: Monitor 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 and are instantly accessible from Monitor’s portal.
- Built-in security and compliance checks, with over 100 certifications across dozens of industries.
- Flexible pricing scales with the amount of information Monitor ingests, while 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 designed to log and respond to performance issues and threats discovered within applications running on its platform.
Cloud platforms covered: Observability is built for applications and infrastructure running on Google Cloud environments. It also supports hybrid and multi cloud environments.
Features:
- Choose your dashboard, with Ops Agent for VMs or Managed Service for Prometheus available, depending on whether your focus is on virtual machines or Kubernetes orchestration.
- Create service-level objectives from automated parameters or define them yourself so 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 cloud monitoring as a service ideal for enterprise customers with sizeable budgets, with full visibility into applications, infrastructure, and logs in real-time.
Cloud platforms covered: DataDog supports multiple cloud platforms, including AWS, Azure, Google Cloud Platform, and more, providing 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 all major cloud environments.
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
DuploCloud doesn’t just offer unparalleled visibility into the health and performance of your product’s cloud infrastructure — it’ll 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, and alert you to misalignments with popular security and compliance control sets like 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.
