6 Cloud Monitoring and Management Tools to Consider

Cloud Monitoring and Management Tools – Server, network and application issues are common to almost all organizations irrespective of whether they use a on-premise instances or cloud servers. As these issues crop up, they need to act fast as delay in any action can impact business in a significant way. This necessitates constant monitoring and management of your infrastructure, environment and applications.

The following are six popular Cloud Monitoring and Management Tools and services available in the market for monitoring and managing your cloud applications and environments.

Top 6 Popular Cloud Monitoring and Management Tools to consider:

1. Amazon Cloudwatch

Amazon Cloudwatch is a cloud monitoring and management platform that helps programmers, system operators, and IT managers gain an understanding into their cloud system’s overall health and performance. The service offers you clearer and actionable insights into the utilization of resources, cloud infrastructure’s health, and change in performance across your cloud system. You can use this information to improve your environment and application’s performance.

The service allows you to view graphs and statistics, set alarms, download logs and react to changes in resources or performance.

Advantages

• You can obtain a unified view of all your AWS assets on a single platform
• You can obtain cross visibility across infrastructure, applications and services
• No additional software needs to be installed
• The dashboards are configurable making it possible for you to define specific actions based on predefined events
• It assimilates easily with further AWS products
• You can pay only for what you use

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2. Azure Monitor

Azure Monitor is a platform capability offered by Microsoft Azure for the collection, analysis and monitoring of logs and metrics from a number of Azure resources. It is a managed service that helps in working with large scale telemetry data. It has the capability to create alerting and automated responses based on metric thresholds and other calculations.

The platform maximizes the performance and availability of your web applications by providing a comprehensive solution for collecting, analyzing, and acting on a wide range of telemetry data from your cloud and on-premise environments. 

Advantages

• It helps users understand how applications are performing and proactively identifies issues affecting them and the resources they depend on
• Provides valuable insights which are visual and easy to understand
• Helps respond to critical situations by creating alerts
• Using its auto-scale feature, users can specify a minimum and maximum number of instances and the logic for when to increase or decrease resources
• Integrated with Power BI- Power BI is a business analytics service that provides interactive visualizations across a variety of data sources and is an effective means of making data available to others within and outside your organization
• Cloud monitoring tools are built-in and easy to set up
• The service provides a complete view into the utilization, performance and health of your applications, infrastructure and the Azure environment as a whole
• Being a Cloud SaaS solution, no software downloads are required

3. Nagios

Originally called NetSaint, Nagios is an open source monitoring tool used for continuous monitoring. The tool monitors systems, infrastructure, networks, applications and business processes in a DevOps setup. Though it was originally designed to run on Linux systems, it can monitor devices running on Unix and Windows OSes as well. Nagios can run periodic checks on disk usage, memory usage, number of currently running processes, microprocessor load and log files. The tool can also monitor services such as HTTP, SMTP, POP3, FTP, SSH and other network protocols. While active checks are initiated by Nagios, passive checks are initiated by external applications that are connected to Nagios. 

Advantages

• Increased server, services, and application availability
• Fast detection of network outages
• Fast detection of cloud computing environment problems

4. Zabbix

Zabbix is another open source infrastructure monitoring tool that can be used for diverse IT components including servers, networks, virtual machines and cloud services. The tool offers several monitoring metrics including CPU load, network utilization and consumption of disk space. Zabbix can be deployed for both agentless and agent-based monitoring. For agent-based monitoring, agents are deployed on IT components. The agent collects data on the performance and reports it back to the centralized Zabbix management server, which can be visually presented on the Zabbix GUI. Agentless monitoring achieves this by using existing resources in a system or device.   

Advantages

• Customizable dashboard with a crisp user interface
• Allows changing configurations through a web based interface
• Zabbix has its own premium graphs available out-of-the-box
• Convenient to deploy
• Alerts and notifications are available out of the box

5. Prometheus

Prometheus was developed by SoundCloud starting in 2012, when the company discovered that their existing metrics and monitoring solutions were not sufficient for their needs. Right now, it is an open-source software tool used for event monitoring and alerting. It is written in Go and licensed under the Apache 2 License.

Advantages

• Consists of a multi-dimensional data model, operational simplicity, scalable data collection, and a powerful query language, all in a single tool
• It has become the mainstream, open source monitoring tool of choice for those that lean heavily on containers and microservices.

6. Stackdriver Cloud Monitoring

It is a full-time monitoring platform powered by Google. Stackdriver’s cloud monitor collects metrics, events, and metadata from Google Cloud Platform, Amazon Web Services (AWS), hosted uptime probes, and application instrumentation.

Advantages

• Workspaces are present which collects metrics from software running in the Virtual Machine instances.
• The platform measures the health of cloud resources and applications by providing visibility into metrics such as CPU usage, disk I/O, memory, network traffic and uptime
• Heps to monitor highly dynamic container environments

Cloud Monitoring Tools – Conclusion

In the cloud, it is absolutely essential to monitor your actual applications and not only your physical servers. Each option presented above has is slightly different with different benefits. Consider yours and your business’s specific needs. Try out the free trial versions and experiment with these programs.

These systems are mostly easy to install, so you can quickly test them to see if the solution is perfect for you. Alternatively, you can also partner with a good managed service partner who can provide you the best solution that suits your business needs.

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