An IT Department’s Guide to Monitoring the Cloud

Monitoring the cloud is a crucial activity for any business that cares about maximizing performance and minimizing the costs of cloud computing. Monitoring is about maintaining visibility and transparency into resources currently used. This article describes the importance of cloud resource monitoring for IT departments.

Benefits of Cloud Monitoring

When IT departments deploy cloud resources, they often do so in an automated way. The problem is that not keeping track of these resources potentially leads to situations in which servers are left running that aren’t doing anything. Another bad outcome from a lack of visibility into cloud usage is that applications might need more resources than are currently in use, leading to performance issues or downtime.

Cloud monitoring tools and dashboards can keep track of storage usage, memory consumption, billing costs, and currently running servers. Correspondingly, the main benefits of cloud monitoring are:

• Cost-effective—cloud monitoring keeps your bill as low as it can be. Despite the often touted cost-efficacy of using cloud computing, it can quickly become an expensive mistake for your business if the proper monitoring is not in place or used.
• Reliability—whether you use the cloud for internal or customer-facing applications, monitoring your resources ensures reliable application performance, with the appropriate number of servers and amount of storage in place to meet application demands.
• Scalability—proper monitoring ensures you can scale your resources up or down on an as-needed basis, precisely when demand for resources dictates that you need to scale.
• Investigative—by examining log files, your cloud monitoring efforts can unearth insights into potential threats to databases, or other issues affecting your IT infrastructure.

Cloud Monitoring and Alerting

Alerts are a hugely important part of effective cloud monitoring. Typically, the way in which cloud alerting works is that when a specific threshold is reached on a resource, the monitoring tool or dashboard generates an alert.

It’s crucial to note that generating an alert doesn’t necessarily mean your IT department receives a notification about it. Ideally, you want a monitoring solution in place with as much automation as possible. What this means in practice is that you set up alerts and automated corrective actions for those alerts.

The idea is that you have a workflow in place that readily detects suboptimal performance and has automated actions to take the relevant systems or applications back into an optimal state of performance.

For some alerts, you will want explicit notification by email or text. These alerts typically relate to billing considerations. With a certain cloud budget in place, you’ll want to know exactly when and why your organization’s cloud usage exceeds that budgets

Scaling Cloud Resources

Scaling your cloud resources in an automated or manual way as needed is a huge part of the reasoning behind cloud monitoring. The beauty of the cloud is that resources are practically unlimited, and you can spin up a new server in minutes if you need to.

It’s important to remember, though, that you can also scale your resources down. Cloud providers would love your business to spin up servers, leave them running, and forget about them. This lack of monitoring leads to more money in their pockets. But it serves your business no useful purpose to pay for unused resources, which is why monitoring is so crucial.

You can generally scale in the cloud in two types of ways. Vertical scaling is when you add more computing power to resources you’ve already deployed. For example, you could add more storage or processing speed. Horizontal scaling is adding extra resources to your current cloud infrastructure.

Cloud Monitoring Tools

Most leading cloud providers give you some useful tools for tracking and monitoring your cloud use. Google‘s Cloud Monitoring suite is a good example.

Closing Thoughts

Striving for as much automation as possible is a prudent way to go about cloud monitoring. Try to get a tool that facilitates automation and gives central access to and control over your entire cloud deployment across all providers and types of cloud. To really optimize cloud performance, incorporate user feedback metrics, such as response times, into your monitoring capabilities.