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With the rapid increase in cloud adoption, organizations are constantly looking to move more and more of their workload to the cloud to achieve scalability, agility, and cost savings. A question that arises with this move is—how do organizations monitor their infrastructure performance as the migration creates visibility gaps. It is highly challenging for organizations to maintain and monitor performance across their dynamic and complex cloud environments. This has led to the emergence of cloud infrastructure monitoring tools which enables organizations to have end to end visibility across their cloud applications and servers.
A typical cloud infrastructure consists of servers, storage devices, cloud management tools, network, and platform virtualization. Cloud infrastructure monitoring tools enable organizations to monitor and manage the operational workflow of their cloud infrastructure environment. These tools provide a complete and comprehensive health picture of the cloud infrastructure components in real time. They help users gain visibility into all their crucial cloud infrastructure metrics associated with network, storage, and resource utilization.
Cloud infrastructure monitoring tools also help in tracking metrics like resource levels, server response times, and storage capacities which in turn helps organizations reduce troubleshooting times, predict performance requirements, and reduce overall costs associated with their cloud environments.
Cloud infrastructure monitoring solutions enable organizations to detect patterns and solve potential issues associated with their cloud infrastructure components. The following are some core features within cloud infrastructure monitoring software that can help users gain real-time insights into the availability, performance, and utilization of resources across their cloud environment:
Usage monitoring: This feature enables users to track infrastructure resource needs and alerts administrators or automatically scales usage to minimize waste.
Database monitoring: The software monitors performance and statistics related to memory, caches, and connections.
API monitoring: Cloud infrastructure monitoring software detects anomalies in functionality, user accessibility, traffic flows, and tampering.
Network monitoring: These monitoring solutions provide real-time insights into network performance metrics such as bandwidth usage, latency, connectivity, etc.
Storage monitoring: Some cloud infrastructure monitoring tools help administrators monitor and track their storage resources and utilization on the cloud.
Real-time monitoring: These solutions provide constant monitoring systems to detect anomalies in real time.
Automation: These tools efficiently scale resource usage to optimize spend with increased or decreased resource usage requirements.
Reporting: Cloud infrastructure monitoring software creates reports outlining resources, underutilization, cost trends, and functional overlap.
Dashboard and visualization: The software presents information and analytics in a digestible, intuitive, and visually appealing way. This feature also helps users gain insights into performance issues by obtaining a dashboard visibility of various types of errors like system errors and user errors.
Spend forecasting and optimization: The tools provide the ability to project spend based on contracts, usage trends, and predicted growth.
Integrations: Cloud infrastructure monitoring can be integrated with ITSM solutions like workflow management tools to enable real-time configuration management database updates, automatic ticketing, and autotriggering of remediation workflows.
Cloud infrastructure monitoring tools facilitate performance monitoring across servers, networks, applications, and storage devices. It allows administrators to continuously assess resource utilization levels, server response times, speed, and availability. It also enables users to troubleshoot anomalies that can lead to future issues, in a timely and efficient manner.
Reduces costs: Cloud infrastructure monitoring solutions help save IT costs by predicting utilization or potential performance issues in cloud infrastructure components.
Efficiency: These solutions help IT teams gain insights into performance metrics across cloud infrastructure environments, troubleshoot detected issues, and bring out the major areas for improvement, which in turn results in an increase in efficiency.
End-to-end visibility: These solutions let organizations have complete visibility and control over their cloud infrastructure environment in real time. It helps them analyze and optimize the performance of their cloud infrastructure applications and services better.
Increased productivity: These monitoring tools alert or notify cloud administrators about performance issues in real time and allow them to resolve them quickly. These solutions also provide interactive dashboards to visualize anomalies and the related root cause analysis representation that helps organizations troubleshoot cloud infrastructure performance disruptions easily.
Improved end-user experience: Cloud infrastructure monitoring solutions are capable of optimizing the user experience with end-to-end performance monitoring of applications deployed on the cloud. They can quickly identify application issues and significantly reduce the mean time to repair (MTTR).
Cloud infrastructure monitoring solutions act as one single source of truth to monitor, manage, and optimize the performance of all the components associated with a cloud infrastructure environment. One can gain a real-time view of all the operational data and act upon it instantly. IT administrators are the key users of this software:
IT administrators: Cloud Infrastructure monitoring solutions are implemented through automated monitoring software that provide centralized access and control over cloud infrastructure environments. Cloud IT administrators can track and assess the operational status and health of cloud applications and services.
Alternatives to cloud infrastructure monitoring can replace this type of software, either partially or completely:
Application performance monitoring (APM) software: These solutions help users track and visualize application obstructions and help troubleshoot any future predictable issues. They also facilitate real-time insights through dashboards into application performance and trigger timely alerts for issues like disturbance in load time or response times.
APM can be considered as a subset of cloud infrastructure monitoring software as the latter is a comprehensive monitoring platform that includes network monitoring, server monitoring, APM, more.
Related solutions that can be used together with cloud infrastructure monitoring software include:
Network monitoring software: Cloud infrastructure monitoring solutions monitor network connections and collect related performance data such as bandwidth consumption, network latency, throughput, and more to optimize network performance across servers.
Server monitoring software: Server monitoring lowers the number of server outages and at the same time reduces the time to resolve related issues. Cloud infrastructure monitoring tools enable server monitoring by monitoring system-level metrics like CPU, memory, disk usage, network activity, etc.
Log monitoring software: Log monitoring software scans and monitors log files generated by servers, applications, and networks. Some cloud infrastructure monitoring solutions facilitate log data aggregation, structuring, and summarizing. Users can analyze the log data through dashboards for anomaly identification and the tool alerts users to patterns in these log files that help solve performance and security issues.
Some of the key challenges which come along with cloud infrastructure monitoring tools are:
Multiple cloud providers: Organizations are extensively adopting multicloud strategies because of multiple reasons like risk mitigation, avoiding vendor-lock ins, and higher security. However, monitoring infrastructure across multiple cloud providers has become a challenge for organizations.
Hybrid cloud environment: Monitoring infrastructure across a mix of public and private cloud deployment is highly challenging. Gaining end-to-end visibility across hybrid cloud environments is complex as applications are deployed in a distributed manner and identifying issues across different environments becomes cumbersome.
Whether a company is looking for their first cloud infrastructure monitoring software or wanting to replace an existing one, g2.com can help find the best tool.
The company’s needs when searching for cloud infrastructure monitoring software often relate to specifically desired data and metrics. For example, the user may be most interested in monitoring and improving performance for transactions within their applications. Buyers should make a ranked list of the cloud infrastructure monitoring features that most directly address the problems they’re trying to solve, then reference G2 reviews to find the right fit.
Prioritizing the desired feature set can help narrow down the potential pool of cloud infrastructure monitoring solutions, allowing teams to then apply further considerations for budget, ease of integration with other systems, security requirements, and more. This holistic approach empowers buyers to move forward with a focused checklist, which can be used in conjunction with G2 scoring to select the best cloud infrastructure monitoring product for the business.
Create a long list
Buyers should start with a large pool of cloud infrastructure monitoring software vendors. Keeping the desired must-have features in mind, it is important that buyers perform consistent inquiries during demos by which they can effectively compare the pros and cons of each software solution.
Create a short list
It helps to cross-reference the results of initial vendor evaluations with G2 reviews from other buyers, the combination of which will help to narrow in on a short three to five product list. From there, buyers can compare pricing and features to determine the best fit.
Conduct demos
As a rule of thumb, companies should make sure to demo all of the products that end up on their short list. During demos, buyers should ask specific questions related to the functionalities they care most about; for example, one might ask to be walked through a typical performance issue from alerting to remediation within the cloud infrastructure monitoring tool.
Choose a selection team
Regardless of a company’s size, it’s important to involve the most relevant personas during the cloud infrastructure monitoring software selection process. Larger companies may include individual team members to fill roles such as project manager, decision maker, system owner, and IT professionals and developers who will be working with the software closely. Smaller companies with fewer employees might overlap roles.
Negotiation
Cloud infrastructure monitoring tools are on the expensive side when it comes to pricing. While some companies will not budge on the configurations of their packages, buyers looking to trim costs should try to negotiate down to the specific functions that matter to them in order to get the best price.
Final decision
After this stage, it is important to perform a trial run if possible with a small selection of IT professionals or developers. This will help to ensure that the cloud infrastructure monitoring software of choice integrates well with an IT administrator’s systems setup or a developers’ day-to-day work. If the cloud infrastructure monitoring tool is well liked and well utilized, the buyer can take that as a sign that their selection is the right one. If not, reevaluation of the options may be necessary.
Cloud infrastructure monitoring tools come with several pricing options like perpetual license and subscription-based model. Some vendors also offer a free trial version starting at the software being free to use for 14 days.