Trending Cloud Performance Monitoring Tools

Monitoring your cloud's performance means using the practices and tools to track and understand the health and functioning of cloud-based systems. Simply put, it's like constantly checking on your digital infrastructure to ensure everything is running smoothly.

But why is this necessary? Today, when almost all databases and systems are integrated with the cloud, any disruptions in their performance can cause significant issues for your work. Around the Hamas and Gaza conflicts, the DDoS attacks and security breaches on cloud servers reached a new high. Google mitigated an all-time high attack that peaked at over 398 million rps. This shows how vital cloud monitoring is.

So, let's learn more about these cloud performance monitoring tools and the best practices for monitoring the cloud.

Which Are The Main Areas That Should Be Monitored?

The following areas are the focus of monitoring because they represent different layers of the cloud service model. Their effective monitoring ensures that each layer functions properly, meeting user expectations and business requirements while maintaining security and compliance.

Monitoring networking helps ensure data moves quickly, and users can access what they need without problems. It also helps keep things safe and follows the rules to protect information. By watching over everything, from computing to storage and networking, we make sure the cloud works well and keeps data secure. The following points should be taken care of when monitoring the network:

1. Monitor bandwidth usage to ensure efficient data transfer.
2. Track latency for real-time application performance.
3. Check for packet loss to prevent connectivity issues.
4. Monitor network security for unauthorized access attempts.
5. Ensure the health and performance of network devices.
6. Monitor DNS for resolution issues.
7. Analyze and address unusual traffic patterns.
8. Monitor Quality of Service (QoS) parameters for effective traffic management.
9. Track changes in network configurations.
10. Verify the effectiveness of redundancy and failover mechanisms.

Other than that, the following areas are the focus of monitoring because they represent different layers of the cloud service model. Their effective monitoring ensures that each layer functions properly, meeting user expectations and business requirements while maintaining security and compliance.

SaaS (Software as a Service)

SaaS is here to deliver software applications over the internet. Without monitoring SaaS applications, you risk encountering undetected performance issues, which may lead to a degraded user experience, increased downtime, and potential SLA breaches. 

Security vulnerabilities might go unnoticed, jeopardizing sensitive user data.

IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service)

Over the internet, IaaS provides virtualized computing resources. 

If IaaS is appropriately observed, inefficient resource utilization and increased costs might be avoided. Plus, unsolved performance issues can cause downtime, affecting service availability. 

This can also lead to undetected security threats, exposing the infrastructure to potential breaches.

PaaS (Platform as a Service)

For application development, PaaS offers tools and services, allowing developers to focus on coding without dealing with the underlying infrastructure.

Developers may miss essential insights into application behavior without proper tools, hindering optimization efforts. And if the performance issues are left unnoticed, it can affect the user satisfaction. 

FaaS (Function as a Service)

FaaS allows developers to run individual functions responding to events without managing the underlying infrastructure.

FaaS monitoring is important for

• tracking the execution of functions, 
• identifying performance bottlenecks, 
• understanding the behavior of serverless functions, 
• improving response times, 
• ensuring efficient utilization of resources.

DBaaS (Database as a Service)

DBaaS provides managed database services, allowing users to deploy and manage databases without handling the operational aspects.

If this is ignored, database performance issues may remain unidentified. This can be extremely risky as it affects the application's responsiveness. 

Security threats to the database might go unnoticed, risking the integrity and confidentiality of stored data.

Challenges Of The Traditional Cloud Monitoring Tools

If we talk about Cloud service and its monitoring, a few of the first tools that strike our head are

1. Microsoft Azure
2. Google Cloud Platform
3. Amazon CloudWatch
4. Riemann

However, as cloud computing advances, it faces some challenging issues that need intelligent solutions. One big problem is making security stronger to fend off complex threats. 

This problem includes dealing with

• Distributed-Denial-of-Service (DDoS), 
• managing data in this changing cloud setup
• sync up data resources well
• concerns about system failures
• keeping the cloud available at all times

So, these challenges make looking for newer technologies in this area necessary.

What Are The New Updates In Terms Of Technology?

Given the challenges, the newer tools, like Cubet Cloud Services, have the following features:

1. Serverless computing allows developers to focus on writing code without managing the underlying infrastructure. 
2. Observability and AIOps Newer tools focus on monitoring, combining metrics and logs, and tracking more detailed insights into app performance. AIOps (Artificial Intelligence for IT Operations) is being brought into monitoring tools to automate problem detection and resolution.
3. Kubernetes container orchestration: Kubernetes has become a standard for container orchestration. Managed Kubernetes services provided by cloud providers make managing containerized apps very simple.
4. GitOps: GitOps is an approach that uses Git as the single source of truth for infrastructure and applications. 
5. eBPF technology: It helps newer tools like Cubet Cloud Services do better network and security monitoring by gathering detailed insights from the core of the system.
6. Edge computing: Edge computing brings computation closer to the data source, reducing latency. New and updated tools can help with edge computing that helps in addressing performance and latency challenges related to traditional centralized cloud architectures.
7. Multi-cloud and hybrid cloud solutions: Tools with this feature help with workload portability and management across multiple clouds are gaining importance. These tools significantly help avoid vendor lock-in and use the strength of different cloud providers.
8. DevSecOps: Security is combined into the development and operations lifecycle itself through DevSecOps practices. So, this, in a way, helps automate security measures, ensuring a more secure cloud environment.
9. No-code/Low-code platforms: Cloud providers are offering no-code/low-code development platforms to make app development simpler and easier to use. Such platforms help any user to create applications without extensive coding. So it is highly user-friendly.

Integration of Security with Monitoring

One of the most significant developments in the new tools includes upgrading security measures to protect against data thefts. Attacks like DDOS have become very prevalent. To protect the information stored in the cloud against these attacks, many new practices have come up that you can pair with traditional monitoring systems. They are:

1. Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) allows security professionals to correlate events and detect potential threats.
2. Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS) and Prevention Systems (IPS) monitor network and system activities for malicious or unwanted behavior.
3. The clouds are monitored in real-time threat intelligence feeds, and AI tools increase their ability to detect and respond promptly to emerging threats.
4. By analyzing user behavior using User and Entity Behavior Analytics (UEBA), the developers can identify anomalous activities and, when combined with monitoring, can raise alerts for potential security incidents.

Tools For Cloud Monitoring: Comparing Features, Pros, and Cons

If you are looking for cloud monitoring tools, here are a few of the most popular tools available.

1. Amazon CloudWatch

Features: Monitor and manage systems, analyze metrics and log data, integrate with 70+ AWS services, and automate actions with CloudWatch Events.

Pros: Comprehensive AWS resource knowledge, cross-application visibility, pay for services utilized.

Pricing: Volume-based pricing, Free tier available.

2. NewRelic

Features: Cloud infrastructure monitoring, real-time knowledge of cloud apps and servers, custom alerts, error rates, and website load times.

Pros: Real-time insights, adaptable installation, granular information.

Pricing: Based on annual and monthly compute units or host-based pricing.

3. Dyntrance

Features: Full-stack observability, user-friendly interface, application performance monitoring, real and simulated user monitoring.

Pros: Easy agent installation with UI help, powerful top-to-bottom view, and diagnostic tools.

Pricing: Feature-based pricing.

4. LogicMonitor

Features: Quick server monitoring setup, automatic discovery capability, SNMP, jFlow, NetFlow, and network topology mapping.

Pros: Cloud-based performance monitoring, customizable dashboards, powerful visualization.

Pricing: Free trial available (Contact vendor for tailored pricing).

5. AppDynamics

Features: Cloud-based network monitoring, link application performance indicators with infrastructure data, business-oriented dashboards.

Pros: Detailed environment information, code-level visibility, visual connections between components.

Pricing: Based on features, a 15-day free trial is available.

6. Datadog

Features: Data reduction in vast contexts, monitoring cloud app performance, centralization and analysis of logs, real users and synthetics monitoring.

Pros: All-in-one observability system, powerful data analysis tools, flexible alerts.

Pricing: Free tier, paid services start at $15.00 per month (billed annually).

7. Hyperic

Features: Monitoring cloud-based applications, OS, networks, and middleware, complete infrastructure picture.

Pros: Powerful monitoring features, graphing, alerts, and user-friendly interface.

Pricing: Hyperic HQ (Open Source) and HQ Enterprise (Free trial, Commercial License).

8. Elastic

Features: Elasticsearch, part of the Elastic Stack, offers powerful search capabilities, analytics, and real-time data indexing. Logstash facilitates log data collection, and Kibana provides a visual interface for data exploration.

Pros: Scalable and efficient search functionality, versatile for various data types, supports distributed computing, robust community support.

Pricing: Has both open-source (free) and subscription-based plans

9. Grafana

Features: Has customizable dashboards, alerting, and visualization options for open-source data analytics

Pros: Supports multiple data sources, user-friendly dashboard creation, extensive plugin ecosystem, community-driven.

Pricing: Primarily open-source, and there is a paid Enterprise version with additional features and support.

Best Practices For Cloud Monitoring

If you want to start cloud monitoring but are confused about what to do and what not to do, then follow the following tips. These are a few of the best practices we apply when delivering solutions to our clients.

• Monitor all stack layers, including applications, infrastructure, and network.
• Set up meaningful alerts to detect and respond to issues before they impact users.
• Ensure monitoring scales with your cloud environment's growth.
• Monitor resource usage and costs to optimize cloud spending.
• Centralize and analyze logs for troubleshooting and security.
• Monitor end-user experience to understand application performance from the user's perspective.

What Are Kubernetes? Why is Kubernetes Important to be Monitored, Especially for Security?

Kubernetes, often abbreviated as K8s, is an open-source container orchestration platform to automate containerized applications' deployment, management, and scaling. Google originally developed it, and is now maintained by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). It is known to provide a strong yet flexible framework for orchestrating containers, making it easier to manage and scale complex, microservices-based applications.

Monitoring Kubernetes is crucial for several reasons, with security being a top concern:

• Kubernetes excels at managing microservices architectures consisting of numerous containers and services. Monitoring helps ensure the performance and stability of these distributed systems.
• It can help keep track of the dynamic nature of the data stored on K8s.
• Containerized environments, including Kubernetes clusters, are susceptible to security threats. Monitoring helps respond to and identify potential security incidents as soon as they happen or prevent them.
• Monitoring helps to identify overutilized or underutilized resources. This monitoring can help you with optimization and cost savings.

Conclusion

Effective cloud monitoring is important for performing the best app deployment performance. With the right tools and best practices, you can cut many costs and prevent some big disasters.

That's why it's important to stay ahead of the game. You can get cloud services with the best security and Kubernetes monitoring at Cubet. They combine GCP with all-new features like AIOps, Hybrid Cloud systems, GitOps, and much more to ensure reliability, security, and efficiency. Contact Cubet today to know more!