The importance of data has grown manifold. People and machines generate jaw-dropping amounts of data every minute of every day, with videos watched on YouTube, searches on Google, payment transactions made, appliances communicating with smartphones and more. The digital universe was estimated to have 44 zettabytes (44 followed by 21 zeros!) of data in early 2020 and this is expected to grow to 463 exabytes (463 million trillion) of data being generated every day by 2025.
The data yields valuable insights for making more prudent business decisions. However, not all companies have the resources or capabilities to store massive amounts of data in local servers. Here’s where cloud computing comes to your rescue. No wonder then that cloud computing generated a whopping $400 billion in revenues in 2021 and the trend does not show any signs of slowing.
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With the rapid expansion of the cloud, it’s important to use monitoring tools to assess the performance and safety of your cloud-based infrastructure and make it more powerful, secure and cost-effective. So, here are some of the most popular cloud monitoring tools that can help you make decisions and identify issues before they turn into significant problems.
Cloud Management and Monitoring Tools to Definitely Check Out
Amazon CloudWatch
This tool runs on AWS (Amazon Web Services) and helps to monitor cloud resources and applications real time. You can track metrics on Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) instances, EBS (Elastic Block Store) volumes, RDS (Relational Database Service) instances and elastic load balancing. While it automatically collates metrics for some parameters, you can assign additional metrics to be monitored.
Amazon CloudWatch is very helpful in setting up alarms and viewing data in the form of graphs. You can view metrics from over 70 distributed AWS applications in one place. It does not require you to install any additional software. However, with different prices for different features, this solution can work out to be quite costly.
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Microsoft Cloud Monitoring
Are you running your applications on Microsoft Azure? Then, it’s a good idea to check out Microsoft Cloud Monitoring, which is also known as Microsoft’s Operation Management Suite (OMS). It is relatively easy to set up and does not require a lot of technical expertise to configure. It scales easily from single to multiple virtual servers and virtual machine instances.
OMS is great for getting quick insights across workloads as well as identifying security threats. You don’t need to download any additional software and it is fairly cost efficient.
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AppDynamics Cloud
AppDynamics was acquired by Cisco Systems early 2017. The APM (application performance management) tool works exceptionally well for gaining control of cloud applications in IaaS and PaaS platforms, like AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Pivotal Cloud Foundry. It is easy to use and provides visibility into the app environment and automated remediation, enabling faster detection and mitigation of issues. AppDynamics Cloud has a free trial but there is no subscription-based pricing, which can be expensive for smaller companies.
Image Source: https://www.appdynamics.com/blog/news/appdynamics-for-hybrid-cloud/
Auvik
This is a cloud-based network monitoring and management tool that comes with features for automating network visibility and IT asset management. It simplifies troubleshooting and lets you automate configuration backup and recovery. Auvik provides visual maps of data, making it easy to drill down. It is easy to add new sites and networks as well as customize alerts. However, the tool slows down when used in a large environment.
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New Relic APM
New Relic is a good tool for managing complex and dynamic cloud applications and infrastructure. It is great for isolating issues and resolving them quickly. It works on the browser as well as on Android and iOS devices and allows to scale operations with usage. New Relic’s dashboard is easy to customize, and you can configure your own alerts and warnings. The tool allows a deep drill down of data to specifics. However, the mobile app version leaves much to be desired.
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DataDog
This offers a range of products for like log management, infrastructure monitoring, application performance management and security monitoring, depending on the pricing plan selected. DataDog supports multi-cloud monitoring and can work with AWS, Azure, and Google cloud services. It offers a feature known as Continuous Code Profiling that offers exceptionally high visibility into resource allocations in production. However, it is quite an expensive monitoring tool.
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Some of the other cloud monitoring tools are BMC TrueSight Cloud Operations, CloudMonix, Dynatrace, Exoprise CloudReady, PagerDuty, ScienceLogic and SolarWinds. To remain competitive in today’s highly digitalized world, it’s crucial to remain on top of technological advancements and be able to integrate and interact with data.