Businesses across industries are increasingly moving toward the cloud. The simplicity and flexibility of configuring a virtual server room make it a no-brainer to incorporate services like Amazon S3 and EC2 into the companies’ IT infrastructure.
Cloud monitoring services can also help you enhance the security and integrity of your cloud data. Therefore, it is definitely recommended to examine them and see if they fit in your cloud life.
What You Should Monitor
In short, it is advised to monitor three key aspects that might negatively affect your cloud infrastructure:
- Costs. Arguably the most important aspect of all. The range of cloud cost optimization techniques includes terminating idle virtual machines and a sensible selection of virtual machines storage disk types.
- Security. Another crucial component that must be fully examined to ensure that any sensitive information in the cloud is invulnerable to any cyber attack. The list of security improvement options includes multi-factor authentication, restricting access to specific ports, configuring various levels of permissions, and so forth.
- Speed & reliability. Storing data in a different continent will unquestionably limit data transfer speeds, that’s why you should store your data on servers that offer better bandwidth. Similarly, utilizing things like geographical redundancy will also prove to be beneficial in case something happens in a particular data center.
Monitoring Services for Your Cloud
AWS Trusted Advisor
AWS Trusted Advisor is an online resource to help you reduce cost, increase performance, and improve security by optimizing your AWS environment. Since Amazon is the most popular cloud services vendor in the world, it, therefore, follows that built-in AWS Trusted Advisor is the most popular and easy way to monitor and optimize cloud infrastructure for most users. It offers a comprehensive monitoring and optimization dashboard that covers the following categories:
- Cost Optimization
- Performance
- Security
- Fault Tolerance
- Service Limits
AWS Trusted Advisor is available free of charge to all AWS users with basic functionality. The full scope of features is available under Business support plan starting at $100/month. You can learn more about AWS Trusted Advisor on the Amazon’s page.
CloudCheckr
CloudCheckr is a multi-cloud management platform enabling enterprises and service providers to save money, reduce risk, and ensure governance at scale. What distinguishes CloudCheckr the most from AWS Trusted Advisor is its ability to perform the multi-cloud analysis. In other words, if you’re using, say, a two-cloud backup strategy, CloudCheckr will help you analyze your cloud environment on both cloud services (Amazon and Google, for instance).
Since CloudCheckr is a company that exclusively focuses on cloud storage analysis, it offers a feature set far superior to that of AWS Trusted Advisor.
It can even regularly notify you over email about your cloud inventory summary so that you can always stay on top of your environment.
cAdvisor for Container Users
Lastly, let us briefly introduce you to a different kind of service — cAdvisor. cAdvisor provides container users a visual breakdown of resource usage and performance characteristics of their running containers. cAdvisor natively supports Docker containers and should, in theory, support any type of container out of the box.
Here’s how cAdvisor looks in action:
You may find more information about cAdvisor on their GitHub page.
Conclusion
Cloud services have already become an integral part of our lives. To ensure that adaptation of cloud services undergoes smoothly, it is critical to ensure that security, reliability, and financial side of things are properly arranged. A great many services that we’ve briefly outlined could be helpful for cloud cost management and optimization. Be sure to check them out and before long you will reap the benefits in the form of fewer headaches and reduced cloud bills.
