What is cloud monitoring?
Cloud monitoring is an aspect of observability that analyzes the health of your distributed cloud-based applications and infrastructure. Cloud monitoring helps IT administrators and developers gain better insight into their cloud environment, improve security, and resolve issues before they impact the end-user experience.
Cloud monitoring solutions proactively measure CPU usage, memory usage, network traffic, and storage utilization to ascertain whether your cloud resources are functioning optimally and meeting service-level agreements (SLAs).
In this article, you’ll learn why cloud monitoring is a crucial way to track the performance and availability of your cloud-based infrastructure, read about what to look out for when choosing a solution, and find a guide to the top cloud monitoring tools on the market.
Why is cloud monitoring important?
Cloud monitoring helps track resource utilization and improve performance, allowing you to establish baseline benchmarks. For example, you can add extra CPU or memory capacity if your applications are running slowly or if you’re looking to scale. These adjustments can be based on ongoing needs or current priorities in your organization.
Choosing the best cloud monitoring solution
A cloud monitoring solution provides you with visibility into your overall system performance to help monitor metrics and optimize usage. It empowers you no matter which cloud environment you operate in (private, hybrid, or public cloud).
Where visibility is low, a monitoring solution gives you all the observability you need to optimize your business functions and scale. Additionally, cloud monitoring solutions can regularly monitor your systems to detect misconfigurations or threats that could result in cloud breaches and compliance violations.
That said, cloud service providers (such as AWS, Azure and Google Cloud) are responsible to secure the infrastructure, while it’s the responsibility of the customer to make sure that monitoring and securing the data, and address misconfigurations. Additionally, cloud monitoring — is an essential part of cloud security best practices.
With all this in mind, here are some key considerations to help you make the right decision in adopting the best cloud monitoring solution.
Service offerings and scalability
- Consistently monitors all your cloud-based apps, services, and infrastructure for misconfigurations and threats.
- Scales up or down to meet business needs.
Security and reliability
- Provides robust security measures to protect company data and applications (including implementing data encryption, establishing secure access controls, and conducting regular security audits and testing).
- Enables you to comply with important regulations like PCI DSS and HIPAA.
- Offers incident response and data recovery protocols in case of a breach.
- Ensures strong and resilient infrastructure to reduce the likelihood of system downtime.
Cost and flexibility
- Offers a flexible pricing model and maintenance fees that align with your company’s budget and requirements.
- Provides a high degree of flexibility, allowing your organization to increase or decrease in size or capacity and to choose from a range of services and pricing options.
Top cloud monitoring solutions
In this section, you can find the leading cloud monitoring solutions available on the market today and examine their distinct value propositions.
(alphabetical by company name)
- AppDynamics Cloud by AppDynamics
- CrowdStrike Falcon Cloud Security by CrowdStrike
- Infrastructure monitoring by Datadog
- Cloud monitoring by Dynatrace
- Cloud monitoring by LogicMonitor
- Infrastructure monitoring by Middleware
- Infrastructure monitoring by New Relic
- Sematext Cloud by Sematext
- Observability by Sumo Logic
- Zenoss Cloud by Zenoss
AppDynammics by Cisco
San Francisco, CA | 1984 | www.cisco.com
Powered by Cisco, AppDynamics offers a suite of application performance management (APM) and analytics tools.
AppDynamics Cloud offers:
- Visibility into the performance of business applications and infrastructure in the Cloud
- Monitoring and analysis of application performance metrics and user experience in real time
- The ability to leverage machine learning, artificial intelligence, and automation
CrowdStrike Falcon Cloud Security by CrowdStrike
Austin, TX | 2011 | www.crowdstrike.com
CrowdStrike is the only vendor that offers visibility, security monitoring and auto-remediation across on-prem, hybrid and cloud environments in a single platform, with a single agent, and single plane threat intelligence, and incident response services.
CrowdStrike Falcon Falcon Cloud Security offers:
- Unified security, visibility and monitoring of the company’s entire infrastructure, real-time monitoring, identification of anomalies and threats, and auto-remediation.
- Real-time alerting, without false alerts, minimizing alert fatigue
- Dashboards and visualizations, including attack path to help remediate issues quickly, maximizing your app’s uptime
Infrastructure monitoring by Datadog
New York, NY | 2010 | www.datadoghq.com
Datadog is a rapidly expanding software as a service (SaaS) company that delivers a full range of infrastructure and application performance monitoring services to developers, business owners, and IT teams.
Datadog offers:
- A cloud-based monitoring and analytics platform
- Machine learning, artificial intelligence, and automation to provide comprehensive infrastructure and application performance monitoring services
- Real-time visibility, easy-to-use dashboards, and integrations with various tools and platforms
Cloud monitoring by Dynatrace
Waltham, MA | 2005 | www.dynatrace.com
Dynatrace is a technology company that delivers a software intelligence platform incorporating AI and automation to provide advanced monitoring and analytics capabilities.
Dynatrace offers:
- The ability to leverage AI and automation to provide real-time insights and automated analytics on enterprise applications, cloud services, and infrastructure performance
- Detection and identification of issues across environments to provide actionable insights
- Integration with different tools, such as notification platforms, CI/CD pipelines, and feature flag systems
Cloud monitoring by LogicMonitor
Santa Barbara, CA | 2007 | www.logicmonitor.com
LogicMonitor specializes in providing end-to-end visibility into organizational IT frameworks.
LogicMonitor offers:
- A SaaS-based performance monitoring platform
- Monitoring of servers, networks, storage devices, and cloud services
- Automated alerts, dashboards, and reports to help organizations optimize performance, improve uptime, and reduce costs.
Infrastructure monitoring by Middleware
San Francisco, CA | 2022 | www.middleware.io
Middleware is a software company that specializes in developing middleware solutions for integrating, managing, and monitoring complex IT systems and applications.
Middleware offers:
- Connection between disparate systems and applications — such as HR, customer relationship management (CRM), and enterprise resource planning (ERP) applications — to organize business processes and increase efficiency
- Real-time insights into system performance, allowing for faster resolution and improved uptime.
Infrastructure monitoring by New Relic
San Francisco, CA | 2008 | www.newrelic.com
New Relic is a software company that provides real-time monitoring, troubleshooting, and optimization solutions for cloud and web applications.
New Relic offers:
- A comprehensive suite of cloud-based application performance management services
- Broad visibility and real-time insights into applications and services across different environments, such as web, mobile, and microservices
Sematext Cloud by Sematext
Brooklyn, NY | 2007 | www.sematext.com
Sematex provides comprehensive cloud-based solutions, empowering DevOps teams and site reliability engineers (SREs) with better visibility to improve application performance.
Sematext Cloud offers:
- Full-stack observability for private, public, and hybrid cloud applications
- Features such as metrics and log collection, alerting, and visualization to identify and troubleshoot issues in real time
- Automatic monitoring and logging of new machines, containers, and databases as you scale
Observability by Sumo Logic
Redwood city, CA | 2010 | www.sumologic.com
Sumo Logic is a service that provides observability and analytics for SaaS platforms and cloud-native applications, providing insights to improve security and reliability.
Sumo Logic offers:
- Monitoring, observability, and cloud security capabilities
- Real-time insights into applications, infrastructure, and services
- Seamless integration with major cloud providers and services
Zenoss Cloud by Zenoss
Austin, TX | 2005 | www.zenoss.com
Zenoss provides AI-driven monitoring of cloud-based applications and infrastructure, enabling teams to perform effective root cause analysis, troubleshoot quickly, cut costs, and optimize performance.
Zenoss Cloud offers:
- Predictive analytics using AI and machine learning
- Reports and dashboards to provide insight into your entire IT service’s health
- Data transfers to other automated platforms to facilitate rapid response
Conclusion
Cloud monitoring solutions provide essential visibility into the performance, availability, and security of cloud-based infrastructure, applications, and services.
This article highlighted our top picks of 10 providers of cloud monitoring solutions and their value propositions. Each solution has its advantages and disadvantages, so choosing the right one depends on an organization’s specific needs and requirements. When choosing an option, we recommend you to pick a solution that gives you visibility and monitoring across your entire infrastructure (on-prem, hybrid and multi cloud environment) in a single unified platform with one console, to avoid silos between security tools. A solution that optimizes performance, improves customer experience, and helps you troubleshoot issues quickly across your organization.
