Top 5 Cloud Monitoring and Performance Management Tools You Should Consider for Your Business

As more and more organizations realize the potential benefits of moving their infrastructure to the cloud, there is a significant increase in the adoption of cloud monitoring and management tools. These tools help businesses manage cloud operations seamlessly and deliver uninterrupted cloud services to end users.

Cloud monitoring tools help in safeguarding the network from cyber-attacks via cybersecurity. They can be used to detect breaches and vulnerabilities at an early stage, securing the network from potential threats. Organizations can detect errors rapidly by testing infrastructure and network at regular intervals. It also helps them to utilize and optimize their websites and applications. Let’s take a look at a few cloud monitoring tools as mentioned below:

1. AppDynamics

AppDynamics is uniquely designed to deliver rich performance data, learning and analytics, combined with the flexibility to adapt to virtually any infrastructure or software environment. Starting with the infrastructure and moving all the way up to the stack, it provides a layered approach to application intelligence. With this tool, you can visualize cloud application performance in real-time along with monitoring of cloud infrastructure health. You can track business activities in the cloud through parameters such as transaction volume and service level; and also perform thorough monitoring. You can monitor and manage critical cloud-based applications, ensuring a smooth transition during pre and post-cloud migration. It also provides application latency optimization in the cloud with the capability to analyze current scalability limits. It is compatible with all JVMs (Java Virtual Machines) and application servers with Java 1.5 and above. AppDynamics supports various cloud platforms like AWS, Microsoft Azure, Pivotal, Rackspace, Kubernetes, Citrix, IBM, Docker, HP Cloud Services, OpenStack, etc.

2. CloudMonix

CloudMonix is a successor to AzureWatch (a popular Microsoft Azure monitoring and scaling solution), which provides advanced cloud monitoring and automation across one or more Microsoft Azure subscriptions. It provides cloud-monitoring dashboards and metrics to track, inspect, and analyze information from a single place. Its issue-tracking feature is used to identify critical issues, thereby providing a representation of system behavior before, after, and during the issue occurrence. It provides cash recovery, ensuring the system runs all the time and does automatic reboots to avoid any potential resource leaks. Integrating CloudMonix with third-party software can provide increased efficiency across all the stacks like collaboration, data store, logging, monitoring, and issue tracking, etc. Currently, it only supports the Microsoft Azure platform, but soon it will provide support for Amazon Web Services (AWS) and OpenStack.

3. Slack

Do you want an easy integration of your cloud monitoring tool with other applications and functions? Then, Slack is the best option for you. It provides application integration related to IT, server, network, and cloud monitoring, security, compliance, etc. One of the main advantages of Slack over other tools is that it publishes an API, with which you can create applications with third-party vendors and directly integrate with Slack. It allows users to write custom integrations and respond automatically to messages. Slack also enables organizations to bring all of their communications into one navigable place through its real-time messaging and archiving capabilities. With Slack’s API ability to define message buttons, you can easily take action from messages within a channel. With the help of Slack, you can consolidate all the team collaboration and communication channels like email, instant messaging, Skype, file sharing, web conferencing, etc., into one smooth running interface.

4. ELK Stack

ELK stands for Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana. ELK stack is used to establish and run a private cloud that involves the ability to control a large and complex system assembled from multiple modules. It is also used for robust monitoring of OpenStack, a complex system that generates a large amount of data.  ELK Stack is well suited for this purpose as it offers scalability, performance, and ease of use.  It helps operations (DevOps) team to log and monitor system activities round the clock, in order to solve performance issues before they become a roadblock. Elasticsearch provides deep search, distributed storage, and analysis of log data. Logstash is used for centralized logging, log enrichment, and parsing, providing a massive list of plugins that allow importing of different kind of data into Elasticsearch. Kibana provides a very powerful front end to search and visualizes the data with the help of build charts like bar charts, pie charts, line charts, tables, maps and many more. With ELK Stack, you are able to install these three tools and get the combined advantage to boost your cloud monitoring activities.

5. PagerDuty

PagerDuty is an enterprise incident management and resolution platform that provides integration with IT operations and DevOps monitoring stacks to improve operational consistency and agility. It allows you to customize your incident management workflow to help you integrate your own tools with monitoring, collaborating, and analyzing tools for providing the best user experience. With PagerDuty App, you can route alerts/alarms depending on their type and source, so that you can act on alerts/alarms right from your mobile. It reduces the mean time to repair (MTTR) by integrating multiple monitoring systems into a single view so that the operations team knows when an incident occurs. It helps you monitor the state, health, and performance of everything from servers to networking devices. PagerDuty supports SMS, push notifications, phone calls, emails, etc., to send updates via integration of various collaboration tools.

Apart from the ones listed above, there are plenty of cloud monitoring tools available in the market to inspect and analyze every aspect of your cloud environment. It is never an easy task to keep your cloud environment safe and secure, from security threats, outages, broken systems, and IT failures. You can utilize cloud monitoring tools or solutions to ensure a healthy cloud infrastructure.

eInfochips, an Arrow company has solid expertise in cloud services and offers CloudOps services that provide continuous application monitoring, continuous infrastructure capacity planning, and monitoring, automatic incident management, and collaboration automation. To know more, download our white paper – Applying DevOps Strategy to Manage Cloud Infrastructure.