Business continuity is a key requirement for cloud operations. To track performance, detect problems in time and fix them, you need automation, i.e. monitoring tools. There are many interesting solutions out there, so let's take a look at the most popular ones.
How to choose a monitoring tool
To choose the right tool for your business, you need to consider and evaluate the available features based on various criteria, from ease of use to scalability.
When making your choice, here are some things to consider
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Comprehensive approach. It is better to choose tools that provide a comprehensive view of the entire infrastructure (servers, databases, applications) in real time.
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Integration and compatibility. The tool should be compatible with cloud platforms and seamlessly integrate with other enterprise systems.
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Scalability and flexibility. As the business grows, the cloud monitoring tool should be able to scale and adapt to more complex needs.
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User-friendly interface. You should be able to easily find all the features you need. Easy navigation and visibility will allow you to work efficiently.
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Security. Choose tools that monitor for security threats and preferably integrate with your organization’s current security management systems.
Popular tools
Datadog provides a range of metrics, visualizations and alerts to optimize cloud or hybrid environments. The software performs tag-based analysis, has AI-based alerting tools, real-time performance analysis, advanced metrics collection capabilities and an easy-to-use interface.
AppDynamics is a comprehensive cloud-based platform focused on application control. It provides users with tools to visualize and track the performance of the entire technology stack and enables the comparison of technical metrics with business outcomes. As a result, issues that could affect business performance can be quickly identified.
New Relic is a modern, advanced full stack monitoring platform. It is designed to enable engineers to efficiently plan, build, deploy and run software. The platform provides a unified interface to all telemetry – metrics, events, logs, and traces - creating a single source of information for the entire system. In addition to data collection, New Relic also provides powerful analysis tools that help identify problems quickly and speed up the troubleshooting process. It offers seamless integration with existing workflows and includes artificial intelligence support for better troubleshooting.
Prometheus is a leading open source monitoring solution that provides dimensional data modelling, PromQL query capabilities, efficient storage and accurate alerting. This improves business metrics and alerting processes.
The tool is easy to use, offers convenient integration with various visualization tools such as Grafana, multiple client libraries and reliable alerting based on flexible PromQL.
Zabbix is a free and open source real-time monitoring tool suitable for both large organizations and small businesses. The software easily integrates with visualisation tools such as Grafana. Zabbix can collect key performance metrics from servers, VMs, network devices, etc. There is a flexible problem detection and prediction engine with customizable severity and importance levels. The tool has a large community of users and new versions are released regularly.
Dynatrace is an AI-powered analytics and automation platform that simplifies working with the cloud, enabling faster and safer innovation. The platform provides full-featured monitoring with automated monitoring of cloud and hybrid environments with automatic discovery of hosts, virtual machines, serverless cloud services, containers and Kubernetes, networks, devices, logs, events and more.
PagerDuty is a platform designed to automate, organize and accelerate responses in digital infrastructure at critical moments. It offers features such as call management, automated incident response, machine learning to improve operations, process automation and the ability to engage customer service and cross-functional teams, all aimed at optimizing operations and allowing developers to focus more on code.
Grafana is a versatile visualization and monitoring platform that enables users to query, visualize and receive data alerts from a variety of sources across their technology and business operations. With features such as a scalable metrics backend, scalable distributed tracing, multi-user log aggregation, performance testing and an extensive set of plug-ins, Grafana provides comprehensive monitoring of logs, metrics, applications and infrastructure.
Elastic Stack, which includes Elasticsearch, Kibana, Beats and Logstash, is a powerful search platform designed to securely extract data from any source in any format for search, analysis and visualization. It provides fast, scalable data storage and search, real-time data exploration with visualization in Kibana, and integration to ingest data from multiple sources with the flexibility to deploy across multiple cloud platforms or on-premises.
