Why is Cloud Infrastructure Monitoring Essential?

In today’s dynamic and fast-paced world, businesses are feeling increasing pressure to maintain their complex on-premise and virtualized infrastructures. The majority are now relying on the extra capacity and opportunity provided by the cloud and cloud-based applications.

Cloud computing provides a number of significant advantages, no matter the size of the organization. SMEs, in particular, can benefit from storage and network services and are able to cost-effectively scale on-demand as the business grows. On the other hand, larger enterprises will discover that the cloud can provide more advanced operational efficiency and flexibility to their organization. 

Cloud Infrastructure Monitoring

It’s essential that your entire IT infrastructure is functioning efficiently and that cloud resources are being effectively utilized, making it vital that cloud infrastructure monitoring is taking place just as you would monitor the rest of your IT estate. 

In its purest form, cloud infrastructure monitoring is the process of using programmed or manual IT monitoring and management techniques to ensure the optimal performance of a cloud infrastructure. It also helps in the evaluation of the performance of a whole infrastructure on a modular level. Monitoring the cloud is crucial for ensuring availability and efficient services, as well as helping to reduce manual error and costs.

Detailed Insight

One of the biggest benefits generated from cloud infrastructure monitoring is the clear, detailed insight into an organization’s operations and resource usage. It’s common for a cloud solution to use up excess memory or CPU if it is not properly used, and this information would not be identified without the aid of a monitoring solution. The data produced can also be used for adjusting resource allocation, budgets and therefore cloud capacity planning, helping to improve cost-efficiency, saving money where possible. 

Added to this, the more knowledge you have about how your complete cloud system operates, the better-equipped you will be in terms of identifying and addressing bottlenecks and potential issues. With this information, you can be proactive and troubleshoot, resolving problems before end users are affected and reducing the likelihood of costly downtime. 

Comprehensive Monitoring Metrics

By investing in the deployment of a cloud infrastructure monitoring platform, organizations can also generate the necessary information to help determine which cloud services it should implement. The organization can identify its specific goals, and make sure that the services implemented are equipped to address these goals. Without a monitoring solution, tracking this information would become difficult and subjective, combined with the difficulty in assessing spiralling cloud costs. 

Further advantages of monitoring your cloud are the comprehensive performance metrics and in-depth graphs made visible by your monitoring solution. Using these displays, you are able to see your on-premise, virtual, and cloud systems together, enabling you to compare performance and look at metrics over a specific timescale. You can also set up and maintain notifications where necessary, tracking specific events and issues in your environment.  

In order to ensure that your entire IT infrastructure is performing at an optimal level, it is essential that you properly monitor your cloud. Without a monitoring solution in place, it is increasingly difficult to identify issues and ensure that your vital cloud resources are continually effective and operational.