By Mike Gardiner, Sr. System Administrator
Organizations are migrating workloads from an on-premises environment to private, public and hybrid clouds. While the cloud environment can bring a wide range of benefits, it also creates complex challenges. Monitoring must evolve into observability to support hybrid and cloud-native environments. The increasing complexity of data sources presents a significant challenge. The need to evolve customer monitoring strategies to keep pace with the dynamic demands of their increasing digital business has become ever more important.
The dynamic and serverless nature of the cloud environment make legacy tools ineffective. Most legacy tools use an agent-based system to aggregate data in a centrally managed location. Cloud native tools are unable to effectively monitor on-premises servers. These tools utilize built-in log streaming services to perform log aggregation. These systems produce large amounts of data that make it difficult for your IT department to manage. This leads to increased security risks, more downtime, and inefficient use of a customer’s time and money.
Several vendors are now offering tools that will allow you to monitor both on-premises and cloud environments, as well as multi-cloud environments in one location. Companies like Splunk, Solarwinds, Google, and Netreo provide tools to monitor hybrid environments. These tools allow you to create dashboards to quickly and efficiently troubleshoot problems, minimizing downtime. Pattern and trend analysis can give you additional insight into your workflow. Alerts can be created to give the IT staff notice when problems arise. Monitoring your hybrid cloud with one monitoring tool is simply better. It not only helps to decrease debugging time for both on-prem and cloud teams, but also allows you to correlate data from different parts of the system.
