Why It’s Time to Switch to Cloud Native Monitoring
Across all industries, a new paradigm in infrastructure space is emerging – the cloud. Organizations, from SMEs to established conglomerates, have adopted public cloud services. As always, there are two main reasons why they’ve been so quick to make the jump to cloud applications: cost and ease of use.
Cloud services are designed to handle industrial workloads at a fraction of the expenses you would have to pay if you were handling all the infrastructure yourself. With all that said, there is one small caveat with cloud applications, the expenses can quickly accumulate and represent a huge chunk of your revenues. This calls for a tool that could provide businesses with an analytical perspective of their cloud infrastructure spend. Logs have traditionally been used to gain insight into an application’s operations to audit every aspect of its usage. Since most cloud providers don’t offer any ‘tangible’ insights into why the bill just keeps ballooning, businesses are now resorting to outsourcing monitoring providers to keep tabs on their daily operations. The goal, as always, is to prevent an unexpected hike in monthly expenses, or at least, figure out exactly why the bill is what it is.
In this article, we’ll explain why monitoring has become such an important component of native cloud applications.
Why Cloud Monitoring Matters
Businesses have always placed importance on root cause analysis to maintain accountability for every application they use. In most cases, conventional app logs worked well enough for on-premises software. However, the rapid expansion of cloud computing tools for organizations made it more complex to keep tabs on every event that was happening. It was time to take logging to the next level: using dedicated applications on the cloud to manage and track logs.
DevOps teams also needed to gain insight into real-time status updates and potential security incidents to maintain the integrity of their workflow. Creating the most suitable cloud analytical solution requires an understanding of each system component and matching that with the right tools to detect and prevent incidents resulting from their usage.
Another important use of cloud monitoring is cybersecurity. The recent rise in cyber threats has played a role in pushing DevOps teams to identify security issues in real-time and taking measures to thwart malicious software from taking over the application or infrastructure. From the standpoint of cybersecurity, cloud monitoring can be expanded into various components such as cloud storage, security tools, and databases that weren’t given as much importance.
These days, cloud monitoring goes hand in hand with data analytics to visualize the flow of information and explore an undesirable event to understand more about its potential causes. The goal is to take the manual labor out of the workloads of dev ops teams and automatically restore normal operations when a certain event goes out of hand.
Identify the Most Costly Components of Your Software and Find Insights to Save Money
A primary goal of cloud native monitoring is to determine how expensive each aspect of a tool is and figuring out a way to balance the budget with other resources you’re using. Cloud monitoring tools have evolved to provide accurate insights and visibility about trends that are happening over time. Today’s cloud monitoring tools can also integrate with a cloud provider’s existing tools to collect important data and present all this information in an easy-to-understand dashboard that distills it down to how much each cloud unit costs to operate. Monitoring services, like Logstail.com, are designed to collect a vast amount of data from a variety of sources and consolidate them into easy visualizations for dev ops teams to make informed decisions. These monitoring tools are also designed to give the user out-of-the-box KPIs and metrics built to determine the performance of a system and its components.
The Challenges of Monitoring in Cloud Native Apps
While the cloud helps businesses maintain smaller, more efficient teams, there are a few challenges they have to contend with. For example, in the case of a failure during a business transaction, the failure needs to be traced end to end, which may span across several services and infrastructure. These challenges include:
- Finding out known and unknown failures
- Legacy monitoring systems simply don’t work as they used to
- Failures are spread apart
This is one area where cloud native monitoring comes in. It can record the overall health of a tool and dig deeper with contextual data. It can conduct health checks using health checkups such as:
- Is the system running?
- Is the system performing its tasks?
Cloud monitoring tools can be used for reporting the health of a system.
Cloud Native Monitoring Provides Valuable Data for Debugging
One aspect of cloud native monitoring tools that makes legacy logging systems truly redundant is the fact that they provide a ‘centralized’ logging system. Without a centralized system, debugging tasks can become harrowing for DevOps teams as they have to go through different serves and sift through logs to find a problem. With cloud native monitoring, containers and servers can ship logs to a centralized logging system. This can be combined with open source tools to simplify storage, visualization, and collection of data. Having all the logs of an application and services in a single place can be an incredibly powerful component of your cloud logging system. When something goes wrong or you need to troubleshoot something, centralized logging can let you see everything that is happening in your system and search through logs for specific services or applications. Moreover, these tools can be configured to send alerts for erroneous behavior, as discussed above. This could be as simple as increased log volume or an unusually high number of breaches coming through.
Get Suggestions to Make Cost Savings
In addition, to provide further insights into how each component is performing, modern cloud native monitoring tools also come with cost-optimizer tools that provide users with recommendations on cost saving opportunities. These tools can also be configured to set up easy alerts when billing exceeds maximum budget thresholds. It is also possible to stay on top of trends in your spending and compare them with KPIs. Depending on your cloud environment, you can make savings of thousands of dollars per day in just a couple of clicks. Logstail tools can be configured to provide you with a quick low-down on when your reserved instances are expiring, the monthly cost of reserved instances, whether you have too many reserved instances for your workload, and much more.
Conclusion: Is It Time to Switch to Cloud-Native Monitoring?
In short, most companies adopt cloud-native monitoring tools to gain insights into their cloud usage and improve deliverables while minimizing expenses. The advantage of cloud monitoring tools is that they are scalable, reliable, and flexible. The migration to cloud service will continue on a rapid scale, which means that cloud monitoring tools will evolve and continue to provide more insightful information about their usage.
Legacy monitoring solutions are simply not designed to be compatible with the technical realities of the cloud. Monitoring tools by Logstail can scale to meet the demands of large scale cloud native deployments and do so reliably. Our cloud-hosted solution with advanced features brings the functionality of centralized monitoring to your hands. Convert your data into actionable insights and maximize the performance of your infrastructure, or be notified of potential problems and take the appropriate actions. Sign-up for a free demo in order to realize the power of Logstail! Logstail will re-adjust the way you monitor your data and will help you get more meaningful insights of your technical logs, via dashboards and powerful graphs, to stay alert for all possible dangers.
In Logstail we are also offering the full range of services required to effectively mitigate cyber-attacks. Incident response and consulting, penetration testing, and red team operations, are altogether aiming to help our customers mitigate their cyber incidents. Contact us at sales@logstail.com to get a tailored offer for your business or get a free consultation by our team of globally recognized security experts!
Contact Our Expertsor Sign Up for Free
