Multi-cloud monitoring: A quick recap

Site24x7 Cloud monitoring in 2020

 

The year 2020 was a tough one and tested the grit and resilience of the human race. Organizations across the globe had to prioritize the safety of employees, customers, and associates. The rapid response to COVID-19 has enabled millions to work remotely because of advanced cloud computing technologies supplied through public cloud services like Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure. These and other platform as a service (PaaS) and infrastructure as a service (IaaS) providers are the strategic drivers for digital transformation.

Public clouds are an immediate option in these unprecedented times, and many organizations are leveraging them to set up and optimize their infrastructure. In this blog, we'll learn how Site24x7 prevailed over today's challenging circumstances to ensure seamless multi-cloud monitoring experiences for our partners and customers. Here's a quick recap from the Site24x7 team about our 2020 cloud monitoring successes.

Starting with AWS, let's look at some of the updates we released in 2020, including new AWS integrations and enhancements, and best practice recommendations.

AWS monitoring best practices

Publicly exposed AWS Simple Storage Service (S3) buckets, which are storage objects that contain data and descriptive metadata, recently have invited many security breaches. This type of security breach grew in scope and number last year. However, AWS monitoring best practice strategies help you close security gaps, optimize costs, and improve the overall fault tolerances. We've added 38 new best practice recommendations this year, and the total number has grown to 146.

Notable AWS integrations and enhancements

In response to requests to enhance features for monitoring AWS clouds, we launched more than 10 monitoring capabilities this year that ensure a smoother user experience, and help you track AWS costs as your cloud infrastructure grows. Now you can schedule automations to perform actions, like start or stop the instances, using the IT Automations feature.

Here is an overview of our 2020 AWS monitoring releases:

  • EC2 capacity reservation monitoring
  • AWS uptime monitoring
  • Metric profile to pick specific metrics to be monitored
  • Tag-based discovery of AWS resources
  • EventBridge and GuardDuty integration
  • Amazon MQ monitoring
  • Lightsail database and load-balancer monitoring
  • AWS Transit Gateway monitoring
  • AWS Storage Gateway monitoring
  • Amazon DMS monitoring
  • Amazon FSx monitoring
  • Lambda@Edge monitoring
  • Amazon Direct Connect virtual interface monitoring

Azure monitoring

Following updates for our Azure monitoring capabilities, we introduced a slew of new features to add to Site24x7's monitoring portfolio, starting from monitoring capabilities that support new Azure services, providing a guidance report for optimization, and other updates.

Support for new Azure services: Windows Virtual Desktop and Recovery Services Vault

In this new normal, organizations are moving to virtual desktop infrastructures (VDIs) to increase productivity and simplify desktop operations. Organizations are choosing the cloud to reduce costs while providing the flexibility to dynamically grow, and shrink the infrastructure, enabling a true digital workspace transformation.

As users are provided with the best-virtualized experience, this update gives visibility into performance metrics, including active and inactive sessions and hosts, uptime status of individual session hosts, CPU, memory, and disk read/write of each host in your Windows Virtual Desktop environment. We also introduced capabilities for monitoring Azure Recovery Services Vault, which is a storage entity in Azure that houses backup data for various Azure services and tracks all the backups seamlessly.

Resource logs monitoring for Azure

With Azure's Diagnostic logs, you can gain insights on the operations that were performed within a resource, and with this feature update, you can now monitor the operations performed within the Web App resources, view all your diagnostic/resource logs in one place, obtain powerful insights, receive alerts from your log data, and more.

Azure Guidance Report

In 2020, we released a guidance report for Azure too. With this intuitive report, you can generate a set of best practice checks to optimize costs, as well as increase the performance and reliability of your Azure services across the infrastructure.

Cloud cost management

Rounding out our cloud monitoring updates, we introduced a few additions to Site24x7 CloudSpend. Cloud cost management is now at your fingertips with support through a mobile web app. Also, we've announced the pricing for our AWS cost management tool. Here are a few other interesting new updates for CloudSpend:

  • Trend Analysis section to observe the spending pattern based on timelines like Monthly, Quarterly, or Yearly
  • View budget periods in a year-to-date (YTD) and month-to-date (MTD) timelines
  • Budget policy support for cost types like Blended, Amortized, and Recurring

In addition to all these updates, we have more planned for 2021. You can read about these in the Site24x7 CloudSpend Product Roadmap 2021.

Looking ahead

In addition to the cloud monitoring front, you can take a quick look at some of our other Site24x7 enhancements and releases during 2020 here, and also see our 2020 infographic for a quick yearly round-up of all major feature releases and enhancements, also read what's in store for 2021.

As we're almost a month into 2021, we wish you a happy and healthy rest of the year!

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