Monitoring Cloud Apps and Infrastructure: 7 Requirements

Here are seven critical features and capabilities that you’ll need to monitor current cloud-based apps and infrastructure effectively:

1. The capacity to record and query events and traces and aggregate data.
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When a customer makes an online purchase, a series of HTTP requests are generated. You need to see the exact set of HTTP requests made by the customer while completing the purchase for proper end-to-end cloud monitoring. Each of the individual product detail pages, the add-to-cart POST requests, the cart view page, the billing and shipping POST requests, and the final “Submit Order” page. The ability to capture raw transaction data is essential in cloud deployments, where requests often pass through several dynamic components before reaching the application and the microservices and queues involved in completing the transaction, from a browser or mobile device to a CDN, followed by a load balancer.

In cloud-native systems, immediately identifying bottlenecks and understanding the interactions between different components is a significant differentiation. When a client contacts support to inquire about why they received an error when checking out, you (or your support or DevOps team) will be able to pinpoint the exact set of transactions that produced the mistake throughout your whole application stack. Monitoring Cloud Apps.

You can better prioritise upgrades and sprint plans for those consumers by segmenting your data based on this user- and business-specific attributes—for example, a customer’s username.

2. The ability to track and visualise the relationships between your sites, apps, and infrastructure.
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When businesses migrate to the cloud, it’s no longer about a single significant monolithic software communicating with a database server. Instead, you’ll deal with issues caused by increasingly intricate interactions among an increasing number of components. Transaction traces must connect all of the pieces to cloud monitoring. Deep language agents must also be well-versed in the application code.

APM service maps also show you how component linkages are connected. It allows you to track a performance issue across all channels. When you’ve found a problem, trace data will help you find the code that’s causing it so that you can fix it faster. Also produced a new Health Map. It’s a visualization that combines our industry-leading application performance monitoring (APM) and infrastructure monitoring data to help operations and DevOps teams better understand and debug their applications.

As previously said, web developers are now significantly reliant on the end-user’s client. As a result, the backend does not always provide a complete picture. When your application server appears to be working well, your client may be failing over and erroring out.

3. Native cloud connectors for the most popular cloud services
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When it comes to cloud-based apps and infrastructure, you need to be able to keep track of several cloud provider integrations in one spot. You don’t have to download and install different AWS (or another cloud provider) plugins for each service.

Why should this concern you? Because you’re probably utilising many cloud services, we don’t want you to have to design your connections with them to keep track of the health of your apps and infrastructure.

4. Pricing that is cloud-aware

Host-based pricing for monitoring solutions designed for on-premise deployments may not effectively match the reality of dynamic cloud infrastructures. You must ensure that the price plan for a cloud monitoring solution is appropriate to cloud platforms’ ephemeral nature.

5. The ability to scale up on the most important day of your life

You don’t have time in the cloud to scale your monitoring solution to meet the rising scale. Traditional ops managers would retain spreadsheets with serial numbers of their servers, load balancers, and other parts in a dynamic cloud environment. It takes time and money to set up and scale an on-premise controller to handle considerably increased loads that may occur at inconvenient times. A single instance is no longer treated as a cherished pet with a dynamic cloud infrastructure. You now have thousands of them, and you need to be able to see them all at once while still focusing on a single one as necessary.

A cloud monitoring platform must also be available at all times—from outages to periods of high load. It must continue to collect data, so you always know what’s going on. Your cloud monitoring system is just as important as the rest of your plans. You may create a dashboard once and obtain real-time information anytime you need it, rather than manually updating how well your website’s product pages are meeting their SLAs for a weekly report.

6. SaaS architecture with several tenants

​The benefits of a multi-tenant Software-as-a-Service architecture go far beyond reducing the need to buy servers to increase your monitoring. We immediately push out our innovations to our users, unlike some single-tenant hosted systems that force you to apply patches and updates.

Furthermore, NRDB is a real-time data store that allows for schema less, index-less raw data searches. To scale and efficiently administer such a system, you need years of experience—handing off an ElasticSearch cluster and telling them to “have fun” isn’t going to cut it.

7. A solution that has been planned for the future
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Advanced server-side transformation and predictive analysis of data are not well suited for on-premise monitoring solutions. Instead of isolating data into silos in a multi-tenant environment, you can establish highly varied points of comparison and benchmark among thousands of customers. It isn’t possible in a single-tenant on-premises or managed-host scenario. On the other hand, on-premise solution providers frequently have limited control over the data. It makes fine-tuning and refining algorithms or predictive analysis in real-time challenging.

Last but not least
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You want your teams to focus on creating unique products, not monitoring scale. To do so, you’ll need a monitoring vendor who can provide you with the most up-to-date technology without requiring you to update on-premise infrastructure or data collectors and who can genuinely connect the dots from the client to the infrastructure serving up your apps.