What to Monitor to Ensure Cloud Performance? |

To ensure cloud performance, it’s not adequate to use “best practices”, such as selecting the right cloud services provider, architecting your cloud system properly, and including industry-leading security measures in your implementation. You also need 24×7 cloud performance monitoring to prevent downtime and make sure you are optimizing costs along the way.

And it’s also important to be able to respond rapidly to any critical cloud event. Proper cloud performance monitoring ensures all of these and more. We offer the following monitoring guidelines and best practices to ensure cloud system health.

5 Critical Cloud Performance Monitoring Tips

Monitoring various key metrics, logs, and events will tell you how your cloud infrastructure is performing. For most cloud systems, metrics worth capturing and analyzing can be found in the following areas :

1. Cloud security

One of the top concerns of CTOs and CIOs today is the threat of a cyber-attack. According to the 2022 Fortinet Cloud Security Report, a full 95% of companies are concerned about cloud security.

The top three concerns were:

Misconfiguration of the cloud platform / wrong setup. (62%)
Insecure interfaces/APIs (52%)
Exfiltration of sensitive data (51%)

Other concerns include:

Unauthorized access (50%).
Insecure interfaces/APIs (44%)
Hijacking of accounts, services, or traffic (44%)
External sharing of data (39%)

The key to identifying suspicious activity before it becomes an all-out attack is cloud security monitoring.

Monitoring cloud security can uncover security breaches such as:

New user accounts deleting existing users
Unusual, simultaneous instances that start and stop, seemingly programmatically.
Temporary security credentials being used for a lengthy period
Erasure of security logs and events

The right way to monitor cloud security is to use a service that provides full end-to-end audit logging of all activities performed by a cloud user. AWS CloudTrail and Azure Monitor are examples of such services. The goal should be to answer “who did what, where, and when?”. This can also aid in regulatory compliance.

2. Cloud Application Performance Monitoring (APM)

Monitoring application performance is key to system health. Cloud infrastructures can generate countless logs, metrics, and alerts. With the aid of APM tools with monitoring and analytics capabilities, this voluminous data can be easily understood. Furthermore, monitoring DevOps metrics can track the performance of the underlying infrastructure.

Performance problems in the cloud may involve such issues as:

MTTR (mean time to repair)
MTBF (mean time between failures)
Throughput
Response time
Latency
Scalability

Many APM tools allow you to track various aspects in real time so you can proactively optimize application performance in the cloud.

3. Application/Service Availability

Downtime is the bane of many cloud applications, especially for companies with SaaS models. User requests are fulfilled by cloud-based servers, so monitoring the health of your SaaS environment and components is key to preventing issues like overloading and other issues that prevent service delivery.

Cloud-based services are typically tightly coupled and highly integrated, depending on other services to function. So when one cloud infrastructure component is not monitored, this often leads to issues in other components. This ripple effect can cause serious performance issues. Since these issues can pop up during frequent software updates, real-time monitoring is key.

4. Infrastructure Monitoring

Cloud infrastructure best practices require monitoring the health and dependencies of storage, databases, virtual machines, and Kubernetes. This will help you track and react to changes that could affect your environment’s security, performance, and availability.

The importance of being able to react quickly to critical events cannot be emphasized enough. 24/7 monitoring is only as good as the ability to react quickly. To respond quickly to critical cloud services events, you will need the appropriate tools, notifications, and rapid-response team in place.

Monitoring your infrastructure can also help discover which services, products, and customers you spend the most on and whether that spend is justified.

5. Incident Response Capability

Critical production incidents could cause millions of dollars and significant damage to an organization’s reputation. Thus, it is imperative that a robust and reliable incident response infrastructure as well as response teams are established for critical production systems. The establishment of a robust Incident Response infrastructure may include the following:

Real-time detection of critical incidents
Real-time alerts and notifications across one more established channels (pager, phones, mobile apps, slack/teams, etc)
On-call team setup and streamlined escalation procedures
Reporting and analytics for continuous learning and improvement

The Role of DevOps in Monitoring Cloud Performance

DevOps is a service delivery enabler. Not only can DevOps be used to automate the process of software development and deployment, but it is also essential to the process of monitoring and maintaining the system. Be sure to include DevOps engineers in your implementation of your Cloud Monitoring Strategy.

Hire a DevOps Team from Cloud App Developers and get FREE 24/7 Monitoring and Support.

The team will provide your development teams with day-to-day DevOps support and architectural guidance. You are free to use their dedicated hours when and where you need the most.

In addition for no additional cost, the same team will provide 24×7 production system monitoring and on-call support with SLA-based responses.

Also, you will get free access to our automated cloud security tool that continuously monitors your cloud environments

Conclusion

Every Cloud System is different. There are many other possible metrics to monitor and track, but by monitoring these 5 Areas, you can greatly increase your cloud performance.