Hybrid Cloud Monitoring: 5 Best Practices featuring God’s Eye

By: Anurag Sharma

May 14, 2020

Recently I watched a ‘Fast & Furious’ movie and loved the concept of the God’s Eye. There are a lot of fans of this movie franchise and after watching I understand why it’s so famous and well-loved. The God’s Eye is a hacking device created by one of the characters. It’s able to hack any type of technology using a camera and, presumably, satellite tracking. It feeds information gathered back to its user “under four minutes or less”. The God’s Eye works at its best when it’s close enough to its target to track, but can locate any given person at great distances.

The God’s Eye makes me think about hybrid cloud monitoring approaches. The new normal is cloud; nearly every organization on the planet is taking advantage of cloud technologies in some form or another. Cloud surveys show a majority of companies use multiple public cloud vendors, but this in itself poses a significant challenge for ongoing monitoring of the overall environment.

When considering the benefits of cloud, it’s crucial to reduce wastage in every aspect: CPU, storage, billing and so on. We need God’s Eye-like capabilities in our planning, delivery process and in our tooling too in order to get the best from our hybrid cloud implementations.

Hybrid cloud management and monitoring is challenging because:

• Cloud providers do have good monitoring solutions tools are still siloed and unable to provide a full picture across a hybrid cloud environment

• Skilled IT professionals who can effectively configure and manage hybrid cloud environments are still rare

• Environments are highly dynamic and ephemeral so it’s hard to instrument logging and monitoring

• It’s difficult to identify and maintain an updated hybrid cloud topology

How to Create God’s Eye: Best Practices for Hybrid Cloud Monitoring

1. Identify Events, Metrics, and Measurement by Design

Monitor and measure what’s required. The key to success is to identify and report metrics that matter to your organization’s goals and include them in the design stages. If you include monitoring measurements in your design phase, you will have a good opportunity to avoid difficult conversations with operations and security during implementation. Take some time to review exactly what your monitoring solution can track and consider what’s going to be useful to you as early as possible.

2. Implement Automation

It’s highly complicated to monitor in isolation. Every system should be as automated as possible. Always identify key value CIs and automate them first. Artificial intelligence(AI) and Machine Learning(ML) can be used to establish thresholds for agreed acceptable performance. This can help you to automatically identify anomalies and raise alerts. If you leverage AI and ML you will be able to develop and troubleshoot analytics and process. AI and ML also help to improve your MTTD and MTTR. 

3. Perform Chaos Engineering

Chaos engineering can improve your hybrid cloud monitoring performance and provide real-time event handling. Test your monitoring tools and see what happens when there is an outage and evaluate monitoring capabilities when certain thresholds are met. [click here more on chaos engineering]

4. Keep Visibility 100% for Everyone with a Single Platform

Your monitoring solution should be able to provide a customizable dashboard and should also provide instant visibility of all events up or down on a single platform. Visibility through a single platform helps expedite incident resolution.

5. Monitor End-User Experience

End-user experience monitoring metrics like response time and frequency of issue provide insights into how your monitoring capability is helping- these are must-have metrics.

 

In summary, we need to keep in mind that hybrid cloud is going to evolve continuously and technical frameworks will increase in size and complexity. It’s good to plan ahead and make the situation more manageable. The ultimate goal is to achieve your best hybrid monitoring ‘God’s Eye’ that can look anywhere and provide you instant feedback on your products and services.

Link to original article