In today's world of complex and distributed systems, monitoring and analysis help you stay on top of the health and performance of your applications and infrastructure. Using the right tools, you can collect and analyze data to identify and diagnose issues, optimize performance, and improve the overall user experience.
One such category of tools that helps with monitoring is hybrid cloud observability. Read on, as we talk about hybrid cloud observability, its benefits, and some best practices to implement it.
What is Hybrid Cloud Observability?
Hybrid cloud observability is the process of monitoring and analyzing the health, performance, and behavior of applications and infrastructure across both on-premises and cloud environments. Typically, it collects data from different sources, like logs, metrics, traces, and events, and analyzes them to gain insights into the health and status of hybrid cloud environments.
Key Components of Hybrid Cloud Observability
Though the exact implementation of hybrid cloud observability platforms depends on the scope of work, there are a few key components that will be part of every implementation. Here's a look at these concepts.
- Metrics Metrics are the numerical data points collected from different sources like servers, applications, and databases. In hybrid cloud environments, metrics may be collected from on-premise infrastructure as well as cloud resources. Metrics are often used to monitor system health, track performance, and detect anomalies. In particular, it helps to compare current performance with a baseline or past numbers to help understand the deviations.
- Logs If metrics are numerical, then logs are the textual records of activities that occur within applications and systems. These logs provide insights into system performance, point to the root cause of issues for quicker troubleshooting, and track changes to detect possible threats. As with metrics, logs are collected from multiple sources, like on-premises servers, cloud infrastructure, and third-party services.
- Traces Traces are data about the flow of requests through a distributed system. These traces help identify bottlenecks, latency issues, and other performance problems. In hybrid cloud environments, tracing may include monitoring requests across on-premise and cloud resources.
- Visualization Dashboards All hybrid cloud observability platforms offer dashboards to visualize metrics, logs, and traces. These dashboards display key performance indicators, graphs that show trends over time, and other parameters that provide insights into the health and performance of systems at a given time. Many times, dashboards correlate data from multiple sources to provide a holistic idea of how your systems and infrastructure are faring, so you can infer trends and patterns for continuous improvement.
- Alerts Alerts are another key component of hybrid cloud observability, as they inform the concerned stakeholders about the additional actions required. Depending on the configuration, alerts of certain classifications, like severity, are sent to those individuals whose contact details are configured in the system.
Now that you know the components involved, let's see how they come together to make hybrid cloud observability platforms an essential part of your operations.
Working on Hybrid Cloud Observability Platforms
After deployment, a hybrid observability platform gathers metrics, logs, and traces from different sources. Using AI and ML, it analyzes the data and displays them on intuitive dashboards, and in the process, it provides a 360-degree view of your infrastructure. You can discern trends and patterns and take proactive actions as needed. In the meantime, observability platforms also compare the analyzed metrics with baseline values and send alerts in case of serious deviations. Some platforms even come with automatic remediation of first-level issues and could point you to the root cause of more serious issues.
You can also use the dashboard to dig deep into the numbers to better understand the cause of a problem and troubleshoot them. These data visualizations can also come in handy for making informed decisions related to budgeting, capacity planning, and more.
With this understanding, let's look deeper into how hybrid cloud observability platforms can add value to your organization.
Benefits of Hybrid Cloud Observability
Hybrid cloud observability can benefit your organization in many ways. Here's a look at the key benefits.
- Provides a Unified View A compelling reason to use a hybrid cloud observability tool is to get a holistic view of the performance and behavior of your tech stack across both on-premises and cloud environments. With such a unified view, you can quickly identify and diagnose issues before they impact the wider organization. In the process, it also reduces downtime and improves the overall security and reliability of your systems.
- Makes your Systems More Secure Hybrid cloud observability platforms provide detailed insights into your existing security practices and their impact on your infrastructure. With this information, you can evaluate the effectiveness of different policies, and take the necessary corrective action when needed. In addition, these platforms help you dive deep into security-related events like unauthorized access attempts or system breaches, so you can mitigate their impact and plug the root cause. Furthermore, you can monitor logs and metrics through a centralized view to detect and respond to security threats in real-time.
- Speeds up the Resolution Process Hybrid cloud observability provides real-time insights into the health and status of your applications and systems, for proactive detection and resolution of issues before they become critical. In turn, this can lead to faster resolution times and improved system uptime. This quick resolution process can also come in handy if you're a Managed Service Provider (MSP) servicing clients, as you can easily meet the agreed Service Level Agreements (SLAs).
- Supports Scalability With hybrid cloud observability, you can easily scale your infrastructure and applications based on demand. By monitoring and analyzing metrics and logs, you can even proactively identify the need for additional resources and plan for them accordingly. Such forward-looking insights ensure that your systems can always meet your organization's and customers' growing demands.
- Enhances Performance You can monitor applications and infrastructure in real-time using hybrid cloud observability platforms. The insights you get from such a streamlined monitoring process help identify bottlenecks, so you can optimize resource allocation, where needed, to improve performance. These platforms can also help identify opportunities to improve application efficiency, reduce costs, and improve the user experience.
- Reduces Costs Another significant benefit of hybrid cloud observability platforms is the cost savings they provide through proactive monitoring. In particular, its insights into resource utilization across different environments can help with capacity planning with an eye on cost optimization. In addition, these platforms identify wasteful spending and improve overall efficiency, leading to significant cost savings over time.
- Improves Collaboration Hybrid cloud observability platforms support collaboration between different teams, including developers, operations, and security, across locations. Specifically, the centralized dashboard provides a single source of truth to different teams, thereby improving communication and productivity among teams. Furthermore, it promotes cross-functional collaboration and helps ensure that all teams are working towards a common goal.
- Ensures Compliance With the increasing number of regulations and compliance requirements, hybrid cloud observability platforms can make it easy for you to meet regulatory requirements by providing auditing and reporting capabilities. Some platforms may even identify any non-compliant activity, so you can fix them right away to reduce the risk of penalties or fines.
- Increases Customer Experience By optimizing application performance, reducing downtime, and providing faster time-to-resolution, hybrid cloud observability platforms improve the overall customer experience offered by your organization. Subsequently, this can lead to increased customer satisfaction, loyalty, and revenue. More importantly, it can help your organization build a positive brand image and connect with your customers.
All in all, hybrid cloud observability platforms provide a ton of benefits to your organization across all areas of operation. Undoubtedly, they add enormous value to your organization in the form of cost savings, improved productivity, and proactive identification and resolution of operational and security issues.
However, to truly enjoy these benefits, you must choose a platform that's best suited for your organization.
Steps to Choosing an Appropriate Hybrid Cloud Observability Platform
Choosing an appropriate hybrid cloud observability tool may not be easy, given the many choices available today. This is why we have listed a list of broad steps that you can use to pick the most ideal platform for your organization.
- Step 1: Define Your Requirements As a first step, identify your organization's specific requirements for monitoring and managing your hybrid cloud infrastructure. Consider factors like the types of applications in your infrastructure, the workloads you need to monitor, the level of automation required, and the type of data analysis and reporting needed. Sometimes, factors like remote access and collaboration tools may also be needed, depending on the nature of your operations.
- Step 2: Evaluate the Platform's Capabilities Next, assess the platform's features and capabilities against your requirements. In particular, focus on features like the data collection process, efficiency of analytics, the visualization provided in dashboards, alerting configurations, automation capabilities, support for scalability, and integration with existing tools and platforms. While evaluating, check for multi-cloud support and ensure the platform can monitor and manage your applications and infrastructure across the cloud environments in which they are deployed.
- Step 3: Assess the Ease of Use Once you shortlist the platforms based on a match between your requirements and their features, it's time to evaluate the ease of deploying and using the platform. Assess the amount of effort needed to customize the platform to meet your requirements, the level of training needed for your employees, and the technical expertise needed for deployment.
- Step 4: Determine Security and Compliance Check whether the platform you choose provides adequate security. In particular, you'd want the tool to send alerts in case it identifies security vulnerabilities or in the event of a security incident. Also, assess the tool for help in complying with the regulations your organization must follow. Some good features to have include data encryption, access control, and compliance reporting.
- Step 5: Check for Vendor Support and Reliability Evaluate the vendor's track record and reputation for providing reliable and responsive support, including the availability of technical support and the quality of documentation and training materials. Talk to people who have used this product, and also research online for reviews before zeroing in on a particular platform.
- Step 6: Consider Costs Lastly, consider the costs of the tool, including the technical expertise and training costs involved in its setup and use. Also, evaluate the platform's pricing model and total cost of ownership, including any licensing fees, subscription costs, and costs associated with integrating the platform with other tools and platforms. Compare these costs with your budget to decide if this tool is the best fit for your needs.
The above steps can help you choose an appropriate hybrid cloud observability platform that meets your specific requirements, provides good visibility and control over your cloud infrastructure, and delivers the desired level of performance, reliability, and cost efficiency.
Bottom Line
To conclude, hybrid cloud observability platforms are an essential tool to gain a unified view of the performance and behavior of your applications and infrastructure across on-premises and cloud environments. By gathering metrics, logs, and traces, and analyzing them with AI and ML, these platforms can identify and diagnose issues, optimize performance, and improve the overall user experience. Undoubtedly, it is a valuable tool for organizations of all sizes, as it helps you stay ahead of the complex and distributed systems in today's world.
But to leverage the capabilities of this technology, you must pick a tool that best meets your requirements. We hope the steps discussed in this article will help you choose an appropriate tool.
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