The Best Hybrid Cloud Observability Tools

As systems become more complex, there's a greater need today than ever for observability tools that detect and diagnose issues quickly. Observability refers to the ability to gain insights into the internal workings of a system by observing its external outputs. In this sense, observability tools provide a way for your security teams to track metrics, logs, and traces in real-time, leading to the quick identification and resolution of critical problems.

Here is our list of the best hybrid observability tools:

1. SolarWinds Hybrid Cloud Observability A comprehensive solution that provides a complete view of your environment to drive actionable insights and maximize your environment's availability.
2. AppDynamics It provides end-to-end visibility into the health and performance of your applications and infrastructure while offering the insights you need for proactive troubleshooting.
3. Datadog An advanced monitoring and security platform for cloud applications and comes with a SaaS-based analytics dashboard to provide the visibility you need into their performance.
4. Dynatrace This intelligent cloud platform offers seamless observability with its many features, like deep cloud analysis, AIOps, runtime application security, and more.

Without observability tools, it can be challenging to diagnose problems in distributed systems, microservices architectures, and other complex applications. Also, these tools improve the overall reliability, availability, and performance of these systems, ensuring that they meet the needs of end-users and remain competitive in a fast-paced market. Some of these tools help with compliance as well.

To make the most of what observability tools have to offer, you must choose the one that best fits your organization's needs. While there are many sub-categories of observability tools, in this article, we'll focus on the best hybrid cloud observability tools.

What are Hybrid Cloud Observability Tools?

Hybrid cloud observability tools are software applications designed to monitor and manage the performance and health of applications and infrastructure that span multiple cloud environments. These tools provide visibility into the entire infrastructure stack, including public clouds, private clouds, and on-premise infrastructure. Essentially, observability tools collect and analyze data from various sources, including metrics, logs, and traces, to provide a comprehensive view of the system's performance and behavior.

With hybrid cloud observability tools, developers and operations teams can quickly detect and diagnose issues, optimize resource allocation, and ensure compliance with security and regulatory requirements. These tools also enable teams to identify and resolve issues before they affect end-users, ensuring that applications remain available and performant. As more organizations adopt a hybrid cloud environment, the need for robust observability tools that can monitor and manage the entire infrastructure stack will continue to grow.

The Best Hybrid Cloud Observability Tools

Let's now take a detailed look at each of these tools.

1. SolarWinds Hybrid Cloud Observability

SolarWinds Hybrid Cloud Observability is a comprehensive solution that can increase your visibility into complex systems, provide the intelligence for informed decision-making, boost availability, and reduce the remediation time across your on-premises and multi-cloud environments.

Key Features:

Below are some salient features of SolarWind's hybrid cloud observability tool.

• Quickens the Pace of Issue Resolution: This tool provides 360-degree visibility into your IT infrastructure and services, so you can focus on key issues and prioritize your resources. By integrating infrastructure, applications, and services into a single monitoring ecosystem, you can reduce IT silos and correlate information across domains and systems. In turn, this leads to better identification of the root cause of a problem and quicker resolution.
• Eliminates Tool Sprawl: SolarWinds eliminates tool sprawl as it combines the capabilities of multiple monitoring tools and platforms needed to manage different IT environments. In addition, you can streamline operations and gain a better understanding of what's happening across different systems through this unified platform. It reduces the total cost of ownership as well.
• Provides Deep Insights: With the SolarWinds Hybrid Cloud Observability platform, you can get in-depth insights to identify and diagnose service issues, assess compliance problems, and surface potential security incidents with greater precision. These insights can also help with capacity planning and informed decision-making.
• Meet Service Level Agreements: In particular, the SolarWinds Hybrid Cloud Observability platform can help you meet the Service Level Agreements (SLAs) entered into with your clients. With this tool, you can reduce the Mean Time to Repair (MTTR) and accurately predict issues before they impact the organization. Plus, you can optimize performance and earn the trust of your clients.

In all, SolarWinds Hybrid Cloud Observability can provide the insights you need for capacity planning and decision-making while ensuring that your complex multi-cloud systems are working as they should.

SolarWinds Hybrid Cloud Observability starts at $5/node/month. Try this product for free to assess its fit for your organization.

2. AppDynamics

AppDynamics is a cloud monitoring and observability platform that leverages AI-powered analytics to automatically detect and diagnose issues, helping you stay on top of the performance of your applications and infrastructure across environments.

Key Features:

The key features of AppDynamics are as follows.

• Application Monitoring: Application monitoring is one of the salient features of AppDynamics, as it monitors the health and performance of your applications across different environments like the cloud, on-premises, and hybrid. It even supports multi-cloud environments to provide a comprehensive idea of how your applications are faring at any time.
• Control and Visibility: AppDynamics is specifically designed for the cloud, as it provides complete control and visibility over all cloud-native applications, architectures, and technologies like serverless, microservices, and containers. With this information, you can understand how applications are connected, which in turn can quicken the pace of troubleshooting. Moreover, you can stay on top of your cloud costs with such detailed information.
• Artificial Intelligence: AppDynamics leverages artificial intelligence and machine learning to automate processes and enhance your overall IT operations. It creates baseline thresholds and compares them with the current values to detect anomalies and provide root cause analysis and recommendations. Moreover, AppDynamics also integrates with other tools and platforms, like Cisco Intersight, to provide a holistic view of the IT environment.
• Relevant Metrics: Another important feature of AppDynamics is that it provides the metrics that matter to you and takes you closer to your goals. For example, if you want to correlate your tech stack's performance with your business goals, you can get insights into metrics like the rate of cart abandonment, the error rate of web pages, and more. Armed with this information, you can also make key decisions like resource planning.

In all, AppDynamics provides the insights you need for improved decision-making while providing the control and visibility you need to stay on top of the health and performance of your entire tech stack.

AppDynamics offers five pricing models:

• Infrastructure monitoring edition: $6/month/CPU core. Provides foundational infrastructure diagnostics.
• Premium edition: $60/month/CPU core. Offers complete backend monitoring.
• Enterprise edition: $90/month/CPU core. Well-suited for backend and business performance monitoring.
• Enterprise edition for SAP Solutions: $167/month/CPU core. Provides code-level SAP visibility.
• Real user monitoring: $0.06/month for 1000 tokens. Ideal for gaining complete visibility into the overall digital experience.

Get a custom quote on these plans and try this tool for free.

3. Datadog

Datadog is a cloud observability platform for applications, infrastructure, and services across different environments. With support from over 600 technologies, you can get a unified view of the state of your infrastructure.

Key Features:

Below are some key features of Datadog.

• Observability Pipeline: A key standout feature of Datadog is its observability platform, which enables you to collect data from any source, route and transform it, and eventually send it to a destination application or database for processing and storage, respectively. Undoubtedly, this feature opens up several things you can do with the source data.
• Distributed Tracing: Observability is not just about collecting metrics, but also analyzing and visualizing them to get meaningful insights, and Datadog supports this entire process. In particular, Datadog supports all three pillars of observability, namely, logs, traces, and metrics to provide a unified view of the state of your infrastructure and tech stack.
• Comprehensive Monitoring: With Datadog, you can monitor many aspects of your business and operations. Its synthetic monitoring helps you simulate user journeys and API calls to understand the availability of API calls and the process involved. Real-user monitoring enables you to measure and optimize the user experience of your applications by analyzing data from real users. Next, is the network monitoring feature that comes in handy to monitor the health and performance of network devices, hosts, and containers by analyzing network flows. All these different types of monitoring come together to provide all the insights you need about your infrastructure to make informed decisions.

In all, Datadog is a user-friendly observability platform that helps you to understand every aspect of your operations by analyzing the corresponding data. You can also view this data through a unified and customized dashboard.

Datadog offers 20 different pricing options, and you can build your custom by including one or more of these options to suit your monitoring and observability goals. Try Datadog for free.

4. Dynatrace

Dynatrace is an end-to-end visibility platform that leverages AI and machine learning to provide relevant insights into your cloud environments, infrastructure, and applications.

Key Features:

Let's now look at some important features of Dynatrace.

• Automatic Discovery: Dynatrace automatically discovers and maps all the components and dependencies of your entire technology stack using three patented technologies: OneAgent, Smartscape, and PurePath. OneAgent automatically discovers your environment and collects its observability data, like metrics, logs, traces, events, and user actions. While Smartscape builds a dynamic and interactive topology model of your entire technology stack, PurePath captures timing and code-level context for 100% of transactions. Together, these three technologies help you stay on top of your environment as it changes.
• In-Depth Analytics: This tool provides the business and performance analytics needed to measure and optimize the impact of your applications on your business outcomes. Specifically, Dynatrace uses a proprietary form of AI called Davis to analyze billions of transactions and provide precise insights that matter to you. It also leverages the Dynatrace Query Language (DQL) for instant and context-rich analysis of your environment. With all these technologies and capabilities,  you can identify and proactively resolve any issues immediately.
• Open Telemetry Support: As a key contributor to the OpenTelemetry project, Dynatrace provides out-of-the-box support for OpenTelemetry data. You can use this feature to automatically integrate OpenTelemetry data with user experience, code-level analytics, and other metrics to provide a unified view of your infrastructure. Dynatrace also discovers contextual relationships between Kubernetes pods, services, nodes, and clusters to add to the unified views.
• Self-healing Capabilities: Dynatrace offers self-healing at scale for your applications and vital infrastructure, by leveraging its AI-powered analytics and extensive self-monitoring capabilities. It automatically identifies the root causes and impact of any issues and triggers workflows across your systems to start the automated self-healing process. Furthermore, Dynatrace integrates with various platforms like JIRA and Ansible to enable seamless collaboration for self-healing at scale.

Overall, Dynatrace is an intelligence platform that provides observability using AI-powered analytics and extensive self-monitoring capabilities.

Dynatrace offers six pricing options:

• Full stack monitoring: $74/month/per 8 GB host
• Infrastructure monitoring: $22/month/per 8 GB host
• Digital experience monitoring: $11/month for 10k annual digital monitoring units.
• Application security: $15/month/per 8 GB host
• Open ingestion: $25/month/per 8 GB host
• Cloud automation: $0.10/cloud automation unit.

Start a free trial to evaluate if Dynatrace is the right platform for you.

Final Thoughts

To recap, hybrid cloud observability tools are essential in today's business infrastructure that spans multiple cloud environments. Whether it's providing real-time insights into system performance, diagnosing issues quickly, or optimizing resource allocation, these tools help ensure the availability, reliability, and security of your systems.

The top four observability tools, including SolarWinds Hybrid Cloud Observability, AppDynamics, Datadog, and Dynatrace described above, offer unique features and capabilities that can help you monitor and effectively manage your applications and infrastructure. However, choosing the right observability tool for your organization requires careful consideration of your specific needs, but with these solutions, you're sure to find a reliable and efficient way to manage your cloud environment.

For more detailed reviews, browse www.ittsystems.com.