Cloud monitoring is the process of tracking the performance, availability, and security of your cloud-based applications and infrastructure. By collecting and analyzing data from various sources, such as logs, metrics, and events, cloud monitoring enables developers, DevOps, and Site Reliability Engineers (SRE) to proactively identify and address potential issues, optimize performance, and deliver a better user experience.
In this guide, we will explore the importance of cloud monitoring, the key metrics and logs to monitor, and how Netdata can help you effectively monitor and troubleshoot your cloud infrastructure, including popular cloud providers like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform (GCP), and Microsoft Azure.
Effective cloud monitoring is essential for ensuring the performance, security, and availability of your applications and services. Some of the key benefits of cloud monitoring include:
By continuously monitoring your cloud infrastructure, you can identify and address potential issues before they impact your users, minimizing downtime and ensuring optimal performance.
Monitoring resource utilization, such as CPU, memory, and storage, helps you identify and address bottlenecks or inefficiencies, enabling you to optimize your cloud infrastructure and reduce costs.
Cloud monitoring helps you identify and address security threats and vulnerabilities, ensuring the safety and privacy of your users' data and meeting regulatory requirements.
With comprehensive cloud monitoring, you gain greater visibility into your cloud infrastructure, enabling you to make informed decisions and maintain control over your applications and services.
Choosing the right cloud monitoring service is critical for maintaining performance, preventing downtime, and scaling your infrastructure efficiently. While many tools offer basic metrics, a truly effective platform goes beyond the surface to deliver real-time insights, intelligent alerting, and full-stack visibility.
When evaluating a monitoring solution, look for features that support modern cloud-native environments:
These features help you detect issues early and respond faster, even in complex, multi-cloud environments.
Not all cloud monitoring services are created equal. Consider these evaluation factors:
A strong cloud monitoring solution should integrate seamlessly into your stack without introducing complexity or hidden costs.
Timeliness matters. Many traditional tools collect and aggregate data at intervals, sometimes minutes apart, which can obscure short spikes, drops, or anomalies.
Look for tools that:
With real-time monitoring, you can diagnose problems as they happen, not after they’ve impacted users.
To effectively monitor your cloud infrastructure, you need to track a variety of metrics and logs that provide insights into the performance, availability, and security of your applications and services. Some of the key cloud metrics and logs to monitor include:
These metrics provide insights into the performance and availability of your cloud infrastructure, such as CPU usage, memory utilization, disk I/O, and network traffic.
Application-specific metrics, such as error rates, response times, and throughput, help you understand the performance and health of your applications and services.
Security logs, such as authentication events, network traffic, and system events, help you identify and address potential security threats and vulnerabilities.
By monitoring billing and cost metrics, you can ensure that you are efficiently utilizing your cloud resources and controlling costs.
Cloud providers like AWS, GCP, and Azure offer a variety of managed services, each with their own set of metrics and logs. Monitoring these service-specific metrics and logs can help you understand the performance and health of your cloud services.
Cloud monitoring isn’t just about uptime, it’s about gaining the visibility and control needed to run modern, distributed systems at scale. Here are some of the most common scenarios where monitoring cloud services becomes essential:
Track performance across multi-cloud or hybrid environments, including virtual machines, containers, and microservices. Ensure consistent visibility across regions and platforms like AWS, GCP, and Azure.
Stay ahead of service-level agreements (SLAs) with proactive alerts and historical data. Know when you’re nearing performance thresholds before they impact availability.
Quickly isolate issues across layers, network, application, container, or system, using metrics correlation and anomaly detection. Reduce mean time to resolution (MTTR) with real-time diagnostics.
Give developers and site reliability engineers the tools they need to detect regressions, monitor deployments, and optimize resource usage in dynamic environments.
Netdata is a comprehensive monitoring solution that simplifies the process of monitoring your cloud environment, including popular cloud providers such as AWS, GCP, and Azure. With its real-time data collection, powerful visualization capabilities, proactive alerting system, and integrations with popular cloud services, Netdata enables you to effectively monitor and troubleshoot your cloud infrastructure, ensuring optimal performance and security.
Here’s how Netdata can help you monitor and analyze various aspects of your cloud infrastructure:
Netdata can collect performance data from a wide range of cloud services, such as AWS EC2 instances, GCP Compute Engine instances, and Azure Virtual Machines. By integrating with popular cloud providers, Netdata enables you to monitor key infrastructure metrics, such as CPU usage, memory utilization, network traffic, and disk I/O, in real-time.
To learn more about how Netdata monitors and visualizes cloud metrics, check out the AWS Monitoring,GCP Monitoring, and Azure Monitoring use-cases.
In addition to cloud-specific metrics, Netdata collects operating system data, container data, network data, storage data, and process data, organizing and correlating all information in ready-to-use dashboards. This comprehensive monitoring ensures that you have full visibility into the performance and health of your cloud infrastructure.
Netdata offers out-of-the-box integrations with a variety of managed cloud services, such as AWS Cloudwatch, Google Cloud Operations Suite, and Azure Monitor, allowing you to monitor cloud provider service-specific metrics and logs in real-time. By integrating with these services, you can gain valuable insights into the performance and health of your cloud-based applications and services.
Automatically gather operational and other performance metrics from almost every packaged application available including popular web servers such as Apache, Nginx, and HAProxy, databases like Redis, MongoDB, PostgreSQL, and MySQL/MariaDB etc and these metrics show up on the corresponding application sections on the Overview tab. Visit the Netdata integrations page to explore the full list of supported services.
Netdata uses a distributed health engine to monitor the health of performance metrics, running health checks close to each service. The health engine supports fixed threshold alerts, dynamic threshold alerts, rolling windows, and anomaly rate information. Numerous alert notification methods are available, including PagerDuty, Slack, Email, and more.
Netdata trains a machine learning model for every collected metric, predicting the expected range of values in the next data collection. This allows for anomaly detection based on the trained model and stores the anomaly rate alongside collected metric values.
Netdata offers powerful tools to optimize troubleshooting and resolve issues faster:
This tool scans all metrics to find correlations within a specific time-frame. Highlight an area with a spike or dive on a chart, and Netdata will find other metrics that changed similarly at the same time.
This tool scans all metrics for anomalies during a specific time-frame. Highlight an area with a spike or dive on a chart, and Netdata will find detected anomalies across your infrastructure during that time-frame.
A cloud monitoring service tracks performance, availability, and security across cloud-based infrastructure and applications. It helps you detect issues, optimize resources, and maintain service reliability.
Key metrics include CPU usage, memory utilization, disk I/O, network traffic, application error rates, and cost metrics. Security logs and service-specific data are also important.
Yes. Netdata supports real-time monitoring across multiple cloud providers and on-prem systems, giving you a unified view of all infrastructure.
Absolutely. Netdata features a distributed health engine with fixed and dynamic threshold alerts, plus machine learning–based anomaly detection built-in.
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