Continuous Monitoring in the Cloud: Strategies for Real-Time Insights

Monitoring and observability have been important aspects of cloud and devops.

Also as devops is a continuous process with various stages, monitoring is one of the important phases, as it feeds the inputs into the plan and subsequent stages.

For the iterative approach to become more effective, monitoring and observability becomes very important.

Also, public cloud companies like aws and Azure have been building their monitoring platforms as centralized platforms that have the flexibility to monitor all kinds of cloud resources.

Here are some of the strategies which I have witnessed to be very effective

1. Detailed monitoring strategy in place

This is a priority item and is to be given due importance. As much focus and bandwidth are allotted for architecture and other details, monitoring is also to be given due and the strategy has to be planned.

# Touchpoints to be monitored

# Level of monitoring to be done — Simple, detailed and any specifics

# Duration

# How the data would be analyzed and reports to be created

2. Dedicate teams to monitor the cloud resources

There have to be experts whose focus is to continuously look at the logs being generated, the metrics and also the dashboard.

An adequate number of employees can help handle this part.

3. Impact of monitoring on the Security of the enterprise

Having robust monitoring systems can help enhance the security of the enterprise. Checks and balances have to be built across all levels.

4. Leverage robust cloud monitoring platforms

AWS cloudwatch and Azure monitor are robust cloud monitoring platforms and can definitely help have a robust monitoring strategy in place.

Their open apis and other interoperability parameters helps to connect with other cloud systems seamlessly.

Above are some of the high level aspects which can help in building monitoring systems which would help improve overall technology health of the organization.

What are your recommendations?