Software Development

On the Spot Servicing with Hybrid Cloud Monitoring Solutions

Many businesses utilize cloud host management systems for their cloud services; however, with cloud monitoring solutions, the IT manager is able to monitor a hybrid cloud infrastructure and provision the necessary hardware on-the-fly.

Stated differently, cloud monitoring solutions provide the business with internal tools to monitor both the internal private cloud and the external public cloud.

Configurations and Management of Components

Hybrid cloud monitoring solutions allow the IT manager to configure and manage components and all hardware resources in the cloud. If anything on the network goes wrong, the monitoring solution must be able to alert the manager and facilitate the interface that lets the manager change hardware resources. If servers must be taken down, the manager should be able to remove the bad server from the rotation until it can be repaired. The IT manager can also route traffic to any new servers. The best part: all of these changes are completely invisible to the customer and the employees who use the hybrid cloud infrastructure for business requirements.

Analysis of External and Internal Traffic

A monitoring service should be able to detect when traffic seems malicious. Not all malicious-looking traffic is indeed trying to hack a system, but the monitoring service should be able to pick up on any suspicious activity.

Although traffic from the external Internet is especially suspicious by default, internal traffic is generally more benign because employees don’t typically try to obtain information about internal corporate data. However, the monitoring service should be able to detect anything that seems awry on the network.

Firewall systems and antivirus systems can sometimes connect with the monitoring system to alert the IT manager if any of the systems are compromised. While these systems help keep hackers out of the internal network, the monitoring solution can alert the manager to current attacks, so the manager can stop any future attacks.

Permissions and Security

Any cloud monitoring system should consider the importance of permissions, so only the IT manager and authorized personnel can access the logs and view any impending actions. Some solutions offer a way to create granular security, so that an IT manager can see all logs but other IT employees can only see logs assigned to them.

Granular security is a higher management overhead expense, but it can be useful when security is one of the biggest concerns for the organization. For companies that need granular security, it can be advantageous to only allow certain IT employees to have access to change logs, so that all employees are accountable for permission changes.

Deployment Monitoring and Alerts

One of the key points for any business is monitoring new code. New code can sometimes have serious bugs that will prevent proper execution of the code in case of an emergency. Monitoring solutions alert the manager to the presence of the bugs and allow the manager to find them and send them to software developers for quick hotfix changes. Bug monitoring helps the business stop serious issues with an application that could be costing the company money in lost customers and revenue.

Any good cloud host offers a solution for monitoring applications in a hybrid network. When choosing a host, ensure that monitoring tools are a part of the hosting package especially when custom applications are a part of the external platform.

Jennifer Marsh

Jennifer Marsh is a software developer, programmer and technology writer and also blogs for Rackspace Hosting. Rackspace Hosting is the service leader in cloud computing, and a founder of OpenStack, an open source cloud operating system. The San Antonio-based company provides Fanatical Support to its customers and partners, across a portfolio of IT services, including Managed Hosting and Cloud Computing.
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marykaichini
10 years ago

I think that the main idea of any monitoring software is to provide as much security as possible for the system. I am not in the cloud yet for some reasons and security is one of them in fact. There are a lo of nice monitoring tools which offer almost 100 % guarantee, but still things happen…

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