Managing a multi-cloud environment can feel like juggling blindfolded. Traditional monitoring tools offer glimpses, but lack the depth to truly understand your cloud's health. Here's where observability steps in, acting as your multi-cloud X-ray machine, revealing the intricate workings of your entire system.
Gartner mentioned in the Hype Cycle of Cloud Security 2022 report that mature technology solutions for Enterprise Cloud Service Brokerage & Cloud Management Platforms are now available. The approach for CMP has started shifting from “Platform to Tools”. Enterprises are going to focus on the main requirements and then decide on the tool. This is and further going to be a challenging task for CMP players, hence they need to keep innovating to be meaningful and useful.
Why Observability Matters in a Multi-Cloud Environment
As businesses embrace the flexibility and scalability of multi-cloud, managing disparate environments becomes a challenge. Traditional monitoring tools struggle to provide a holistic view, leading to blind spots and delayed troubleshooting. Observability bridges this gap by offering a deeper understanding of your entire cloud ecosystem.
Benefits of Multi-Cloud Observability
- Enhanced Security: Gain real-time insights into potential security threats across all your clouds. Proactively identify and address vulnerabilities before they become exploits.
- Improved Performance: Quickly pinpoint bottlenecks and performance issues impacting applications or resources. Optimize cloud resource allocation for better user experience and cost savings.
- Streamlined Troubleshooting: Eliminate the finger-pointing between cloud providers. Observability tools provide a centralized view for faster issue resolution and reduced downtime.
- Empowered Decision-Making: Data-driven insights from observability tools enable informed decisions about cloud resource allocation, cost optimization, and overall cloud strategy.
In this blog, I am going to talk about aggregated monitoring & security capabilities Jamcracker CMP tool provides under “Monitoring & Observability” functional areas. Following are the abstractions built for Auditing, Monitoring and Securing various infrastructure and application resources.
- Native Monitoring with Open Framework to integrate
- Monitoring via 3rd party tools like Zabbix
- Security & Operations Recommendations
- Application Change Analysis for Azure
- AWS Event History
1. Native Monitoring with Open Framework to Integrate – Jamcracker has built native monitoring capabilities to automate policy-based governance. It also provides dashboard live monitoring key parameters such as
- Status of Resources
- Status of configured Events
- Drill downs monitoring such as CPU utilization, memory utilization, network utilization, Volume utilization, Disk reads& writes
2. Monitoring via 3rd party tools like Zabbix– With an open integration framework, Jamcracker has done integration with Zabbix monitoring tool and abstraction is available as a dashboard for extended elements and now enterprises can
- Monitor their device parameters, like VM’s, NIC, Firewall etc.
- Monitor their site/URL monitoring
- Monitor your site network traffic
- Monitor their host application interfaces
- Monitor their network adapter usage,
- Monitor their network traffic
- Monitor their firewall parameters
- Monitor their firewall context switches
- Monitor their firewall network traffic
3. Security & Operation Recommendations – The security recommendation dashboard gives actionable insight to improve security of the AWS Trusted Advisor and Azure resources by creating abstraction using Azure Advisor. Operational recommendations include provider policy enforcements. Critical parameters like impacted resources, level of impact, and recommended solutions can be seen in the dashboard.
4. Application Change Analysis for Azure – The purpose-built dashboard for Azure resources monitor,compute, and aggregate change-related data from the right data source. It created observability by giving analytics data and convenience to navigate and identify changes and their impact. The drill-down visibility such as changed property, timestamps, and change logs like values, category, and types. It gives abstraction to see the change side by side.
5. AWS Event History – By integrating with AWS CloudTrail native APIs, Jamcracker provides visibility to compliance auditing of AWS resources and AWS accounts accessed and used directly, via APIs or services. The visibility provides a list of activities done by people, groups, or AWS services in AWS accounts. The drill-down details like event ID, event source, event name, IP address, and event time.
CMP tools flexibility and agility to provide Monitoring & Observability by creating abstractions for underlying cloud providers going to be key differentiators among CMP tools providers. Jamcracker having cloud brokerage and cloud management strongly built as cross functional attributes are not limiting Observability to just IT Ops or DevSecOps, we have extended this to FinOps as well.