Cloud infrastructure monitoring solutions allow businesses to monitor, analyze, and manage the performance and health of their cloud-based infrastructure, including cloud-based servers, storage, virtual machines, networks, databases, applications, and websites. These tools provide visibility into complex cloud architectures, delivering actionable insights and facilitating timely issue resolution in order to maintain optimal system performance. As cloud environments continue to proliferate and become more intricate, effective cloud infrastructure monitoring is becoming increasingly important for organizations that want to maintain operational efficiency, reduce downtime, and ensure optimal user experiences.
Cloud infrastructure monitoring solutions typically offer an array of features, including real-time and historical monitoring of system performance, advanced analytics and visualization, automated alerting and notifications, customizable reporting dashboards, root cause analysis, and resource utilization tracking. They are designed to integrate seamlessly with various cloud platforms, such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), and support even complex hybrid and multi-cloud infrastructures.
The cloud infrastructure monitoring market is highly competitive, with numerous vendors offering tools for organizations of all sizes and industries. In this guide, we will explore the top cloud infrastructure monitoring solutions available today, highlighting the key use cases and features of each solution.
Paessler PRTG Hosted Monitor is a cloud-based monitoring software developed by Paessler AG. This versatile tool, intended for small to larger IT infrastructures, is capable of monitoring IT, IoT, and OT environments across on-premises, cloud-based, or hybrid setups. Hosted on AWS servers in various regions worldwide, it provides extensive monitoring opportunities for devices, applications, network traffic, websites, services, and energy efficiency.
Paessler PRTG Hosted Monitor simplifies the monitoring process by offering integrated support for major technologies and protocols, automatic network discovery for initial setup, and customizable dashboards for detailed analytics. Real-time alerts keep you informed, while limitless distributed monitoring facilitates surveillance of numerous remote locations. With user-friendly interfaces for web, desktop, and mobile devices, this subscription-based solution updates and backs up automatically, ensuring your access to the latest features.
Not only can PRTG Hosted Monitor cater to multiple distributed locations such as branch offices or data centers, but it can also be utilized by Managed Service Providers. It offers secure, continuous monitoring of remote networks and allows customers to remotely access their infrastructure with no need for dedicated hardware or installations, making the setup hassle-free and economically viable.
Checkmk Cloud Edition is a comprehensive monitoring solution designed to address the needs of cloud and hybrid IT infrastructures. It is specifically tailored for monitoring dynamic workloads across major cloud platforms such as AWS, Azure, and GCP. The platform covers key cloud use cases like compute, networking, and storage, as well as advanced cloud-native technologies like managed databases, functions, and microservices. Checkmk Cloud Edition is also compatible with various Kubernetes distributions like vanilla Kubernetes, OpenShift, AKS, EKS, and GKE.
Checkmk Cloud Edition keeps up with dynamic IT infrastructures by employing features like auto-registration to map cloud objects in real-time and cloud-ready agents for data collection from both cloud and on-premises hosts. These agents can autonomously send data to Checkmk servers, encrypting communication via TLS and monitoring servers in segmented networks.
The platform offers robust automation capabilities through its REST API, allowing for seamless configuration and operation of daily monitoring tasks. Additionally, monitoring agents can be centrally managed with the Agent Bakery. Checkmk Cloud Edition is designed to offer extensive coverage of on-premises and cloud workloads, supporting over 2,000 plugins out of the box. The platform allows for the creation and addition of custom monitoring plugins and ensures security through access control via SAML, LDAP/AD, and 2FA, whilst being scalable to hundreds of thousands of hosts.
Cisco AppDynamics is an application performance management solution that enables businesses to monitor and optimize their application environment. It is designed to work across traditional, hybrid, and cloud native infrastructures, providing comprehensive insight into application performance and user experience outcomes.
AppDynamics helps companies modernize their applications while reducing noise and costs. It offers seamless integration with Amazon CloudWatch and other public and private cloud environments, such as Microsoft Azure. The solution enables IT and Infrastructure teams to work together with a shared context, breaking down team silos and achieving business goals faster.
The platform also focuses on the bottom line by prioritizing KPIs that affect essential business results, such as revenue. It automates data collection and correlates cloud native services to application code to easily monitor and isolate performance issues in cloud native environments. Cisco AppDynamics supports a proactive approach by providing automated actions to prevent performance risks and optimize spending through Cisco Intersight Workload Optimizer. By utilizing AppDynamics, businesses can efficiently manage their application environments and drive innovation.
Datadog Infrastructure Monitoring is a SaaS solution that offers comprehensive visibility into infrastructure performance and security. It covers various environments, including on-premises, hybrid, IoT, and multi-cloud, and integrates with over 500 popular technologies such as Kubernetes and serverless platforms. The platform is easy to deploy and manage, requiring minimal maintenance, and features an intuitive user interface, making it accessible to a wide range of users.
Datadog Infrastructure Monitoring tracks thousands of out-of-the-box infrastructure metrics, provides continuous historical records, and enables quick troubleshooting through one-click correlations of related data across the stack. Its Metrics without Limits feature allows users to ingest and manage all their metrics selectively, maintaining accuracy and granularity. The platform also helps secure cloud infrastructure by offering continuous configuration checks, compliance framework support, and automatic detection and prioritization of cloud vulnerabilities.
With advanced collection capabilities, Datadog Infrastructure Monitoring allows users to access globally accurate percentiles and track the impact of every process in the stack. It also supports the integration of custom business-level metrics, adding additional value and insights for decision-makers. Overall, Datadog Infrastructure Monitoring is a comprehensive and user-friendly tool for managing and optimizing infrastructure performance and security.
Dynatrace Cloud Monitoring offers a comprehensive view of the entire cloud infrastructure, covering all nodes, transactions, and users. This platform is suitable for various cloud environments, including public, private, and hybrid. Its observability features enable full visibility across all cloud components, as well as the elimination of blind spots and advanced root cause analysis.
With Dynatrace Cloud Monitoring, businesses can enjoy plug-and-play functionality for modern cloud monitoring, capable of auto-detecting and monitoring cloud components while seamlessly adapting to dynamic environments. Dynatrace supports a broad spectrum of cloud services, automatically monitoring virtual machines as they are deployed. The platform also offers an understanding of how applications are deployed across cloud instances.
Focusing on container and microservice monitoring, Dynatrace supports distributed applications across hosts and cloud instances. This allows for observability within containers from the application perspective, without requiring modifications to images or configurations. The intelligent cloud scaling features enable businesses to optimize costs and utilize the full potential of auto-scaling capabilities within public clouds, like AWS.
Finally, Dynatrace Cloud Monitoring assists businesses during cloud migration processes. Whether moving an application or an entire data center to a public, private, or hybrid cloud, Dynatrace offers the necessary support throughout the migration journey.
IBM Instana Infrastructure Monitoring is a comprehensive solution that offers AI-powered automated monitoring, alerting, and remediation capabilities. This product delivers real-time visibility into complex, distributed applications, services, and infrastructure components, such as servers, containers, and databases. This allows teams to prevent downtime, optimize resource utilization, and improve user experiences and productivity.
IBM Instana enables organizations to monitor their entire infrastructure easily with real-time automated infrastructure monitoring across multiple clouds and on-premises environments. It provides one-second metric granularity for full-stack accuracy without any configuration or coding required. Instana automatically correlates performance, event, and configuration information from the full stack (cloud, infrastructure, Kubernetes, virtual machines, and services). This functionality empowers teams to take intelligent action immediately, regardless of the origin of an issue, helping to reduce mean time to resolution (MTTR).
Instana offers features such as an infrastructure map, comparison table, context guide, and compatibility with over 300 supported technologies. The infrastructure map provides an overview of all monitored systems and visualizes aspects of application infrastructure. The comparison table simplifies identifying critical application components and assessing performance metrics. Instana’s context guide dashboard reveals interdependencies between cloud, infrastructure, and application components to better understand the impact on application performance. The platform also integrates seamlessly with other monitoring tools to provide a comprehensive view of application performance across the entire IT infrastructure.
LogicMonitor Cloud Monitoring is a unified hybrid and multi-cloud observability platform that provides real-time visibility into the health and performance of cloud deployments. The platform supports AWS, Azure, and GCP, offering comprehensive multi-cloud monitoring in a single solution. Designed to keep up with rapidly changing cloud environments, LogicMonitor Cloud Monitoring has over 2,500 custom integrations and dynamic resource discovery capabilities that allow for automatic monitoring without manual oversight.
Businesses can benefit from quick deployment, out-of-the-box dashboards, and deep technical insights into their cloud infrastructure and apps. LogicMonitor also provides valuable financial insights by predicting cloud costs, identifying cost optimization opportunities, and offering detailed ROI analysis. Users can control their cloud spending by optimizing resource utilization, eliminating unnecessary costs, and monitoring spend thresholds and reserved instance expirations.
Intelligent alerting is another key feature of LogicMonitor Cloud Monitoring, with service insight capabilities that monitor and alert at the business level. Pre-configured alert thresholds based on AI-driven best practices and patented algorithms help detect log events and changes across both cloud and on-prem infrastructure landscapes. Overall, LogicMonitor Cloud Monitoring allows organizations to optimize their cloud operations and achieve complete visibility into the health, performance, and availability of their cloud platforms.
New Relic Infrastructure Monitoring is a comprehensive infrastructure monitoring platform that enables businesses to identify and resolve issues across cloud and on-premises systems. With its focus on providing a unified solution, New Relic allows users to visualize the relationships between infrastructures and application performance for fast and efficient problem-solving.
One of the key features of New Relic Infrastructure Monitoring is its ability to provide an overview of system health, including the status of hosts, events, and alerts. This allows users to quickly understand the overall health of their systems and identify any deviations or anomalies. New Relic’s embedded change tracking helps users evaluate the impact of app deployments on their hosts so that they can resolve issues, monitor host and configuration changes, and minimize the impact on their applications.
The New Relic Infrastructure Monitoring platform offers a subscription-based pricing model that means that customers only pay for what they use and receive consistent per-GB pricing. Additionally, the platform offers users a single location to integrate infrastructure and application performance management, aiding in the elimination of siloed teams, tools, and data. This results in higher application uptime and a more efficient approach to maintaining and monitoring IT systems.
Splunk Infrastructure Monitoring offers real-time monitoring and troubleshooting for on-prem, hybrid, and multi-cloud infrastructures, ensuring optimal performance and complete visibility. Its full-stack visibility enables seamless correlation between hybrid infrastructure and microservices, leading to in-context insights for smooth troubleshooting.
Featuring real-time streaming analytics, Splunk uses a streaming architecture to ingest, analyze, and alert in seconds, blending metrics and logs for in-flight analytics within a single, integrated dashboard. Moreover, it offers centralized management, utilizing programmable APIs and monitor-as-code in CI/CD, to provide transparency and enterprise control suitable for self-service deployment. With in-context troubleshooting, Splunk combines real-time metrics with logs already ingested in the Splunk Platform via Log Observer Connect, further enhancing cloud insights and expediting root cause analysis.
Splunk also provides advanced Kubernetes monitoring and instant visualization with over 250+ cloud service integrations and pre-built dashboards for rapid, full-stack visualization. Additionally, it supports real-time actionable alerts that instantly detect and accurately report on dynamic thresholds, eliminating alert storms and reducing MTTD/MTTR. Finally, centralized enterprise controls enable users to monitor service-level objectives and indicators quickly, while scalable architecture ensures that businesses can troubleshoot across countless microservices and billions of events without compromising their monitoring budget.
VMware Aria is a multi-cloud management solution designed to optimize business outcomes across various cloud environments, platforms, and tools. Powered by VMware Aria Graph, a data store technology, it addresses the scale and speed required by cloud-native environments. The VMware Aria UI adapts to the needs of different users, such as cloud providers and consumers, by employing machine learning to understand their interactions with applications.
VMware Aria offers a range of features, including a global search that allows users to access relevant information across all services within a single user interface. Its curated insights help users identify and resolve problems affecting their applications across any cloud. The solution also enables in-context switching to VMware Aria services for deeper investigation and analysis. Users can access a unified configuration and change history, allowing them to view alterations, rewind to a previous point, and reassemble snapshots of topologies.
The solution provides self-service access to cloud consumption, along with monitoring, troubleshooting, capacity analysis, and cost visibility. It enables financial accountability by allowing users to control cloud spending and analyze cost and capacity trends, as well as improving the efficiency of resource utilization and optimizing performance. Furthermore, it secures configurations to manage risk and maintain compliance across cloud workloads, services, and infrastructure. Finally, Aria accelerates agility by speeding up the delivery of infrastructure, platform, and app services through a self-service consumption experience.
Cloud infrastructure monitoring is the process of evaluating, managing, and controlling the performance and security of an organization’s cloud infrastructure, including cloud-based servers, storage, networks, virtual machines, websites, databases, and applications. Effective cloud infrastructure monitoring enables organizations to identify, analyze, and remediate any back-end problems in their infrastructure before they can impact end users—be they employees or customers.
Cloud-based deployments can be complex, with many organizations today using a broad stack of cloud applications and services. Because of this, monitoring a cloud infrastructure can be time-consuming and resource-intensive… but that’s where cloud infrastructure monitoring tools come in.
Cloud infrastructure monitoring tools continuously collect performance data in real-time from across all the components of your cloud infrastructure (usually with support for hybrid and multi-cloud environments). Using this data, they automatically track performance, resource allocation, availability, and user activity, among other key performance indicators (KPIs). They then provide detailed reports on their findings, making it much easier and quicker for IT and security teams to gain visibility into their entire environment so they can proactively resolve any downtime or security issues.
Most cloud infrastructure monitoring solutions offer a combination of different monitoring technologies. It’s important that you know which assets you need to monitor before you start comparing solutions, so you can check that your chosen solution supports them. Here are some of the most common monitoring technologies currently available:
There are numerous benefits to implementing a cloud infrastructure monitoring tool, the main one being that they make it much easier for organizations to gain visibility into their cloud infrastructure’s availability, security, and performance. That’s because they’re highly scalable, so can increase monitoring activity seamlessly as your organization grows; they’re maintained by the host, which means less management and maintenance for your IT and security teams; they automatically collect and visualize performance data for you, saving time and resources; and they’re compatible with lots of different device types, which means you can monitor your entire environment from anywhere, at any time.
So, we get that using a dedicated tool makes cloud monitoring much easier and more effective, but why should you monitor your cloud infrastructure in the first place?
Well, for starters, it enables you to proactively and immediately detect any issues in your infrastructure, then remediate them before they can result in downtime or data loss. This helps you to secure your organization’s and your customers’ data. Additionally, by helping you identify the root cause of any incidents, cloud monitoring tools allow you to take steps to prevent the same thing from happening in the future, boosting your overall security.
Secondly, cloud infrastructure monitoring provides you with valuable information on how your infrastructure is operating. Using this data, you can make better, more informed decisions and strategic plans.
Cloud infrastructure monitoring can also help you improve your end user experience by ensuring that your systems and services are running optimally and catching any performance issues early on – before they become major outages. A seamless user experience helps keep your employees productive and ensures that your customers can interact with your services easily, making them more likely to come back in the future.
If all that wasn’t enough, monitoring your cloud infrastructure can help you save money. By monitoring metrics such as network performance, memory and storage usage, and server load, you can identify areas that are over- or under-provisioned and make changes to your resource allocation as needed. Additionally, automating the cloud monitoring process reduces labor costs, and enables your teams to proactively catch issues in real-time as they crop up—reducing costs associated with downtime and data loss.
Here are the top features you should look for when comparing cloud infrastructure monitoring tools:
Caitlin Harris is Deputy Head of Content at Expert Insights. Caitlin is an experienced writer and journalist, with years of experience producing award-winning technical training materials and journalistic content. Caitlin holds a First Class BA in English Literature and German, and provides our content team with strategic editorial guidance as well as carrying out detailed research to create articles that are accurate, engaging and relevant. Caitlin co-hosts the Expert Insights Podcast, where she interviews world-leading B2B tech experts.
Laura Iannini is an Information Security Engineer. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Cybersecurity from the University of West Florida. Laura has experience with a variety of cybersecurity platforms and leads technical reviews of leading solutions. She conducts thorough product tests to ensure that Expert Insights’ reviews are definitive and insightful.