The advent of multi-cloud and hybrid-cloud architectures has created new opportunities for organizations to leverage best-in-class features from various cloud service providers. However, these complex environments present their own unique challenges, especially when it comes to monitoring and managing performance.

Visibility

The visibility challenge in multi-cloud and hybrid-cloud environments often stems from the use of disparate monitoring tools that are native to each cloud provider. While these native tools (like Amazon CloudWatch, Google Cloud Monitoring, and Azure Monitor) are excellent within their respective ecosystems, they don’t necessarily play well together when it comes to consolidating data and providing a comprehensive, unified view of your entire infrastructure.

For instance, if you have an application running on AWS and another on GCP, both emitting their own set of metrics, it can be difficult to correlate these metrics using CloudWatch and Cloud Monitoring respectively. This could lead to blind spots in your visibility across your multi-cloud setup.

A multi-cloud monitoring solution like Netdata, aims to solve this problem by providing a consistent and unified way to collect, aggregate, and visualize metrics from applications running on any platform. These solutions are designed to integrate with a wide variety of systems, applications, and platforms, allowing them to collect and present data in a consistent format. This enables you to correlate metrics and events across your entire infrastructure, greatly improving visibility and making it easier to detect and troubleshoot issues.

Complexity

Complexity is another major challenge in monitoring multi-cloud and hybrid-cloud environments. As you move from a single cloud provider to multiple providers, or incorporate on-premises infrastructure into your cloud strategy, the complexity of your infrastructure increases significantly. This can make it much harder to manage and monitor your environment effectively.

Here’s a breakdown of how this complexity manifests and how it affects monitoring:

1. Diverse Infrastructure Components

With multi-cloud and hybrid-cloud environments, you’re dealing with a wide array of services and technologies. These can range from compute instances like AWS EC2, Azure Virtual Machines or Google Compute Engine, to database services like Amazon RDS, Azure SQL Database, or Google Cloud SQL, and many more. Each of these services has its own data that need to be monitored, and each can have its own set of potential issues and troubleshooting methods. This diversity can make it challenging to keep track of everything and understand how different parts of your infrastructure are interacting.

2. Inconsistent Naming Conventions & Metrics

Different cloud providers have different conventions for naming resources, as well as different sets of metrics they provide for monitoring. This inconsistency can make it difficult to correlate data across different platforms and identify trends or issues. For instance, if you’re trying to analyze CPU usage across your entire infrastructure, you’ll have to account for the fact that AWS, Azure, and GCP may report this metric in slightly different ways.

3. Multiple Management Interfaces

Each cloud provider has its own management console or interface. This means you have to switch between different interfaces to manage and monitor your infrastructure, which can be time-consuming and increase the likelihood of missing important information.

4. Security & Access Control Complexity

Different cloud providers have different security models and access control mechanisms. This can make it more complex to ensure that your monitoring tools have the necessary access to your resources across all platforms.

The key to managing this complexity is to use a monitoring solution like Netdata, that can integrate with a wide range of services and platforms, normalize and correlate data from different sources, and provide a unified interface for management and monitoring. By reducing the need to switch between different tools and interfaces, such a solution can make it much easier to manage and monitor complex multi-cloud and hybrid-cloud environments.

Cost

Cost is a significant challenge when monitoring multi-cloud and hybrid-cloud infrastructures. Each cloud provider has its own complex pricing model, dependent on factors like compute resources used, data storage, network traffic, and other parameters. Added to this is the need for resource optimization, managing data transfer costs, and dealing with cost allocation, making the overall management quite complex.

Traditional, centralized monitoring solutions can inadvertently add to these costs. These solutions typically aggregate data from all cloud providers to a single location. This approach necessitates the transfer of substantial volumes of data between different cloud platforms, which can result in considerable egress data transfer costs. On top of this, centralized solutions usually require substantial compute resources to process and store the aggregated data, further adding to the total cost of ownership.

Netdata, with its distributed architecture, supports the establishment of multiple centralization points, one within each cloud provider. This unique feature allows for the efficient aggregation and centralization of metrics within each provider, eliminating almost completely egress bandwidth for monitoring, contributing significantly to cost reduction.

Furthermore, the lightweight and efficient design of Netdata minimizes the impact on system resources. By using a minimal amount of system resources, Netdata ensures that your infrastructure’s performance isn’t hampered while providing thorough monitoring and real-time insights.

How Netdata Can Help

Netdata is a versatile monitoring solution that can play a significant role in managing multi-cloud and hybrid-cloud infrastructures.

Comprehensive Coverage

Netdata offers comprehensive coverage, supporting a wide variety of platforms and applications. This means you can monitor different aspects of your infrastructure using a single tool.

Real-time Performance Monitoring

Netdata offers high-resolution, real-time performance monitoring. This enables you to detect and respond to issues promptly, ensuring optimal performance and minimal downtime.

Distributed, Open-source & Easy-to-use

With Netdata, you can centralize your monitoring efforts, but not your data. It is open-source and designed for simplicity, allowing for seamless integration and quick setup. Its user-friendly dashboard provides a holistic view of your entire infrastructure, making it easier to identify and troubleshoot issues.

Intelligent Alerts

Netdata’s intelligent alerting system can automatically detect anomalies and alert your team. This allows you to address issues proactively, reducing the potential impact on your services.

Standardization

Netdata’s approach towards standardizing metrics across all providers is a game-changer. It unifies all metrics, standardizing the way resources and application data is represented, irrespective of the cloud provider. This saves a tremendous amount of time and effort in setting up a monitoring solution, and significantly reduces the learning curve for teams needing to understand different monitoring tools for each cloud provider.

Automation

Netdata comes with a host of automated features that greatly simplify the task of monitoring complex infrastructures. It offers auto-discovery of metrics, automatic generation of dashboards, and alert templates that are attached to all components of the infrastructure. Beyond these features, Netdata also supports the automation of its own deployment and configuration through Infrastructure as Code (IaC) practices. This makes Netdata a highly scalable solution that can seamlessly grow with your infrastructure.

Integration With Other Tools

Netdata is an open platform, integrating seamlessly with a wide range of tools, from other monitoring solutions to ticketing systems. While it doesn’t monitor logs and traces, it boasts impressive APM capabilities for metrics, including OpenMetrics compatibility. This versatility allows teams to incorporate Netdata into their existing infrastructure with minimal disruption.

Scalability

With excellent vertical scalability and virtually unlimited horizontal scalability, Netdata stands as one of the most flexible and scalable monitoring solutions available today. On a 16 core and 32GB RAM VM, Netdata can ingest over 1M metrics per second at 50% utilization, making it a capable solution for even the largest and most complex infrastructures.

Data Security & Compliance

Netdata places a strong emphasis on data security. All monitoring data is stored on-premises, exclusively on your systems. This approach ensures maximum data security and helps you maintain compliance with data protection regulations.

In conclusion, Netdata’s comprehensive coverage, real-time monitoring, standardization, automation, and intelligent alerts make it an ideal solution for monitoring multi-cloud and hybrid-cloud environments. By offering a unified, standardized, and automated approach, it can help you overcome the common challenges associated with such environments, and ensure that your infrastructure remains performant, resilient, and cost-effective.