Mastering Cloud Monitoring Data: Optimise Cloud Spend, Security, and Compliance

Navigating the complexities of your cloud infrastructure can feel overwhelming. While the cloud offers incredible potential, effectively managing its intricate web of services and costs requires robust cloud monitoring and management strategies. This article delves into the essential data points you need to unlock the true power of your cloud environment, optimise performance, enhance security, and maximise efficiency.

What type of data can you get from cloud providers?

Cloud providers give you a lot of monitoring data and information about the services you consume to run your business applications. Add to this the information, logs, and data from your business application layers—you have a huge amount of data to process and make sense of. The transparency available is amazing, and it is a very important and delicate balance to ensure you are not ignoring the key data and not reacting to the wrong one.

So, in the context of cloud-powered business applications, data refers to any information generated, collected, and stored throughout your operations. This can include:

• Customer data: demographics, purchase history, preferences, and interactions with your website or app.  
• Operational data: sales figures, inventory levels, supply chain metrics, production output.
• System data: logs, performance metrics, and usage statistics from your cloud infrastructure and applications.

The Golden Signals of Your Cloud Monitoring Data

Data is the raw material for deriving insights, empowering you to make informed decisions and optimise your business. In the context of this article, let’s focus on system data. As mentioned already, there is a lot of data in that domain. To make sense of it and filter all the noise that is not essential, we must define and focus on so-called golden signals. 

Golden Signals are a set of four key metrics used to monitor the health and performance of your cloud-based systems and applications:  

1. Latency: The time it takes for a request to be processed and a response delivered. High latency translates to slow performance, impacting user experience.  
2. Traffic: The volume of requests or data flowing through your system. Sudden spikes or drops in traffic can indicate problems or opportunities.  
3. Errors: The number of failed requests or errors encountered during processing. Monitoring error rates is crucial for identifying and resolving issues quickly.  
4. Saturation: How close your system is to its maximum capacity or utilisation. High saturation levels leave little room for handling increased demand and can lead to performance degradation or outages.  

By tracking these Golden Signals, organisations gain real-time visibility into their cloud environment, enabling them to:

• Detecting issues proactively: Identify performance bottlenecks, errors, or capacity constraints before they impact your users.  
• Respond quickly to incidents: Troubleshoot and resolve problems efficiently, minimising downtime and impact on your business.  
• Optimise resource utilisation: Understand how your system is used and ensure you have the right resources allocated to meet demand.
• Plan for future growth: Anticipate capacity needs and scale your infrastructure proactively to support business expansion.  

In the data-driven, transparent future, mastering the collection, analysis, and interpretation of your general data and golden signals is crucial for successful cloud management.

Cloud Monitoring Insights You Get from Cloud Service Providers

The abovementioned things help you focus, ensure operational excellence, and support operational teams and their decisions in real-time. What about the additional system data we get from the cloud service providers? 

Let’s also remember that in the multi-cloud world, every provider has its way of exposing and naming data. Engineers working with that data must transform and uniform the meaning so it can be interpreted the same way. And regardless of the source and naming.

Furthermore, relying solely on such data is insufficient, but applying a level of data engineering provides a fresh perspective and much better insights into its relevance and meaning in our context.

Let’s explore examples of the insights that could be gathered from cloud provider system data in the context of spending, security, compliance, and anomaly detection:

Spend

• Cost allocation: Tagging and categorising cloud resources enable accurate cost tracking and allocation across different departments, projects, or business units.
• Cost optimisation: Identifying unused resources, idle instances, or inefficient configurations helps reduce unnecessary spending.
• Budgeting and forecasting: Historical spending data can be used to create budgets and forecast future cloud costs.

Security

• Access control: Monitoring user activity, login attempts, and access patterns helps detect unauthorised access or suspicious behaviour.
• Network security: Analysing network traffic, firewall logs, and intrusion detection systems can identify potential threats or vulnerabilities.
• Data protection: Tracking data access, encryption status, and data movement can ensure the protection of sensitive information and meet compliance requirements.

Compliance

• Audit trails: Maintaining comprehensive logs of system events and user actions facilitates compliance audits and investigations.
• Regulatory compliance: Mapping cloud resources and configurations to specific regulatory requirements helps ensure adherence and avoids penalties.
• Data residency: Tracking data storage locations across different cloud regions ensures compliance with data sovereignty laws.

Anomaly Detection

• Baseline behavior: Establishing normal resource usage patterns, network traffic, and user activity enables the detection of deviations that might indicate security incidents or performance issues.
• Machine learning: Leveraging machine learning algorithms to analyse large volumes of system data can help identify subtle patterns and anomalies that traditional rule-based systems might miss.
• Real-time alerts: Setting up alerts for unusual behaviour enables quick response and mitigation of potential problems.

Make Cloud Monitoring easy with Insight by Devoteam, a multi-cloud management platform

Insight by Devoteam is our multi-cloud management platform that can help you to navigate through that data and make decisions based on transformed and aggregated data to ensure your costs, compliance and inventory trends are in control with the help of:

• Data Engineering and AI-driven analytics: Transforming and analysing all that data over time to detect patterns and forecast context-driven behaviours
• Visualisation and dashboards: Creating intuitive visualisations and dashboards makes it easier to interpret complex system data and identify trends or issues at a glance.