B Swaminathan | IMAWS
Cloud network monitoring service is the process of reviewing, observing and managing the operational workflow in a cloud based information technology infrastructure and that is either into manual or automated management techniques to verify,the availability and functionality of web portals or websites and computer devices or any of applications related to any other cloud infrastructure.
Most organizations know that they need monitoring to ensure site uptime and keep their business running. Yet, many sites still suffer from outages first reported by their customers due to small mistakes made with their monitoring systems. Monitoring mistakes are easy to make and easy to overlook, but the consequences can be detrimental. “Cloud monitoring is primarily an element of cloud security and management procedure; typically it is implemented by automated monitoring software waste that provides centralized access and control over a cloud infrastructure, the cloud. The cloud administrator should be able to review the operational status and overall health of any cloud based device or component at any given point of that. We have the things that should be any of the CAS perspective or DevOps or head perspective that should be available at the fingertips.”, says Arun Padmanabhan, Mentor, adplist.org. Arun has rich experience in working for some of the leading start-ups and enterprises and has handled heavy data on cloud.
Cloud Monitoring: Common mistakes by IT decision makers
Dhaval Mankad, Vice President IT, Havmor Ice Cream says, “We often hear from many about myths where people believe if one is on cloud everything is safe. Cloud is built on a shared responsibility model and whatever you may have to do on the data center landscape, is equally applicable to cloud landscape. Secondly, although you may have cloud partners to manage the landscape or internal team to manage, it is important to review landscape continuously for gaps – this cloud be review of unwanted AMIs, Snapshots, unapproved entries in security groups, service activations, costs & budgets.” He also highlighted experimentation: never rely on consultant views alone. “You need to have an internal team or partner who is continuously monitoring new offerings by cloud OEMs. Most new family instances come with lower price and higher performance hence all your on-demand instances can easily be moved and similarly for storage types.”
According to Vinod Sivaramakrishnan, a veteran CIO for close to 3 decades, one of the main mistakes which IT decision makers make is to look at cost as the deciding factor and not understanding the actual needs of the organization, which is the large variability of demand for IT resources. Another frequent 
mistake is the focus on the age-old Capex vs. Opex discussion, which is largely irrelevant as a factor to most organizations given the percentage of spend on IT as a part of overall expenses. In fact, it is a myth that CFOs have a single-minded focus on cost, he says. Many CFOs are now quite IT savvy and understand the reasons for moving to cloud, such as a good DR arrangement with short Recovery Point and Recovery Time objectives, or accelerated month end processing from 3 days to (say) 8 hours because of scalability in the cloud. When the arguments are made in this way, they usually get the CFO’s nod quite easily. He also adds that even a cloud-friendly CIO would not like to have 100% of his/her environment on cloud and will maintain a local or near-local data center, with a small footprint of continuously used systems such as attendance or leave management etc. Cloud would be used for accommodating big swings in demand, for instance a Festival Sale for a major e-Commerce retailer where significantly larger capacity is required for a short duration.
Key Challenges:
Paul Raj M, who heads IT in Purvanakara lists out some of the key challenges in cloud monitoring:
Root Cause Analysis & Monitoring at the forefront:
Analysis of Root Causes & Proactive Monitoring: Cloud systems are very difficult to diagnose problems at the root cause. It is essential to investigate the cloud in depth in order to discover the cause of the problem. Developing a root cause analysis method that is effective and efficient is key to solving the problem in a timely manner. On top, there is a need for proactive monitoring since most existing Cloud Monitoring Tools are reactive. It is therefore difficult to optimize performance in critical situations. A prediction technique should be employed so that users and cloud managers are aware of the possibility of a crash before it occurs. A machine learning algorithm can be used to predict cloud status the best way.
Efficient Energy Management: It is vital that Cloud Monitoring Systems minimize energy consumption. Currently, monitoring tools and cloud computing do not place much emphasis on reducing energy consumption. The high resource usage rate in the cloud consumes more energy. The monitoring data can be utilized to develop new policies that reduce energy consumption.
Interoperability: Hybrid cloud performance can be monitored seamlessly by developing standard interoperable tools or protocols to overcome the ongoing issues. In monitoring hybrid cloud performance, there is a lack of visibility to predict resource usage, challenges supporting a dynamic environment, and far-reaching overhead in managing multiple tools/procedures.
Key Things To Select Cloud Monitoring Software:
Dhanasekaran Sivaraj, a cloud evangelist and Chief Technology Officer, Belstar Microfinance puts cloud monitoring in three aspects. Dhanasekaran says, “ In my view, while thinking about cloud monitoring, a CIO/CTO should think on prevention methodology, alert mechanism and storage security”. 
“A good solution should have a good prevention aspet. They [IT heads] should look at a solution provider with a good threshold of every parameter. They should also look at the server and networking equipment to be in state-of-the-art that would prevent any unwanted incidents.”, he says further adding that the solutions should give a CTO regular alerts before the incidents. “Any solution can alert us once the attack happens. However, who can alert us of a possible incident matters. The last aspect we would look at is storage security. Most BFSI companies today are started migrating critical data to the cloud. Thus, a secured storage space is always liked by the IT decision makers.”
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