Introduction: Rise of Hybrid, Multi-Cloud Approaches
While you often read about the move to “the cloud,” the reality is that most organizations aren’t moving to a single cloud, but multiple cloud environments from multiple providers. There can be a range of reasons for companies to use cloud services from more than one provider today:
- Teams may opt to use different cloud providers for different workloads or services, based on such considerations as capacity, cost, and technical requirements.
- Considerations can also include geography and proximity to cloud provider regions as well as regional privacy regulations and policies.
- After a merger or acquisition, a team may have multiple cloud accounts with multiple service providers to manage.
For IT operations teams, the upshot of this proliferation of cloud services is complexity. Often, teams start by relying on the monitoring tools offered by the cloud provider. By definition, the use of multiple clouds therefore requires the use of multiple tools. Further, while the migration to cloud environments continues, increasingly dynamic on-premises deployments will remain a part of most enterprise landscapes moving forward. For just about every enterprise operations team, therefore, a hybrid mix of multiple cloud and on-premises environments will need to be monitored.
For most organizations, this means dozens of monitoring tools may be required. Managing this proliferation of tools introduces a number of challenges. Teams are left juggling different interfaces, trying to aggregate data from multiple sources for reporting, bouncing from one tool to the next when an issue arises, and so on. Beyond this labor-intensive, inefficient effort, teams have to contend with poor visibility, degraded service levels, spiraling costs, and more.
Requirements: Unified Solution for Azure Monitoring… and More
In our work with leading enterprises around the world, we’re seeing significant demand for support for Azure environments. What we’re also hearing is that many of those organizations that have services running on Azure today also have a presence in other cloud environments, such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google Cloud Platform (GCP).
Consequently, what IT operations teams need now isn’t a new tool for monitoring Azure; what they need is a comprehensive solution that can monitor Azure and the entire hybrid, multi-cloud ecosystem.
Establishing Unified Visibility of Hybrid, Multi-Cloud Environments
With DX Unified Infrastructure Management (DX UIM), teams can establish a unified view of all the cloud and on-premises environments their business services rely on. DX UIM represents a single solution for monitoring traditional data centers, public cloud services, and hybrid infrastructure environments.
DX UIM enables teams to do efficient, comprehensive monitoring of their Azure environments, including those that span multiple regions and, in the case of managed service providers, multiple customers. In addition to Azure monitoring, DX UIM offers coverage of AWS and GCP, and the modern architectures associated with cloud services, such as Apache, Hadoop, Mongo, and Nutanix. Plus, DX UIM offers coverage of physical servers, virtual machines, hyper-converged infrastructures, storage platforms, databases, packaged applications, and big data technologies.
Efficient, Powerful Azure Monitoring
When it comes to monitoring Azure environments, DX UIM offers a number of key advantages:
Extensive Monitoring Breadth and Depth
With DX UIM, teams can gain complete coverage of their Azure services, including computing, networking, applications, analytics, databases, storage, integrations, and management interfaces. Further, the solution can tie together data from these different areas to provide a complete, unified picture of the environment.
Streamlined, Scalable Configuration
DX UIM features an intuitive template editor and Monitoring Configuration Service (MCS). These capabilities streamline initial configurations for metrics, baselines, alarm thresholds, time of thresholds, custom alarm messages, and more. Teams can configure once for a specific Azure element type and then seamlessly deploy on all those elements across the entire Azure environment.
Automated Scanning and Data Collection
DX UIM can automatically scan the Azure environment, discover all deployed components, and collect location and service details. The solution features integrations with Azure Service Health, enabling collection of data on component status. Based on rules administrators define, the solution can also automatically group elements discovered and keep inventories updated.
Robust, Actionable Insights
DX UIM offers advanced, customizable visibility to ensure teams can gain maximum insights from the Azure monitoring data being captured. A number of pre-packaged dashboards are available to use immediately. In addition, teams can leverage complete customization options, tailoring data points captured, how elements are displayed, and so on. The solution also offers flexible reporting capabilities. Reports can be run on an ad hoc basis and scheduled to run at desired intervals.
Objective Service Level Monitoring
Teams can leverage advanced service level management views in order to efficiently track service level agreements (SLAs) and service level objectives (SLOs). This provides objective, quantifiable data for tracking and reporting on SLAs, eliminating finger pointing and ensuring teams are accountable.
When organizations start running important business services on Azure, it’s critical to monitor the performance of these services. To meet their imperatives, teams don’t need a tool for monitoring Azure—they need a solution like DX UIM. With DX UIM, teams can monitor their entire IT ecosystem, including on-premises infrastructure, Azure deployments, and other cloud environments. With this unified visibility, teams can boost service levels and operational efficiency.
For more information on monitoring Azure with DX UIM, check out the demo.
This blog post was co-authored by Ravishu Arora and Randy Budde. Randy has been developing content extensively in the enterprise security and software markets for more than 25 years. Over the years, he’s written on a wide range of technologies and topics, including artificial intelligence, automation and orchestration, infrastructure management, encryption, IT service management, and software development.