Cloud Monitoring: getting the full picture

We all know this: the cloud is here to stay and Cloud Monitoring is not something IT Operations teams could escape. Whether it be Amazon AWS or Microsoft Azure monitoring for public IaaS and PaaS cloud services, Kubernetes and Docker monitoring for private cloud infrastructure, of Office365 monitoring as an example of SaaS offering, cloud monitoring is a must-have for any ITIM platform.

It is expected that by 2025 about 40% of IT workload will reside in the Public Cloud, as opposed to 19% in 2019. The latest trends on the subject are about distributing workload among multiple public clouds, mixing private & public clouds into a hybrid infrastructure and in the near future you may even hear about edge cloud infrastructure.

Your challenge is not so much about cloud monitoring, though. After all, public cloud and SaaS offerings come with their own monitoring services, and your DevOps teams have long installed specialized deployment and observability tools to manage their private cloud Kubernetes clusters.

What you really need is a clear view of all business-critical IT workflows that make innovative customer experiences or efficient processes a reality, from the cloud to the edge. This is where Centreon comes into play: to get the right cloud monitoring insights into this clear view before sharing it with all stakeholders.

Centreon Cloud Monitoring is no different from on-premise, edge or legacy monitoring: it leverages our Plugin Pack service that maintains an up-to-date library of technologies to monitor 470+ type of resources or equipment. You don’t need to worry about what’s coming next into your cloud infrastructure, we’re adding new Plugin Packs on a weekly basis so that you’re always prepared for the next technology trends that make modern IT a never-ending journey.

Amazon Web Services comes with a monitoring service called CloudWatch. Microsoft Azure also comes with its own monitoring service called Azure Monitor. Both follow the same API-Centric philosophy as Centreon, making it easy to integrate your cloud assets (compute, database, storage, etc.) into your overall monitoring scope:

1. Centreon connects to these monitoring services using their Rest APIs
2. The Auto-Discovery feature retrieve the list of cloud assets to be monitored
3. Dedicated Configuration Templates are applied to start collecting all relevant cloud monitoring indicators

This is all made even easier with the AWS and Azure Plugin Packs.

As its name implies a Plugin Pack is a package. This package contains all is required to connect to AWS CloudWatch or Azure Monitor, given your own credentials. It contains the discovery rules that Centreon Auto-Discovery engine will apply daily to get the list of all assets that may be monitored. And it contains multiple configuration templates to automatically set the right parameters to collect and monitor all relevant indicators.

Plugin Packs are installed from the Centreon web user interface and include a dedicated documentation with step-by-step instructions on how to start monitoring.

What about Kubernetes and Docker? Same concept. We chose Prometheus as the most deployed platform to collect high-frequency real-time metrics from the Kubernetes cluster and its Docker containers (pods, namespaces, deamonsets, replica sets, etc.). The Prometheus Plugin Pack lets Centreon connect to the Prometheus platform and use PromQL query language to get the insights about your Kubernetes cluster performance.

And because Centreon is an API-Centric platform, it fits into your Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) framework, ideally combining your DevOps IT Automation toolset with our Auto-Discovery functionalities to make sure you never miss a beat and are always in sync with your dynamic cloud infrastructure.