What is hybrid monitoring?

Cloud-first and fully cloud strategies have been the main choice for many IT administrators in the last decade. Lately, a more moderate approach has taken the stage. A hybrid infrastructure, mixing cloud and on-premises assets, is increasingly seen as a better option by many companies, for a series of sound reasons.

Mounting public cloud costs, data privacy limitations, and increased complexity have led administrators to juggle assets and services across multiple platforms: public and private clouds, as well as the good old on-premises. Inevitably, this has influenced the way infrastructures are monitored.

Hybrid cloud monitoring presents its own set of challenges and advantages, which we will be exploring in this article. As often we do, an excursus on the exact nomenclature we will be using throughout the article is necessary to avoid confusion and make things clear from the beginning.

Hybrid cloud monitoring, or the equivalent hybrid cloud monitoring, is the set of processes and systems that are apt to monitor hybrid infrastructures. Hybrid monitoring is another synonym for hybrid cloud monitoring.

What is not a synonym is multi cloud monitoring. This is a narrower term that refers to the capability of monitoring tools to monitor services and assets across multiple cloud providers.

Hybrid monitoring most definitely includes multi cloud monitoring capabilities.

While moving to a hybrid infrastructure is increasingly common, some difficulties have to be addressed.

A key issue in managing and monitoring hybrid infrastructures is achieving complete end-to-end visibility into software and hardware stacks that are deployed across multiple clouds and on-premises. The fewer cloud services you have, the easier it is to find a complete hybrid IT monitoring solution, but that’s of course limiting. It is unfortunately more common to miss a few cloud services here and there, or have them with a limited set of monitored metrics, and having to rely on cloud-own monitoring solutions like AWS CloudWatch or Azure Monitor, to integrate your tools on locale.

The difficulty in discovering, creating, and maintaining a network topology in hybrid monitoring is a real problem. Obviously increasing cloud observability is a key objective of any hybrid cloud monitoring software but achieving it today in full is not as simple as one would wish to.

A hybrid infrastructure often relies on multi cloud assets and services, spread across different vendors, public or private. While this is an advantage in choice and flexibility, it can bite you back when you need to consolidate all the metrics you receive from different APIs and services into a unified view. There is some overlap between the metrics of each tool, while some metrics are unique to a tool.

This would require a separate tool that could integrate all cloud vendors as well as all on-premises software, and provide a meaningful and usable view of all the different metrics and data. Far from an easy task for any company, and a main challenge of hybrid cloud monitoring.

Consigning part of your infrastructure to an external actor is a matter of trust. As the stack grows, so does the attack surface. While it is undoubtable that cloud vendors pay high attention to security, there is more data that moves across networks between your on-premises and your cloud assets. More is exposed, and more can go wrong. Physical security measures become impossible once you have a hybrid infrastructure.

Cloud security requires a different approach to user permissions, data encryption, and secrets management. This reflects on monitoring, where what was once all on your hands becomes a game of managing sensitive data that are partly fully controlled by you and partly on the hands of the cloud vendors.

These challenges are not easy to face and the holy grail of a single, unified, and complete view in hybrid cloud monitoring may not be achievable yet. Nonetheless, following a few best practices can make monitoring hybrid infrastructure simpler and more effective.

Cloud observability and then hybrid monitoring are hard efforts that become much harder if implemented later than the design stage. Make sure you include monitoring considerations right from the start, when your hybrid infrastructure is being modeled. Security and operations teams both need to have a word on how to design your mix of cloud and on-premises assets to later be able to effectively monitor it all.

In hybrid IT monitoring, metrics are surely not lacking. There is a wealth of different ones, coming from a large range of services, from multiple vendors. Just aggregating them all is wasteful, in both resources and costs.

It pays to be more selective. Focus on the main objectives first, whether they may be availability, reliability, performance or others. Then, depending on what you need to monitor, select first the metrics that best inform you about these objectives. It is not about excluding all others, though, but focusing more on what most matters to you first.

A hybrid infrastructure is too vast to be handled manually, or even to be only marginally automated. Automation must be a focus in your hybrid cloud monitoring efforts. Modern monitoring tools have ample automation capabilities. Exploiting them is a key practice when dealing with the vastness of a multi cloud or hybrid infrastructure.

Moreover, standardizing backend monitoring procedures and processes help in making hybrid cloud monitoring as seamless as possible. Obtaining maximum hybrid cloud observability goes through aggregating the useful subsets of monitoring data from all the various platforms into a single monitoring system. Integrating centrally all the alerts and notifications, and automating them, becomes exponentially simpler when you have a robust hybrid monitoring setup, not one scattered across multiple tools.