When implementing a cloud-based infrastructure, you want to control costs and keep a tight lid on expenses without sacrificing services or performance. But how can you do that?
Greater visibility into your cloud environment is the answer.
With a well-managed private or public cloud, administrators have insight into their usage of resources and the services their organization uses. However, when there are gaps in visibility, it’s much more challenging to manage costs and maintain performance with acceptable uptime.
Based on multiple surveys, it’s clear to see that many businesses experience difficulty in gaining total AWS Cloud visibility—while some look like they’ve given up trying! Surprisingly, one in seven did not utilize any visibility tools at all.
Not surprisingly, the most popular AWS Cloud visibility tool being used was AWS CloudWatch. AWS CloudWatch was the most popular AWS Cloud visibility tool, but many respondents used log management tools, application performance management tools, and/or open-source or third-party tools due to its complexity, lack of customization, and mainly because of “functional gaps”. As a result of this lack of visibility, many organizations are unable to identify and comprehend the sources of AWS Cloud charges.
Here are some statistics (2018 survey report) that might help you get more clarity regarding how and what type of tools to use for the purpose of gaining visibility:
- 56% of the businesses used AWS CloudWatch
- 30% of them used third-party monitoring tools
- 10% of them manually tracked down the cloud costs
- Remaining were under the category of “Unknown/Others”
Given below are 3 techniques/practices that can help you upscale your cloud visibility:
- Develop the base and structure of the data: With a common view of data, teams can also create more comprehensive data policies. In many enterprises, data is siloed across different technology stacks, making it difficult to monitor and manage. If engineers can create a unified view of data, they can also create data policies that govern the usage of data and enforce compliance. Finally, unified data views help engineers troubleshoot issues across data technologies. Because many diverse technologies are now integrated into a single view, engineers can troubleshoot issues across systems more quickly.
- Add more useful tools: Data from different sources might be in different formats or be unstructured, which makes it difficult for humans to analyze therefore, AI/ML tools:
- Can be used to convert data from different sources into a single format, which makes it easier for humans to study it in depth
- Can be used to locate patterns and trends in data that can be used to detect anomalous events, predict future trends and patterns, and generate reports
- Some AI/ML tools are cloud-based and can be used to monitor and analyze data from a variety of sources
- Complete Automation: By tracking the status of automated tasks, the remedial activities can be monitored to determine whether additional manual work is needed. If a particular process requires several steps, each of which must be completed in order to achieve the desired result, monitoring that sequence of activities can provide an overview of the process. This visibility can assist with the documentation of the remedial activities, allowing them to be easily repeated in the future. Automation can assist bring structure to the endeavor, simplifying it, and minimizing the number of points of misunderstanding.
The visibility that you need to deliver high-quality services is directly related to the level of control you want over your cloud environment. If you want to manage your cloud costs, you need to make sure you can get visibility into your infrastructure, applications, and operations.
Cloud visibility helps organizations mitigate risk, improve security programs, and drive business value.
Although it does not mask the fact that many businesses experience difficulty in gaining total AWS Cloud visibility. But organizations have been shifting to multi-cloud, using AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, and/or on-premises). This would explain why organizations have to utilize several tools to achieve AWS Cloud visibility (since they need visibility into other environments, which AWS CloudWatch cannot supply).
One solution for AWS, GCP, and Azure cloud visibility
OpsLyft is soon launching a holistic solution that gives you visibility of costs across all cloud providers over a single dashboard. This solution will generate inter-cloud cost savings by comparing costs across different clouds by collecting data from all cloud and on-premises services used by a business and consolidating it on one single pane dashboard for easy analysis and reporting. It doesn’t matter whether or not the business is using AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, and/or on-premises, OpsLyft will provide total visibility over all these environments.
With a holistic view of its complete cloud and on-premises environment, a business can analyze and manage cloud cost, usage, security, and governance in one place. No more spreadsheets and no more running between disparate systems to identify and understand the drivers of AWS Cloud costs. OpsLyft gives businesses the opportunity to make crucial data-driven decisions and makes recommendations about reducing costs and increasing efficiency to drive continuous improvement.
Not only this but OpsLyft will provide you reports over email and slack regarding anomalies in cloud cost as well as cost overviews monthly/weekly/daily is a great way to keep your finger on the pulse of your cloud security. By integrating your 3rd party tools with us, we can generate cloud cost-to-business metrics like site visits/orders placed. This gives you a complete picture of your cloud security posture and allows you to make informed decisions about where to allocate resources.