Cloud Computing has come a long way, and for many enterprises, cloud has become a necessary strategy to grow and scale. The distinct advantages of efficient utilization of resources and cost efficiency has lured many enterprises to transform their existing infrastructure into a cloud-based infrastructure. Whether they prefer an on-premise cloud or a public cloud, it becomes necessary for enterprises to continuously monitor and manage cloud-based IT assets, and other infrastructure components to ensure optimal availability and maximum security 24*7. Cloud is not a singular entity, but a collection of different components that need to function as intended for the entire service to run uninterrupted – it is hence essential to identify one such cloud monitoring platform that can monitor, identify and notify any anomalies in operation of any component. This is exactly where we can help.
Why do we prefer Zabbix and how we’ve set it up for cloud monitoring?
Cloud monitoring requires multiple components within the cloud ecosystem to be continuously checked for availability, utilization and such other key performance metrics. Other areas that require monitoring are database queries, access requests and consumption of database resources. Virtual machines and storage resources too require health checks and monitoring of service availability, network parameters and peak operating levels. Here’s how we use Zabbix to monitor all the essential components of your cloud infrastructure:
- We use Zabbix to effectively monitor numerous parameters such as the health and integrity of servers, virtual machines, applications, databases, websites and more. Notifications are configured to send email-based alerts that help us keep on top of what’s happening on your cloud at all times.
- Zabbix’s agent-based monitoring capabilities are used to report the infrastructure usage data back to a centralised management server, using which the entire infrastructure is proactively monitored.
- For those components where agents cannot be installed, Zabbix’s agentless monitoring is used to ensure that all critical components are visible and under surveillance – constantly.
- A web-based GUI is used to view the environment with customizable dashboards based on widgets, graphs, network maps, slideshows and reports.
- While continuous monitoring is done 24*7, we’ve also configured parametric monitoring data to be saved over time so that historical analysis can be done to understand usage patterns.
- Using Zabbix’s reporting and data visualisation features we monitor metrics such as network utilisation, CPU load and disk space consumption for various monitored devices including Linux OS, HP-UX, Mac-OS X and Windows.
- Customized reports for your enterprise cloud environment are generated to show metrics associated with service-level agreements (SLAs) and key performance indicators (KPIs) for various workloads.
- Simple as well as complex network environments are effortlessly monitored because Zabbix works in three discovery modes – Network Discovery, where a periodic scan keeps a track and records a device’s type, IP address, status, uptime, downtime etc. Secondly, low-level discovery is used to automatically create items, triggers and graphs based in the discovered device using SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol) object identifiers, Windows services, Open Database Connectivity (ODBC), Structured Query Language (SQL) queries, network interfaces and more. Lastly, auto-discovery is used to monitor devices whenever a new agent is installed on it.
Remote monitoring using Zabbix
With Zabbix distributed monitoring, we remotely run scripts to collect data from multiple devices in distributed locations and combine that data in one dashboard. This is used to get a glance of all monitored devices in one place. Since it supports SNMP (trapping and polling), IPMI, JMX and VMware monitoring, diverse network components are configured to be monitored effortlessly. Flexible thresholds are defined and triggers are set by referencing values from the backend. Alerts are highly configurable and notifications based on predefined events are customized for the escalation schedule, recipient and media type. It works just as well for small organizations with a few servers and for large companies with a multitude of servers. Data is gathered efficiently by running availability and performance checks at custom intervals and custom graphs that combine multiple items into a single view are generated.
As your cloud grows and you either scale up or scale down resources, it’s easy to add or remove monitored devices. Further, Zabbix stores all the data in a database from where historical data can be configured and made available anytime.
We help monitor and maintain your private, public or hybrid cloud 24*7 – with the right supporting tools and experts to attend to any issues that are brought to light.
For more information on our managed cloud services, you can simply drop us an email or talk to our experts.
For more information, visit our page – Managed Cloud Services.
Kshitish is a ‘startup expert’ and has been involved with early stage startups, seeing various phases of growth, for more than 15 years. A specialist in Product Management, User Experience, Technology and Product Growth/Strategy, Kshitish is a seasoned entrepreneur with deep expertise in building enterprise products and horizontal/vertical SaaS. Kshitish did his PG in Product Design from NID, Ahmedabad.