Introduction
Many organizations manage a hybrid infrastructure spread over on-premise and multiple public cloud platforms such as AWS, Azure and Google for specific business applications. The hybrid cloud approach has advantages but adds more complexity for IT teams responsible for keeping IT systems safe and secure. The monitoring tools system administrators use for on-premise infrastructure are often unsuitable for monitoring public cloud platforms. And the native tools available for each cloud platform typically don’t work with other cloud services.
Industry data shows that the use of multiple cloud providers is now common. A Gartner study reported that 81% of respondents were working with two or more providers (Gartner: Why Organizations Choose a Multicloud Strategy). An EMA Survey Report found that only 4% of respondents found that a single cloud provider served all their needs and that a majority used three or four providers (EMA: Multicloud Networking: Connecting & Securing the Future).
The EMA Survey Report also found that 76% of the organizations using multiple cloud providers were unhappy with the native network monitoring that cloud providers offer.
Overview of Hybrid Cloud Monitoring
As organizations adopt hybrid cloud environments, performance, security management and availability of applications and services across both on-premises and cloud infrastructure becomes critical. The challenges include ensuring seamless visibility, correlating data from different environments and maintaining consistent monitoring capabilities across hybrid setups.
Hybrid networks often comprise a complex mix of physical, virtual and cloud-based assets. Achieving comprehensive network visibility and control is a top priority. This includes monitoring network traffic, capturing and analyzing data from various sources and implementing effective network segmentation and access control measures.
Having a toolset that can monitor hybrid cloud environments enables the use of cloud infrastructure to be optimized. Organizations can choose cloud platforms based on financial and technical fit without worrying about how to deliver monitoring, detection and response. Having access to hybrid cloud monitoring ensures optimal performance, security and scalability across on-premises and cloud infrastructure.
Flowmon works across multiple cloud platforms and on-premises infrastructure and provides a unified view of the entire estate rather than siloed views.
Key Features and Benefits
Using Flowmon features to monitor hybrid cloud infrastructure delivers real-time visibility, proactive issue detection, scalability, cost optimization and compliance management. It provides the following features and benefits:
- Comprehensive visibility - Flowmon is a hybrid cloud monitoring solution that provides a complete view of multi-cloud infrastructure and real-time network traffic monitoring and analysis to detect and resolve network issues, minimizing downtime quickly.
- Centralized management - Flowmon simplifies multi-cloud management and troubleshooting, boosting efficiency and reducing operational overhead.
- End-to-end security - The attack surface expands with hybrid networks, requiring robust cloud security management measures. Monitoring for network threats, such as intrusions, malware and data breaches, is crucial. As are application security, application vulnerability management and server monitoring.
- Integrating threat intelligence, behavior analysis and anomaly detection technologies is essential to detect and respond to security incidents in hybrid environments. Flowmon enables hybrid cloud security monitoring in multi-cloud environments to detect and prevent security breaches and malicious activities. Flowmon also integrates with other security tools.
- Performance optimization - Flowmon improves multi-cloud performance by monitoring network traffic to detect and fix performance-related issues. This ensures a better user experience for cloud-based applications and services.
- Cost optimization - Flowmon helps optimize cloud resources and reduce costs by identifying inefficiencies that System Admins can use when optimizing resource allocation.
- Scalability - Using Flowmon to monitor and manage multi-cloud environments also helps System Admins with decisions about deployment options and scalability.
Having a solution that can deliver across the board in these areas has a significant positive impact on business operations and productivity.
Monitoring Capabilities
Flowmon includes network monitoring capabilities that provides big-picture and detailed information for specific use cases. Flowmon’s Network Visibility and monitoring functionality offers:
- End-user Experience Monitoring - With Flowmon, you can easily pinpoint bottlenecks and fix any latency problems caused by your networks, servers, or applications. Via a single dashboard System Admins have the information to troubleshoot any faults, performance and availability issues for local, cloud or SaaS applications.
- Network Monitoring and Visibility - Flowmon collects network telemetry data, such as IP flows and raw packets from various network devices. It uses Flowmon Probes to enhance performance, improve data granularity and add L7-information to the data.
- Cloud Application Performance - Flowmon analyzes network traffic to track the interactions between users and cloud-hosted applications. It helps to identify bottlenecks along the network chain and whether issues are your responsibility or the service provider.
- Network Performance Monitoring - Flowmon Network Performance Monitoring provides multiple performance indicators and statistics about IP traffic. Metrics include RTT (Round Trip Time), SRT (Server Response Time), Delay, Jitter and others. Dashboard widgets enable System Admins to monitor and get alerts about response times of critical applications and network round trip time for important servers and systems.
- NetFlow/IPFIX Monitoring - NetFlow network monitoring collects and analyzes network traffic data in an efficient way. This data includes details about source and destination IP addresses, the protocol used, the application and the amount of data transferred. It does not capture the actual data as this is not needed in most cases to detect anomalous behavior or troubleshoot issues. Collecting NetFlow/IPFIX data reduces the processing overhead required and the storage requirements for storing historical data. Flowmon uses NetFlow/IPFIX by default, but it can also do full packet capture via automatic event triggering or manually by Systems Admins. Flowmon also supports native FlowLogs from AWS, Google Cloud and Azure as a source of network telemetry data.
The functionality of Flowmon outlined above enables organizations to do better cloud performance & application monitoring, resource utilization tracking & planning, enhanced log analysis, more effective security monitoring, and store the information needed to deliver compliance with auditing requirements.
Integration and Compatibility
No monitoring or security solution can be an island. Hybrid cloud deployment is the default for many organizations. They also have investments in existing IT tools. For this reason, monitoring and security solutions need to integrate into a varied IT landscape.
Flowmon works across multiple cloud platforms and on-premises. IT teams can deploy it using the virtualization capabilities available across the major public cloud platforms and those available for on-premises deployments. As mentioned above, Flowmon also supports using AWS VPC FlowLogs, Google Could VPC FlowLogs and Azure NSG FlowLogs.
Flowmon integrates with Security Integration and Event Management (SIEM) solutions. It also integrates with Splunk and ServiceNow and has a REST API to enable integration into other 3rd party systems.
Why Choose Flowmon’s Hybrid Cloud Monitoring Solution
Flowmon is an ideal choice for organizations that operate a hybrid cloud infrastructure. It works in any environment, can be deployed and useful within 30 minutes and comes with world-class support to ensure optimal use and ROI. With Flowmon, organizations can:
- Scale indefinitely - Flowmon offers limitless scalability thanks to a future-proof flow-based engine that delivers a level of detail comparable to packet-based solutions at a fraction of the resource requirements. Full-packet data capture is available on-demand when needed.
- Improve your security and boost operations - With Flowmon, you can easily detect and prevent ransomware attacks, identify insider threats and respond promptly to security issues. Flowmon delivers a unified source of truth for network and security teams, reducing the need for multiple tools and saving costs.
- Visibility into every network branch - Gain complete visibility by analyzing data from various environments, including proprietary and third-party data sources. Utilize diverse data formats to gain insights from virtual, on-premises, edge and cloud traffic in one place, reducing the possibility of missing issues.
- Automate Network Monitoring - Reduce the time spent on repetitive tasks by using on-demand and event-triggered packet capture and automated root-cause analysis.
Conclusion
Our website has comprehensive details of the Flowmon solution. On those pages, you will find detailed information on how Progress Flowmon provides an industry leading Network Detection & Respond (NDR) solution that delivers hybrid cloud monitoring without being too complex for IT and security teams to use.
You can sign up for a fully functional free trial of Flowmon, and if you want to speak to an expert to find out more or get help with your trial, use our Contact Form.
Hybrid Cloud Monitoring FAQs
What is hybrid cloud monitoring?
- Hybrid cloud monitoring is the process of monitoring and managing a hybrid cloud environment’s performance, availability and security.
What is a hybrid cloud environment?
- A hybrid cloud refers to a combination of public cloud services and private cloud or on-premises infrastructure, allowing organizations to leverage the benefits of both.
How to monitor a hybrid cloud system?
- Monitoring a hybrid cloud requires tracking and analyzing metrics and events across both on-premises and cloud infrastructure and networks.
What is an example of hybrid cloud monitoring?
- Using Flowmon to monitor and present a unified view of networks and services deployed across an on-premises data center and cloud infrastructure from AWS and Microsoft Azure.
Is there a tool to monitor multi-cloud?
- The Progress Flowmon Platform provides hybrid cloud monitoring tools.
