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How To Achieve "Multi-Cloud" Monitoring

Intercomms talks to Phil Swainson, KedronUK, long-standing partner of Infosim®, about how he deals with the challenge of helping customers to achieve Multi-Cloud visibility

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Phil Swainson, Head of Technical Services at KedronUK

Phil Swainson, Head of Technical Services at KedronUK

Phil Swainson is Head of Technical Services at KedronUK, a UK based Consultancy that works exclusively in the areas of Network, Application and Security Analytics.

Phil has spent the last 17 years as a Trusted Advisor to many of the UK’s largest Enterprise and Service Provider organisations, helping them to collect, integrate and visualise their critical fault, performance, configuration and security data.

In this interview we ask Phil about how he deals with the challenge of helping Customers to achieve Multi-Cloud visibility.

Q: You discuss Multi-Cloud Monitoring, what do you mean by that term?
A: Sourcing of services from different Cloud services providers e.g. Azure, Amazon, Office 365 requires monitoring the services availability, performance and utilization across the different platforms and technologies.

Multi-Cloud’s require Cross-silo Monitoring of services for Servers, Storage, distributed, regional Networks, Virtual Systems, Containers, multiple Clouds, App/Web STMs, Enterprise Applications & Infrastructure.

Ensure hybrid services based on legacy infrastructures and systems and multi-provider Cloud services via cross-provider, cross-technology, and Cross-silo monitoring in a way, your operations staff can still handle.

Be able to track issues internal and external where they occur and in a reasonable time.

Q: Which Monitoring Vendors does KedronUK recommend for Multi-Cloud Monitoring?
A: That’s a difficult question because it really does depend on the unique Customer requirement. We work with technologies that focus on traffic (Flow and Packets), APM technologies that focus at the transaction level via Agents installed on server host infrastructure and also technology that looks at the infrastructure itself. Often the Customer requires a combination of technology types to get the most accurate picture and that’s where our integration work comes in.

That said, many of our Customers are focussed on monitoring their end-to-end infrastructure and that means seeing multiple multi-cloud infrastructure components in one place, to visualise how it fits together. From there they want to able to measure the complete service journey. For that, we recommend StableNet® by Infosim®.

Phil Swainson, Head of Technical Services at KedronUK

Find out more about Multi-Cloud Monitoring with StableNet on Infosim®’s website

Q: Lots of people when they think about Monitoring infrastructure in the Cloud, they think about the tools native in the Cloud providers solutions, why do you think an enterprise should consider a third-party solution such as StableNet®?
A: Cloud SP tools do usually work only per Cloud SP and not Cross SP! You need to be able to get a holistic view on your utilized services and not a large number of individual limbs which your operations team needs to correlate manually.

StableNet® combines the “passive” Monitoring of reading out data from the APIs provided by the respective Cloud providers with “active” probing testing different parameters externally

Here are two examples below:

Amazon, Azure & Co do “natively” provide information about the CPU usage, the memory usage, the number of disk writes, etc. but not about the actual services running in the virtual machine/Cloud instance. If you want to know how many emails you sent/calendar entries you have etc., you can ask the Cloud API. If you want to measure how long sending and receiving an email takes or how long adding a Contact takes, you need to do external probing – StableNet® offers this and combines both worlds/approaches.

If your Cloud provider offers you certain RAM, CPU, etc., the APIs help you to check the actual usage. However, if you want to measure the actual SLA, i.e., whether your service runs smoothly or not, you need external measurements.

Q: How does StableNet® differ from other third-party Monitoring solutions for Cloud Monitoring?
A: StableNet® addresses and ensures hybrid services Monitoring based on legacy infrastructures and systems and multi-provider Cloud services via cross-provider, cross-technology, and Cross-silo Monitoring in a way your operations staff can still handle.

In particular, you do not need yet another tool and graphical user interface but you can combine the data in the existing Monitoring using renown interfaces for integration.

“Our customers want to be able to measure the complete service journey.”

Q: If a Customer has an end-to-end enterprise application service which may consist of elements of public, private and on-premise infrastructure is StableNet® able to understand the interrelationship between these components?
A: StableNet® e.g. StableNet® Service Analyzer and highly automated StableNet® Network Service Analyzer do support analysis tools to model and track Cross-provider, Cross-technology, and Cross-silo infrastructure constellations.

Furthermore, well known StableNet® technologies like the automated root cause analysis, derived measurements, dynamic rule generation can also be used to combine different measurement sources of hybrid Cloud, network, etc.

Q: What is the best way for someone who is interested to see StableNet® in action?
A: Browse our StableNet® Web page here: https://www.infosim.net/stablenet/stablenet-in-action/

Watch our Webinar Recordings to see many examples here: infosim.net/stablenet/resources/webinars/

Request an online demo Webinar tailored to your questions from us or our Partners like Kedron here:
https://www.infosim.net/stablenet/support/demo-request/

Infosim logo For more information please visit:
www.infosim.net or email: info@infosim.net

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