Cloud monitoring and operations basics

- [Narrator] So let's talk about monitoring of public clouds. Operating cloud is much like operating traditional data centers. We have servers, that are virtual. We have storage systems. We have networks. We have all sorts of things that you'll recognize. However, all things must be done remotely. One of the things that makes cloud monitoring important, is that ultimately, we're dealing with a public cloud that we don't own, and we have to leverage those resources remotely, monitor them, and make sure they're running, because we can't see them.

We can't physically touch them. So I put together the foundations of monitoring and operations. We have governance, we have performance, we have security, we have cost, we have health, and we have reporting. Governance in terms of monitoring is not necessarily governance in terms of resource governance and service governance and we have another course on that. Ultimately governance in terms of monitoring is the ability to set checkpoints. So that we're going to allow the systems to operate in a certain number of parameters, if it falls out of those parameters, then someone's going to be alerted, or it's going to be automatically corrected.

Performance means ultimately how quickly it runs. Latency issues, response time, the ability to process data in the time that's required by the business. If it falls out of this threshold, then it needs to be dealt with. Security, because we have to be proactive in how we deal with security, and you'll find that monitoring, and security systems operate as peers. We have to understand when people are attacking the system that performance levels are going to go down, so therefore that's a pattern we need to capture and redo.

Cost associated with how much things are costing. Whose spending what, where, when? The nightmares keep coming in where people get $50,000 to $100,000 Amazon web service bills, because cost overruns occurred. The health of the system, just the general understanding of how things are going. Just like you check your health, your blood pressure, your blood sugar levels, your oxygen saturation, we need to understand the health of the cloud, and when it goes south, and basically falls out of parameters, be able to correct it.

And finally reporting. The ability to understand what goes on longterm within cloud based systems as a report that is generated that may go a few weeks, a few months, or in some cases a few years. So keep in mind that picking the technology is critical. We're going to provide you with a few demos, and you're going to see how cloud monitoring technology works. Sometimes, it's going to be a very logical choice. If you're using Amazon web services then Amazon Cloud Watch may be the logical solution, however, you need to take a look at your requirements, and back the appropriate technology into your requirements.

Setting up the process for monitoring is also critical. We need to understand that this is about discipline, this is about giving human beings access to various system components and understand that there should be a process that's around how we're going to implement monitoring, and how we're going to correct issues that come up in the light of monitoring.