Companies are increasingly adopting cloud services. They’re cost-efficient, scalable, and give you time to market by getting your ideas out there as quickly as possible. However, cloud services don’t have extensive, in-built cloud application monitoring. This is where Netreo steps in.
Let’s take a look at what cloud computing is. After that, we’ll dive into cloud application monitoring and how it affects business decisions. Then we’ll take a deep dive into Netreo’s cloud application monitoring dashboard and its AIOps Autopilot. Finally, we’ll look at how Netreo gathers data and consider the benefits of the company’s cloud application monitoring platform.
Let’s get started!
What Is Cloud Computing?
In the past, the deployment of any new technology needed tons of up-front investment. The process was long, expensive, and inefficient.
Companies like Google, Amazon, and Microsoft decided to lease their unused servers to smaller companies. Thus, public cloud computing was born. This is where multiple organizations or entities use the same server. Private cloud computing, in contrast, is an on-premises cloud that a single user uses.
What are the advantages of cloud computing? It’s cost-efficient and subscription-based. You have remote access from anywhere in the world. It’s scalable to demand. You can deploy your services quicker. And it’s secure because everything is monitored and logged in the cloud.
How Does Cloud Application Monitoring Help Business Decisions?
Cloud application monitoring, like Netreo, gives you insights that a cloud service provider doesn’t. It’s real-time, full-stack monitoring of your entire IT infrastructure and cloud-based applications or services.
Netreo’s cloud application monitoring is based on the following four pillars.
- Intelligent alerting and noise reduction. Through Netreo’s incident management engine, any anomalous behavior can be detected and disparate events can be correlated. This results in targeted intelligent alerts to proper recipients at the proper time.
- Deep insights into your infrastructure. Netreo stores three years of historical time-series data with both average and peak values. Through built-in 95th percentile business hours reporting and statistical analysis, it predicts when a given threshold will be exceeded. This deep insight allows you to quickly get to the root cause of the problems in your IT environment.
- Unified visibility. Netreo centralizes the dozens of monitoring tools that different teams usually have in a large organization. It’s a centralized monitoring tool, and it’s deployed on-premises or in the cloud. Netreo also brings together time-series and availability monitoring data from vendor APIs. What’s more, it runs synthetic checks against your mission-critical applications.
- Minimal care and feeding. Netreo’s auto-configuration and template-based device setup eliminate the need for you to manually tweak your network management system to work in your environment. So you can focus your attention on looking after your infrastructure, users, and applications rather than tweaking tools.
Netreo’s Cloud Application Monitoring Dashboard
Let’s take a look at this dashboard and then consider the advantages.
- Virtual application: Netreo is provided as a virtual application. You don’t need to download or install it or have Flash or Java. Rather, you can run it through your web browser or mobile devices. It’s deployed on-premises or as a cloud-hosted SaaS solution.
- Consolidated dashboard: It provides a summary of all the different areas of full-stack IT monitoring. You can create customizable dashboards with a simple drag-and-drop interface.
- Consolidated alerts: You can correlate alerts by site, location, network topology, business workflow, or application grouping and turn them into incidents.
- Business workflows: You can see business workflows that provide a nontechnical way of presenting status data across your organization.
- Tactical overview: Additionally, you can see a tactical overview that provides a summary of all the devices and applications being monitored.
- Graphing: This feature allows you to see the overall status of any device so you can look for anomalies or correlations in the data.
- Anomaly detection: It also does anomaly detection by creating long-term trending reports and analyses.
- Detailed service status: In addition to general CPU and memory statistics, you can also monitor detailed service status, including application-level testing.
- Tagging interfaces: These allow you to quickly run comparison reports or top talkers reports across multiple interfaces based on their tagging information.
- Interfaces: On networking devices, detailed information is available about interfaces.
- Synthetic application testing: This is provided for both web and email applications. Additionally, you can run these synthetic application tests against internal, public-facing, or SaaS-hosted applications.
- User adoption rates and storage usage: These are also visible in Netreo. Also, you get notifications about any slowdowns or unusual performance changes.
More Netreo Features
What else does Netreo provide? Let’s take a look.
- Custom maps: You can create maps that contain single devices, entire locations, or business workflows as objects on the map.
- Geographic maps: Netreo automatically generates and updates these based on device location and site data.
- Flow-based traffic analysis: This processes the data from Netflow, Internet Protocol Flow Information Export (IPFIX), sFlow, or cFlow devices. The analysis breaks down the applications in use on a particular device, interface, or site.
- Network device configuration management: This allows you to automatically detect when changes happen on network devices. It also provides an intuitive, structured report on the particular device and when the change happened.
- Configuration compliance rules: You have automatic configuration remediation when someone enters unauthorized commands into a system. Additionally, you can force particular configurations to always be present and run real-time commands across multiple devices simultaneously. You can also use the SSH command session directly from the web browser to execute commands remotely.
- Configuration management tools: These allow you to push configurations out to devices. Additionally, you can automate the process of updating passwords, rotating encryption keys, or updating certificates, for example—in real-time or on a schedule.
- In-built reports: These are quick and easy to make. Furthermore, you can customize your reports based on interface tags, descriptions, or names.
- Device life cycle management: This allows you to automatically onboard new devices into the environment.
- Hierarchical template system: This allows you to detect different environments and allows multiple layers of configuration onto a device. It also allows the Netreo platform to scale up to hundreds of thousands or millions of devices under management.
Netreo AIOps Autopilot
AIOps, or artificial intelligence for IT operations, combines machine learning and big data to automate IT operations. In most cases, AIOps reduces human error and increases reliability and accuracy.
Netreo uses AIOps to automate anomaly detection, event correlation, and causality determination. Netreo’s AIOps autopilot is a product that runs inside Netreo deployment. Netreo AIOps Autopilot uses AI and machine learning models to ensure that Netreo is always properly tuned. Here are six other things it does:
- Scans the internal data using machine learning
- Detects any changes and potential optimizations
- Tunes Netreo to address any issues
- Does full-stack monitoring of any environmental changes and of the entire IT stack for all key performance indicators to ensure there are no blind spots
- Alerts incidents intelligently using threshold baselining and machine learning event correlation rules; this reduces redundant noise to address
- Automatically learns from your initial setup about your optimal configuration and tunes Netreo to meet that standard
The autopilot discovers any new device (such as APIs, configuration management database, cloud, software-defined wide-area network, or scanning) using the API’s process integration and autoconfigures it using Netreo’s automation architecture.
How Netreo Gathers Data
Netreo uses vendor-based APIs to collect data on your entire IT infrastructure across your cloud application. Netreo further analyzes, monitors, and reports on your resources.
It uses polling, real-time monitoring, alerting, and synthetic transactions to allow you to monitor cloud applications on any platform. Furthermore, to verify the functionality and performance of your cloud-based applications, Netreo includes performance and availability monitors.
Netreo collects its baseline of statistics across any SNMP-compliant device type. The data it collects includes:
- CPU
- Memory
- Disk usage
- Disk I/O
- Network bandwidth
- Network errors
- Round-trip latency
For Windows environments, Netreo uses WMI/PowerShell for data collection. Likewise, for the VMware environment, Netreo connects to the vCenter API to automatically detect new hosts, guests, and datastores as they’re configured in the environment. Finally, for Linux systems, Netreo uses a simple network management protocol. Netreo collects appropriate metrics based on the guest’s operating system.
Netreo monitors cloud application platforms, such as Google Apps for Business, Microsoft Office 365, Amazon EC2 and AWS, and Salesforce, among others. This is the most comprehensive approach available.
Cloud application monitoring data is critical because of the complexity of multiple services across your IT infrastructure and networks. Since your company doesn’t own these services, they can hinder visibility across the infrastructure. And that may mean lower revenue, productivity, and reputation. Cloud monitoring allows you to monitor specific areas of the cloud as well as the entire infrastructure.
Netreo’s Support
Netreo provides cloud monitoring solutions in a wide range of industries. These include healthcare, retail, transportation, manufacturing, banking, and education. You can drastically cut costs, use your resources more efficiently, and make proactive business decisions.
In conclusion, Netreo offers a clean, efficient, and holistic IT management system. Furthermore, improved cloud monitoring has saved companies six figures, helped reallocate resources, and increased efficiency.
Netreo can support your organization’s goals, such as reaching a specific performance metric, using a particular database type, or employing some other less common requirement.
Are you ready to take your cloud performance to the next level? Contact Netreo today.
This post was written by Annie Qurat. Annie has a masters degree in data science and she absolutely loves researching and writing about data-related topics in ways that are approachable for readers. She works with Python and SQL, has extensive knowledge of machine learning, statistics, NLP, and is constantly expanding her horizons on data-related topics. She also enjoys deep-dives into topics related to psychology and happy, healthy living.