What Is Cloud Monitoring? Cloud monitoring ensures the safety of your network.

Cloud monitoring is the process of evaluating, monitoring and managing cloud-based services, applications, and infrastructure. It is mainly, part of cloud security and management processes. It is implemented through automated monitoring software that provides central access and control over cloud infrastructure. Cloud administrators can review the operational status and health of any cloud-based device or component.
In addition to monitoring and ensuring cloud infrastructure/solution/service availability, cloud monitoring data also helps in evaluating the performance of the entire infrastructure on a modular level. Properties such as server uptime and response rate report can help in evaluating customer/user experience.

The types of cloud services to monitor include:
1. SaaS
Software-as-a-service (SaaS) is a method for delivering software applications over the Internet, on demand and typically on a subscription basis. With SaaS, cloud providers host and manage the software application and underlying infrastructure, and handle any maintenance, like software upgrades and security patching. Users connect to the application over the Internet, usually with a web browser on their phone, tablet, or PC.
2. IaaS
The most basic category of cloud computing services. With IaaS, you rent IT infrastructure—servers and virtual machines (VMs), storage, networks, operating systems—from a cloud provider on a pay-as-you-go basis.
3. PaaS
Platform-as-a-service (PaaS) refers to cloud computing services that supply an on-demand environment for developing, testing, delivering and managing software applications. PaaS is designed to make it easier for developers to quickly create web or mobile apps, without worrying about setting up or managing the underlying infrastructure of servers, storage, network, and databases needed for development.
4. FaaS
New serverless applications like Microsoft Azure.
5. Application hosting
Services like Azure App Services, Heroku, and the likes.
Cloud services can be monitored using application performance tools. However, it has some unique requirements over the basic server monitoring tools. For example, Exoprise has a focus in monitoring Office 365, Salesforce and other existing cloud services.

Also see: Kenya’s Best Cloud Hosting Services

How it Works.
There are a set of tools that supervise the servers, resources, and applications for cloud monitoring. The tools typically come from two sources. The first is In-house, from the cloud provider. It comes as a tool that is part of the service. No installation is required and the integration is seamless. The second is tools which are independent of the cloud provider or SaaS provider. Although the two tools used are different, they work seamlessly together to provide a great service.

The cloud monitoring tools seek out problems that generally prevent or restrict businesses from delivering services to their customers. This can be due to cyber-attacks for one. The tools then offer data on the performance, security and customer behavior of their cloud services. This way you have knowledge of how customers are interacting with your product or service. At this point, you can make decisions to improve performance and implement new security measures if there is an issue.

Cybersecurity is a measure taken to keep servers safe from cyber-attacks. IT teams use it to detect breaches and vulnerabilities early to manage any damage or prevent any damage from happening. Speed metrics are also part of cloud monitoring. This can help companies to optimize their websites and applications for better functioning. Website monitoring involves tracking the processes, traffic, availability and resource utilization of cloud-hosted websites. Virtual machine monitoring involves monitoring the virtualization infrastructure and individual virtual machines

Database monitoring is about evaluating the processes, queries, availability, and consumption of cloud database resources. While virtual network monitoring concerns monitoring and managing the virtual network resources, devices, connections, and performance. The Cloud storage monitoring, which we have been discussing concerns monitoring storage resources and their processes provisioned to virtual machines, services, databases, and applications