AWS Cloud Monitoring with IBM SevOne NPM

Introduction

According to a Flexera study titled 'The State of Hybrid Cloud Security', 60% of organizations have limited or no visibility into their Hybrid Cloud environments.  How can you measure what you don't monitor?

When you are migrating workloads to the Public Cloud, one of the most prominent pain points Network Engineers encounter is that they start losing visibility into the performance of several different resources that have migrated to the Public Cloud. Different teams manage Cloud and On-premise workloads creating a visibility gap across Cloud and Network Engineering teams. This in the end leads to higher MTTR/MTTD and ultimately the teams are less productive.

We wanted to solve these problems of visibility gaps and teams operating in silos while troubleshooting an outage of an application that runs across different Cloud and On-premise infrastructure boundaries. Some of these problems are highlighted below:

1) Performance Problems: It is impossible to optimize the performance of an application if you don't have visibility into the performance of different resources in your on-premise and Cloud environment.

2) Cost impacts: Its extremely difficult to control costs in a Public Cloud environment when you do not have visibility to specific components causing your usage to go higher than expected. This can lead to a lot of surprises on our Cloud bill.

3) Security Risks: Its difficult to identify and respond to security threats with lack of visibility into your Public Cloud environment. 

4) Compliance Violations: Many organizations are required to comply with regulations that govern how their data is stored and processed. Without visibility into public clouds, it can be difficult to ensure that these regulations are being met.

In our recent SevOne NPM releases, we introduced amazing new functionality to support AWS monitoring out of the box! Designed to empower Network and CloudOps engineering with unprecedented insights into their infrastructure, SevOne users now enjoy a unified view of real-time performance of their entire network environment.

AWS Services monitored by SevOne NPM

We offer a comprehensive solution that involves monitoring of several different AWS resources that include EC2 instances, S3 buckets, NAT Gateways, Transit Gateways, Elastic Block Stores, Site to Site VPNs and Network Load Balancers.

Cloud Performance Insights

In a single report, having the ability to spot Performance outliers across several resources in AWS can be significant. The report below shows you Top 10 views of CPU/Network traffic of EC2 instances , Top NAT Gateway traffic and Site to Site VPN traffic along with Top Transit Gateway traffic.

Q:Why is this important ?

A: These metrics directly equate to your AWS costs. Having a consolidated view of the resources that are contributing to your AWS costs the most and also having the ability to spot outliers using these views can be super insightful. This can lead your teams to optimize the applications running in your Cloud environment in many better ways.

 Figure 1: AWS Summary Report showing different resources being monitored in a single report.

Furthermore, SevOne NPM offers curated Reports right Out of the Box, enabling monitoring teams to swiftly transition from integration to gaining insights into their AWS networks in just minutes. 

Below you can see a detailed EC2 Instance report showing you the AWS Infrastructure being monitored by SevOne NPM:

 Figure 2: AWS EC2 Report showing several different statistics.

Benefits

• Simplified monitoring: AWS Monitoring Suite provides a single pane of glass for monitoring several of your AWS components. This makes it easy to get a consolidated view of your environment and identify any potential problems. With this integration, users can monitor multiple AWS accounts and Regions in a Single Report.
• Real-time alerts: SevOne NPM can send you real-time alerts when there are any problems with your AWS components. With Webhooks for alerts, you can make use of a wide array of integrations that allows you to take action quickly to prevent outages or performance degradation.
• Trend analysis: SevOne NPM can track trends in your AWS environment by baselining every metric we collect. This ensures that users identify potential problems before they become serious.
• Historical data: We store historical data for your AWS components going back to a year. This allows you to troubleshoot problems and identify trends over time.
• Custom reports: SevOne NPM's Data Insight User Interface allows you to create custom reports. This enables you to tailor your monitoring solution to your specific needs. In addition, we also ship curated reports created by our experts, that can give you insights on your deployment right after setting up an integration.
  
  

We are excited about this new AWS monitoring capability and the ways it can enhance visibility for our new and existing users. If you would like to see this new capability in action, please reach out for a demo using the link here: Schedule Demo.
For additional information on this , please checkout our Hybrid Cloud Network Monitoring page.