How To – Monitor Multi-Cloud with Catchpoint

Many companies have adopted a multi-cloud environment for their services and many more plan to expand cloud usage in the future. As more VMs and workloads transition to public and private clouds, it is becoming clear that multi-cloud is becoming a standard or benchmark rather than something optional that businesses want to ‘try out’.

Why Use A Multi-Cloud Solution?

There are many reasons to adopt multi-cloud solutions, ranging from security, testing, planning, and so on. Recent studies show that around 94% of organizations are already using cloud services and on average leverage five different platforms. For example, if you’re trying to pick a virtual desktop provider and decide to split resources between two providers after comparing endpoint data from test VMs. Alternatively, you could be trying to avoid vendor lock-in, or perhaps for security reasons, you want to separate resources into public and private cloud instances.

Let’s go into more detail on a few of the benefits:

Security

While hosting critical applications, security is often a concern that holds back cloud migration. Today’s enterprise IT architectures have become so complex that traditional methods of securing assets and services are no longer an adequate plan of action. The security edge that people used to plan around is all but gone, thanks to the popularization of IoT, distributed infrastructure, and remote work/users. Cloud security risks can seem troublesome, but they’ll more often than not overlap with traditional IT security risks – control access, encryption, monitoring, tenant isolation, etc.

Today, the cloud can be more secure than on-premise solutions since most cloud providers have more resources to implement comprehensive security features. AWS and Azure vendors put a lot of forethought and granularity into their security controls, which in turn empowers users to create services with protections that are meaningfully based on their specific architecture.

Better Performance & Resilience

There is inherent latency in cloud-based services, especially when they are delivered from distant locations. If your existing provider doesn’t have the best reach, you could end up paying for that on the back end with inferior performance. With a multi-cloud infrastructure, the data center with the fewest number of hops from the users can more easily serve them.

Distributing your workload across multiple cloud networks also helps negate localized issues with a single provider. Even if an organization can never be 100% protected against downtime, using a multi-cloud approach means they can add enough redundancy to pivot around localized or isolated issues with minimal disruption of the user experience.

Monitoring Multi-Cloud with Catchpoint

One drawback that users often see with a multi-cloud solution is a lack of visibility and observability for a hybrid system. This isn’t as big of an issue as you might think – you just need a tool that’s capable of effectively monitoring such an abstracted system.

In this week’s video, we’re going to go through a couple of scenarios where you might need to monitor multi-cloud infrastructure and performance and how Catchpoint can help you do this. I’ll also share how to design corresponding tests or analytics in our UI.

First up, however, we’ll deal with a troubleshooting scenario involving asymmetrical infrastructure divided across two providers. Then, we’ll see how Catchpoint can evaluate identical compute resources hosted in different providers to aid with either SLA monitoring and/or business/site planning.

Let’s hop in!