Today we’ll show you the best monitoring and reporting tools for enterprises. Given the large amount of data and information that organizations generate, they must have solutions that facilitate that everything is properly ordered. It is also important that all this material can be processed and monitored to make the best decisions at all times. Within this context, monitoring and reporting tools such as the ones in this article ‘open’ with Amazon reporting, the monitoring and observation service in the cloud from Amazon Web Services.
Best monitoring and reporting tools for enterprises
It is followed by Cisco’s Services Workload Optimizer, a multi-cloud application resource management solution that monitors and visualizes the complex interdependencies in all layers of the infrastructure. Crayon Cloud-iQ is a digital and integrated platform that helps companies cover the entire lifecycle of their technology resources in the cloud, optimizing and facilitating management and billing tasks. Dynatrace and HPE also participate with GreenLake Central: The former provides different types of monitoring (infrastructure, digital experience, applications, and microservices…), while the latter goes beyond managing and optimizing workloads, as it also supervises performance tasks, plans capacities… All from a centralized panel that improves hybrid environments.
IBM offers Cognos Analytics, a platform equipped with artificial intelligence, control panels, complete reports… Meanwhile, Microsoft Power BI helps organizations make the best decisions based on the data collected; It can also predict trends thanks to its artificial intelligence layer.
In the case of Netapp Cloud Insights, we find a tool that monitors, optimizes, and protects the resources that companies have in the cloud. On the other hand, Orizon Boost & Optimize Applications (BOA) optimizes and manages the performance of technological infrastructures by identifying and correcting problems, among other advantages. Finally, VMware CloudHealth is presented as a solution that manages costs, ensures security compliance, improves governance, and automates actions in multi-cloud environments.
Amazon CloudWatch
It collects, displays, and correlates data from those AWS resources, applications, and services running on AWS and on-premises servers into a single platform.
Amazon CloudWatch is an Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud monitoring and observation service that provides organizations with actionable data and information to monitor applications, respond to system-wide performance changes, optimize resource usage, and achieve a unified view of operational health. It collects monitoring and operational data in the form of logs, metrics, and events, providing a unified view of AWS resources, applications, and services running on both on-premises and AWS servers. It also allows you to detect anomalous behavior in your environments, set alarms, compare logs and metrics, perform automated actions, troubleshoots problems, and discover information to keep applications running smoothly.
Precisely, and to improve operational performance and resource optimization, customers can set alarms and automate actions based on predefined thresholds or machine learning algorithms that identify anomalous behavior in their metrics. And when it comes to AWS resource and application monitoring, CloudWatch natively integrates with more than 70 AWS services such as Amazon EC2, Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon S3, Amazon ECS, Amazon EKS, and AWS Lambda, automatically publishing up-to-the-minute detailed metrics and custom metrics at up to one-second level of detail to drill down into logs for additional context. CloudWatch can also be used in hybrid cloud architectures using the CloudWatch agent or API to monitor on-premises resources.
It is worth noting, moreover, how this solution provides automatic dashboards, data at the one-second granularity, and up to 15 months of metrics retention and storage. Similarly, it is possible to perform mathematical operations with the metrics to derive operational and utilization data; For example, you can sum up the usage of an entire fleet of EC2 instances. You can also explore, analyze and visualize logs to easily troubleshoot operational issues.
With CloudWatch Logs Insights you only pay for the queries you run. Because it scales with log volume and query complexity, you can provide answers in seconds. You can also publish log-based metrics, create alarms, and correlate logs and metrics together in CloudWatch dashboards for complete operational visibility.
Cisco Intersight Workload Optimizer
It helps improve the productivity of enterprise IT staff by simplifying complex tasks and automating decision-making.
Cisco is participating in this article with Intersight Workload Optimizer, a multi-cloud application resource management solution that monitors and visualizes complex interdependencies across infrastructure layers and makes recommendations to ensure the best user experience at the lowest cost.
As a real-time decision engine that monitors the state of applications in local (on-premise) and public cloud environments, it continuously analyzes workload consumption. It also analyzes costs and policies across the environment and automatically scales resources in real-time to ensure application performance.
This automation allows you to match resources to the dynamic demands of workloads. Also, as analytics software, it can determine when, where, and how to move and resize workloads; Maximize elasticity with public cloud resources, and forecast potential infrastructure and workload growth scenarios to determine required resources.
Also, Intersight Workload Optimizer helps IT teams simplify complex tasks and automate the management of application resources, ensuring performance with a single solution that provides complete visibility into applications and underlying infrastructure, informed data, and automated actions. Organizations can also reduce costs by optimizing the use of resources locally and in the cloud, avoiding oversizing.
One of its key features and benefits is related to ensuring that business-critical applications automatically get the resources they need. Also, it safely optimizes the use of infrastructures and accelerates and reduces the risk of multi-cloud projects: Intersight Workload Optimizer efficiently migrates workloads from local servers to the public cloud, and vice versa, to minimize costs and maximize efficiency.
Moreover, to optimize the public cloud, it sizes cloud resources – compute, storage and databases – according to actual application demand to ensure performance without over-provisioning. It also automatically manages infrastructure resources (on-premise, containers, and cloud) based on real-time application demand.
In addition to integrating with Kubernetes, APM solutions (Cisco AppDynamics, Dynatrace, and Microsoft Azure Application Insights), and leading hypervisors, it automatically manages to compute, storage, and network resources to provide intelligent recommendations on how to size and scale resources.
Crayon Cloud-IQ
Tool oriented to improve the partner’s experience and grow their business. It is customizable so that the end customer can access and view the contracted products.
It is a digital and integrated platform that helps organizations to cover the entire lifecycle of their technological resources in the cloud, optimizing and facilitating management and billing tasks. Administrators also have access to all the subscriptions that the organization acquires from different cloud providers, as well as a complete overview of their use through the tool’s portal. Likewise, these administrators create user profiles and assign privileges ranging from portal access to license management.
With business intelligence capabilities, Cloud-it provides all the necessary commercial information so that the client has up-to-date prices for the provider’s different cloud services, as well as filters and search options to find the license needed at any given moment, something that speeds up the provisioning processes.
On the other hand, the platform does not limit itself to providing the information already provided by cloud providers on total consumption/billing by months, days, etc., but crosses this data with its data and applies business intelligence to offer a Business Dashboard in which costs are configured by segmenting categories and applying multiple filters. For example, consumption/expenditure by product or by type of consumption model (purchase/subscription). All this information can be visualized with graphical resources in a dashboard and can also be downloaded.
Also, Crayon provides its customers with the Cloud Cost Explore platform to obtain data with maximum granularity on the cost per unit of the resources consumed. For example, storage equipment consumption information is provided for each of its specifications: Disks, space, etc. ….. All of this is filtered in the desired period and almost in real-time. Cloud Cost Explorer also allows you to program notifications that information via email about any event that you decide to notify that the contracted storage has been exceeded.
Also, Cloud-iQ makes it possible to open support cases related to cloud licensing models within the platform, report technical incidents, and the possibility of contracting additional support. On the other hand, its Insights functionality aims to add value and dynamize the business with the end customer, informing them of possible business opportunities with each of their customers and allowing them to up-sell.
Dynatrace
This platform incorporates different modules through which various types of monitoring are provided, such as infrastructures, digital experience, applications, and microservices.
The US technology company’s proposal was created to ensure that companies’ technological infrastructures work well and that their users and customers also perceive this to be the case. Offered from the outset as an APM (or application performance management) tool, in 2018 it reinvents itself: It does so through the extension of the platform to which modules such as Digital Business Analytics; Digital Experience Monitoring; And Session Replay for mobile applications are added. The latter, as part of its digital experience module, provides digital teams with a view of a mobile user’s experience, visualizing clicks, swipes, and other actions from the user’s perspective.
Later, in 2020, it would add the Dynatrace Application Security module with RASP capabilities, thus entering the application security market. Also, it has recently added a new cloud automation module to its software intelligence platform, joining its infrastructure monitoring, application, and microservices monitoring, digital experience monitoring, digital business analytics, cloud automation, and application security modules; In terms of infrastructure monitoring, its engineers have enhanced its capabilities with the search and analysis of activity log data from Kubernetes and multi-cloud environments, as well as from the most widely used open-source data collection software-based work environments. These enhancements will enable DevOps and Site Reliability Engineering (SER) teams to easily search, segment, and analyze real-time and historical logs from any source, centrally and without the need to locate logs or intervene manually.
The technology incorporated in the Dynatrace platform makes it easier for DevSecOps teams to have a single platform to automate the management of dynamic multi-cloud environments, aligning teams through an all-in-one platform with artificial intelligence and automated observability, among other benefits. It uses the Davis artificial intelligence engine.
It also provides continuous, automatic discovery and observability across the entire stack; Automatic, real-time topology mapping with context; Distributed traces with code-level analysis; Accurate responses with root-cause analysis for improved performance and security in multi-cloud environments; And scalability to hundreds of thousands of hosts, millions of entities and the largest multi-clouds.
HPE GreenLake Central
In addition to managing and optimizing workloads, it monitors performance tasks, plans capacities… All from a centralized panel that improves hybrid environments.
As part of HPE’s solutions for self-managing the hybrid cloud, the North American multinational has HPE GreenLake Central which, with a unified service perspective across the customer’s local IT, private cloud, and public clouds, helps organizations to deploy services faster, gain full control of their IT and costs, gain a holistic understanding of the IT landscape and simplify hybrid cloud management; All with the ease of an interactive experience.
Within this context, HPE GreenLake Central provides a single, centralized dashboard that includes options such as consumption analysis and monitoring of more than 1,500 governance and compliance controls. It also provides the ability to provision, monitor, and manage virtual machines across all of the customer’s data centers and clouds. In terms of consumption analysis, this tool, for example, identifies areas that can be optimized with rule-based insights. It is also possible to query the main costs by type of service or location, among other criteria. Meanwhile, interactive graphs are used to track IT budget expenditure.
With real-time statistics on the utilization of available resources, HPE GreenLake managed services focus on monitoring (e.g., events), availability, performance, capacities, service levels, user experience, costs, security, etc. …..
Similarly, the technology with which it has been provided enables it to provide planning capabilities about how much capacity has been used compared to what is installed and what is reserved. In this regard, companies have at their disposal the HPE Consumption Analytics online portal that not only provides the flexibility to forecast capacity at any level, from the aggregated storage of a hybrid environment to the capacity in a specific array or server. It is also possible to monitor, manage and optimize IT services based on consumption, on-premises, and in the cloud itself.
Finally, it provides an overview of all the key performance indicators of a business, offering answers to the main questions related to cost issues, resource usage, compliance, and operations… All these thanks to the philosophy around which it is developed: To be an intuitive self-service portal and operations console from which to implement services, simplify management tasks, gain knowledge about costs, in short, have total control over IT.
IBM Cognos Analytics
To show and ‘visualize’ the performance a business achieves, it suggests, among other features, comprehensive reports and interactive dashboards in a single tool.
A business intelligence platform ‘powered’ by artificial intelligence that supports the entire analytics cycle, from discovery to operationalization. This is Cognos Analytics, the proposal selected by the ‘blue giant’ for this article: Thanks to it, companies can visualize, analyze and share practical information about their data with any person or employee. It has the added advantage that it can be deployed where and when the user needs it, providing, on the other hand, support for multi-cloud environments: Public, private, on-premises, and through IBM Cloud Pak for Data; The latter is a fully integrated data and artificial intelligence platform that ‘modernizes’ the way a company collects, organizes and analyzes its data. IBM Cloud Pak for Data is also based on the Red Hat OpenShift Kubernetes container platform.
One of the key features of IBM Cognos Analytics is that it helps companies create dashboards and reports with the recommendations suggested by its artificial intelligence technology so that it is possible to visualize the performance of each business much better. All this from a single tool. Following this line, and taking this artificial intelligence as a starting point, the platform helps to discover the patterns that remain hidden in the data. It does so not only by displaying bar charts but also by interpreting this data and presenting the information that is considered of value through a simple and understandable language. Similarly, analysts have the opportunity to use this ‘information of value’ to dig much deeper into the available data.
On another front, IBM ensures that all this data is protected through rules that determine who has access to sensitive information and who does not. Also, that visual content can be captured, annotated, and shared via email or the communication tool that promotes and facilitates teamwork Slack. IBM Cognos Analytics features include an option that allows workers to import data from spreadsheets, cloud or on-premises databases, or CSV files; apply machine learning to automatically discover and combine related data sources into a single, reliable data module; And add new columns to data, as well as perform calculations, split, reorder and hide columns.
Microsoft Power BI
Companies can take control of everything that happens in their company, analyze their performance, optimize their productivity and boost their profitability.
In the context in which this comparison is placed – and given that companies generate more and more data and need to order it, process it, and have tools that facilitate its monitoring – Power BI helps them to make decisions based on the data collected and to predict trends thanks to its artificial intelligence layer.
In this regard, the Redmond giant’s tool unifies analytical processes: It does so by simultaneously managing data and information from various platforms by combining multiple sources. It also provides a visual and intuitive interface that offers both monitoring and reporting in real-time, a feature that is particularly useful to organizations because it speeds up the interpretation of the data displayed on the screen.
Ready to integrate with other platforms of the North American multinational such as Dynamics 365 or Microsoft 335 through Teams, it should be noted that Microsoft Power BI has a library that is growing (currently incorporates more than 120 connectors at no cost) so that all users have at their fingertips a complete picture of the situation and that decision making is supported and controlled precisely by data. In practice, this means connecting directly to hundreds of data sources (both local in the cloud) such as the aforementioned Dynamics 365 suite as well as Excel, SharePoint, Salesforce, or Azure SQL Database.
Meanwhile, and to ensure maximum security and privacy, accessibility controls are provided both internally and externally. In this sense, end-to-end data protection is guaranteed and is applied when data is shared outside the company or exported to other formats such as PDF, PowerPoint, or Excel.
The features available in Microsoft Power BI make it easy for companies to create their reports and dashboards, whose visualizations are derived from these same reports (in turn, each of which is based on a dataset). These visualizations, also known as visual objects, contain the conclusions drawn from these data.
Microsoft has also thought about mobile workers and has developed a free mobile application available through the Windows Store, the App Store, and Google Play: It is possible to obtain a 360° view of company data, visualize reports or create them for mobile users with Power BI Desktop, make annotations.
Netapp Cloud Insights
It is a tool that helps to monitor, optimize and protect the resources that companies have in the cloud.
Detect problems faster, limit downtime, manage resources more efficiently to ‘do more with less’ and control performance, monitor the resource usage of workloads in the cloud environment, meet service level objectives and service level agreements during and after the move to the cloud, stop ransomware in its tracks with actionable intelligence… These are some of the features that companies have at their disposal with Netapp Cloud Insights: This is a tool focused on monitoring, optimizing, and protecting all available resources, including not only those located in public clouds. It is also available in private data centers. It also helps organizations to identify their performance problems and optimize cloud spending.
In addition to having a full-stack view of infrastructure and applications from hundreds of available compilers – all in one place – NetApp’s approach features seamless navigation of Kubernetes clusters to identify performance issues and resource constraints, whether internal to the cluster or the infrastructure that supports them. Another benefit it brings is related to efficient resource management, which helps to significantly reduce waste and maximize utilization as part of daily workflows that avoid bottlenecks that could affect performance.
Also of note is the presence of alerts (which can be customized) and audit reports that are implemented to ensure regulatory compliance for each company through an audit of usage patterns and access to the organization’s most important data, whether in the cloud or on-premises.
The Cloud Insights development team has provided the NetApp tool with machine learning capabilities. This means, for example, that an enterprise can automatically generate topologies, correlate metrics, and detect resources that are degraded or have higher consumption, as well as resource contention. It would even enable the generation of alerts on anomalous user behavior to detect security threats.
Orizon Boost & Optimize Applications (BOA)
It includes five phases visible to customers through a dashboard, standard or customized according to their priorities and requirements.
Developed by Orizon and the basis of the software optimization services that the company provides through its Performance Technical Office (PTO), Boost & Optimize Applications (BOA) optimizes and manages the performance of technological infrastructures by identifying and correcting problems. In this regard, it implements a standard for measuring these parameters, contributing to the development of a software quality culture, and providing solutions to their dynamic behavior, with the advantage of not being confined to any environment and proposing solutions to resolve inefficiencies and problems. It resides in a public cloud.
Based on the information that the client transfers to BOA, BOA monitors its technological components, processes, and transactions to detect how they affect the business, solves problems, and proposes improvements. By monitoring and analyzing the performance of hardware, software, and both together, provides a global view of all your IT systems and technology infrastructures.
It operates in five feedback phases aimed at continuous improvement. The first is the capture of data from the client’s infrastructures, both in mainframe and distributed environments, databases, etc. In the second phase, a census of processes and detections is made, which, depending on each type of process, can be daily, weekly, or monthly. The third phase analyzes all this data and detects opportunities for improvement.
In the fourth – development follow-up phase – the RTO transfers its proposal for improvement to the client and the service provider involved. It is worth noting at this point that BOA’s algorithms can currently detect and solve 79% of incidents automatically. This aspect is key given that, in the world of technological performance, 50 common cases are responsible for 80% of the problems. The fifth verifies that the objectives set with the proposed recommendation have been met, either in terms of reducing resource consumption and costs or improving efficiency or response times.
BOA’s roadmap contemplates its evolution along these lines: The evolution of its graphic interface with an even greater orientation towards the business; The incorporation of machine learning and new Artificial Intelligence algorithms to increase the level of intelligence and automation in the diagnosis and resolution of problems; The incorporation of additional indicators; And progress in the presentation of the spider of external suppliers that provide services to the client.
VMware CloudHealth
A management platform that transforms the way an organization operates in the cloud through one solution that manages everything.
With this platform, it is possible to transform the way organizations operate in the cloud thanks to a single solution for everything. Specifically, it allows you to manage costs, ensure security compliance, improve governance and automate actions in multi-cloud environments. It facilitates, to this end, simplifying financial management by reporting on spending, driving financial accountability against budgets, and finding ways to reduce spending in the cloud.
In turn, CloudHealth enables streamlined operations by creating custom policies that automate day-to-day operations in the cloud, accelerate decision making and reduce risk. It is equally capable of strengthening security and compliance by reporting vulnerabilities, proactively monitoring, detecting, and remediating risks in real-time.
New CloudHealth features, therefore, extend the platform’s cost management functionality and include the availability of multi-cloud, multi-dimensional, and workspace reporting. Changes also include increased amortization, convertible reserved instance swapper automation, visibility into container clusters, and sizing between instance types for Amazon EC2.
The CloudHealth cloud monitoring solution makes recommendations based on constant, real-time analytics: This will facilitate system-wide changes, manage budget and allocations simply, and know that the platform is monitoring efficiency at all times. Also, you can align infrastructure metrics and report to business objectives for more detailed documentation and analysis; Track and report on data center cost and usage by the department to enable chargeback; Analyze usage and performance to identify underutilized or insufficient infrastructure; Assess the cost of migrating an individual virtual machine to public clouds; And set policies that define how you want to manage the cost, usage, performance, and configuration of data center infrastructure.
Finally, it allows you to decide how you want to visualize and assemble the assets and services of a hybrid and cloud infrastructure for analysis, management, evaluation, monitoring, and measurement. It is even capable of keeping a historical record of all assets throughout their lifecycle, including objects and metadata so that costs can be tracked at the resource level.
