01 Cloud Platform Monitoring Pain Points
Compared to traditional server architectures, cloud platforms offer significant advantages. At their core, they efficiently virtualize physical resources into a dynamic virtual machine resource pool, enabling flexible allocation of software and hardware resources. During runtime, cloud platforms can migrate virtual machine resources in real time based on varying user concurrency levels—ensuring high-quality, continuous services while minimizing resource costs and improving CPU and memory utilization. This makes monitoring cloud resources critically important.
Currently, enterprises face the following pain points when it comes to IT monitoring platform adoption:
Massive data volumes: The large number of instances running in cloud environments generates enormous amounts of data. Managing and analyzing this data to quickly identify and resolve issues is a significant challenge.
Multi-layer and multi-component monitoring: Cloud architectures typically comprise a variety of components—physical machines, virtual machines, storage, and more. Ensuring every layer and component is effectively monitored is an extremely complex task.
Dynamism and elasticity: Resources in cloud environments are highly dynamic and elastic, with instances potentially scaling up or down at any time. This requires the monitoring system to promptly capture such changes and perform data collection and monitoring accordingly.
Multi-cloud and hybrid cloud environments: Many enterprises adopt multi-cloud or hybrid cloud strategies, which means they need a unified monitoring solution to cover services from different cloud providers. Different providers may have their own monitoring tools and APIs, making integration quite complex.
Visualization and user experience: In complex cloud environments, presenting monitoring data intuitively so that IT O&M personnel can quickly understand and assess system status is a challenge. Well-designed user interfaces and visualization tools are indispensable.
In this article, we will focus on the scenarios and characteristics of cloud platform monitoring, and introduce how CanWay BlueWhale Full-Stack Observability Center (hereinafter referred to as the "Monitoring Center") delivers cloud platform monitoring.
02 Product Highlights
Cloud Platform Integration
The Monitoring Center supports unified management of both on-premises private clouds and public clouds, with plugin-based extensibility for additional cloud platforms. It currently integrates with VMware, Alibaba Private Cloud/Public Cloud, Tencent Public Cloud, Huawei Private Cloud, H3C CAS, and Yunhong CNware. Furthermore, enterprises can quickly connect different types of cloud platforms through plugins, achieving the goal of one-stop monitoring management across single-cloud and hybrid cloud environments.
Built-in Private Cloud & Public Cloud
For managed cloud platforms, onboarding requires only filling in integration parameters to achieve one-click management. This greatly reduces deployment and integration costs, making it easy to deliver lightweight cloud platform monitoring capabilities.
Cloud Platform Integration
Cloud Resource Discovery & Collection
For private cloud environments, the Monitoring Center leverages the collaborative operation of cloud platform resource discovery plugins and collection plugins. Once cloud resource objects are created, they are automatically brought under management, with continuous tracking of dynamic changes in cloud resources—requiring no manual intervention. For public clouds, the Monitoring Center can directly retrieve cloud resource monitoring data through API calls.
Private Cloud Collection Metrics
Public Cloud Collection Metrics
Cloud Platform View
For cloud platform IT O&M administrators, having an intuitive view of the health status of each cloud platform is a critical requirement.
Single Cloud Platform Resource View
For hybrid clouds, how to uniformly manage complex and massive cloud resource data is the capability enterprises care about most. The Monitoring Center features a unified resource list designed for hybrid cloud monitoring, centrally displaying the operational status and alert/fault information of all cloud platform resources. This cross-cloud resource management model helps cloud administrators more efficiently identify and filter faulty resources, thereby accelerating problem identification and resolution, and improving overall management efficiency and resource availability.
Cross-Cloud Resource View
Beyond the overall cloud platform view, the Monitoring Center also provides detailed monitoring for specific cloud resource instances, including real-time metric views, alert lists, and key information about cloud resource instances.
Cloud resource topology is a tool for visualizing and structuring resources distributed across different cloud platforms, offering a clear view of relationships and dependencies among resources. Through cloud resource topology, cloud administrators can more intuitively understand and manage complex resources in cloud environments, quickly identifying potential performance bottlenecks, fault nodes, and opportunities for resource utilization optimization. It not only enhances the efficiency of troubleshooting and resource configuration but also supports more effective capacity planning and strategy adjustments, thereby improving the reliability and operability of the entire cloud environment.
Private Cloud Topology View
Cloud Platform Monitoring Policies
The Monitoring Center supports configuration of multi-metric policy templates from a cloud resource perspective, enabling batch policy configuration for cloud resource objects. Monitoring policies include target selection, detection configuration, and alert management configuration—simplified logic, one-time configuration, easy management.
Template-Based Monitoring Policies
In terms of policy capabilities, it supports batch enabling/disabling of detection policies, eight detection algorithms including static thresholds and year-over-year/period-over-period comparisons, metric calculations with PromQL expression compatibility, built-in debounce and suppression algorithm detection, three types of automated remediation packages, and diversified alert notification channels.
Monitoring Policy Configuration
Cloud Platform Permission Management
The Monitoring Center also supports multiple permission configurations, meeting diverse enterprise IT O&M management needs through flexible authorization models. Authorization can be granted at the cloud platform level as a whole, or at a granular level down to specific cloud resource types. This multi-mode permission management approach ensures precision and flexibility in IT O&M management.
Cloud Platform-Level Authorization
Cloud Resource Type-Level Authorization
03 Conclusion
In summary, cloud platform monitoring is not only a foundational tool for ensuring healthy system operations but also a key measure for enhancing business stability and security. Through continuous monitoring and timely response, enterprises can effectively prevent failures, optimize resource utilization, and improve user experience. As a vital component of enterprise IT management, cloud platform monitoring will continue to play an indispensable role on the journey of digital intelligence operations.
