In this blog post, we'll explore best practices for proactive server management in hybrid cloud environments and how solutions like Site24x7 can address common issues.

Challenges in hybrid cloud server monitoring

Let us see some common pitfalls that organizations face with their hybrid IT infrastructures:

• A lack of visibility across diverse environments
• Performance inconsistencies
• Security and compliance concerns
• Cost mismanagement
• Data redundancy and unavailability
• Scalability issues

How can you solve these problems?

Let us dissect each challenge now.

1. Implement unified monitoring

Does your organization's observability strategy sound familiar to this setup?

• Product A for server and VM monitoring
• Product B, a cloud-native tool like Amazon CloudWatch for cloud resource monitoring
• Product C for application server monitoring (like SQL Server and AD servers)
• Product D for monitoring applications
• Product E for bringing the data from all these tools together

This setup is difficult to maintain and, more importantly, very inefficient. Utilize a monitoring solution that provides a single pane of glass for every component of your IT infrastructure, regardless of your public cloud service provider—Azure, GCP, AWS, or Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. Site24x7 offers a robust, thorough hybrid cloud monitoring platform that tracks your server performance, cloud resource metrics, and application health—all on one centralized dashboard.

2. Establish baseline performance metrics

The KPIs for on-premises infrastructure and cloud resources vary by a huge margin. For example, the KPIs for your servers will mainly include the following:

• CPU utilization
• Memory usage
• Disk I/O
• Network throughput
• Storage capacity and usage

But for your cloud resources, there will be many more KPIs like the following:

• Read and write latency
• I/O operations per second
• Throughput
• Error rates

Site24x7 provides tracking and threshold-based alerting for more than 80 metrics for on-premises systems and more than 100 cloud resource types. With Site24x7, you are spoiled for choice when it comes to the question, "Which KPIs should I monitor?" This is a nice problem to have, unlike the opposite: "My monitoring tool does not track the KPIs I want to monitor."

3. Set up real-time intelligent alerting

Alerting has evolved into much more than sending pop-ups to your browser window and emails to your inbox. Set up intelligent alerting mechanisms to notify the right teams when issues arise. Site24x7 provides customizable alert thresholds and supports multiple notification channels, ensuring rapid responses to critical events.

4. Use AI-enabled predictive analysis

Leverage machine learning and AI to analyze historical and real-time data to pinpoint the probability of an anomaly before it becomes an outage. Site24x7's predictive analytics can help forecast resource needs and identify potential bottlenecks in your hybrid environment. Whether your disk partition is about to overflow, or your backups are going to fail due to unavailable space, let AI tell you beforehand.

5. Optimize costs

Finding underutilized resources is as important as knowing about overutilized resources when you are working with the cloud. Underutilized cloud resources could mean a lower ROI from your cloud costs. Use monitoring data to identify underutilized resources and optimize your cloud storage costs. Site24x7's Guidance Report and CloudSpend can track your spending and recommend cost-saving measures.

Key takeaways: Proactive server management

• Unified monitoring: Site24x7 provides a single platform for monitoring on-premises, public cloud, and private cloud resources.
• Comprehensive cloud storage monitoring: Site24x7 supports major cloud provider environments and offers detailed insights into storage performance and usage.
• Intelligent alerting: AI-powered anomaly detection and customizable alert thresholds ensure you're notified of critical issues promptly.
• Cost-optimization: Site24x7 provides detailed cost analytics and recommendations for optimizing cloud storage usage.
• Security and compliance: Site24x7 offers features for monitoring access patterns, encryption statuses, and compliance-related metrics.
• Automation: By creating automated workflows, you can address common issues without manual intervention.
• Predictive analytics: Site24x7 uses machine learning to forecast resource needs and identify potential problems before they occur.

Happy monitoring!

Proactive server monitoring in hybrid cloud environments requires a comprehensive approach that addresses the unique challenges of managing diverse infrastructures. By implementing these best practices and leveraging a powerful monitoring solution like Site24x7, IT professionals can ensure the optimal performance, security, and cost-efficiency of their hybrid cloud environments.

By following these best practices and utilizing Site24x7's comprehensive monitoring capabilities, you can stay ahead of potential issues, optimize your hybrid cloud infrastructure, and ensure seamless operations across your entire IT environment.