Top 10 Multi-Cloud Monitoring Software Solutions
Multi-cloud monitoring software solutions enable managing, monitoring, and analyzing applications, infrastructure, and services across various cloud providers. Learn more with Control Plane.
Your cloud environment is your baby. Taking care of one cranky newborn may be doable. But you can bid farewell to sleep and peace if you try to take care of multiple – especially simultaneously and while managing all your other life commitments. Operating a multi-cloud environment is the same (-ish) because it’s simply too large a surface to monitor on your own.
58% of enterprises consider not having the right skills to deploy and manage a complete cloud solution the biggest barrier to securing a multi-cloud architecture. And with the rapid adoption of the multi-cloud, increasingly more enterprises will face these challenges.
Take multi-cloud monitoring software as your multi-cloud nanny – keeping an eye on all your resources and providing you frontline insight into what is right and wrong, so you can focus on solving pressing issues. This article reviews the top multi-cloud monitoring software solutions, distinctive features, and use cases.
What is multi-cloud monitoring software?
Multi-cloud monitoring software is a tool that assists in managing your cloud workflow in more than one cloud provider. It can encompass the monitoring of all cloud services, including Infrastructure as a Service (Iaas), or GCP, Azure, and AWS; Software as a Service (SaaS) tools such as Zoom and DropBox; Platform as a Service (PaaS) such as OpenShift and DigitalOcean; and even Functions as a Service (FaaS) and Database as a Service (DBaaS) services.
Although each leading cloud provider offers cloud monitoring, each has metrics and logs. You’ll need a newer solution to get a holistic report of what’s happening in a multi-cloud environment.
Key features in a multi-cloud monitoring software solution
- Automated scalability – Can it automatically scale regardless of your organization’s size, industry, or region? Multi-cloud management solutions such as Control Plane offer auto-scaling services that enable you to reduce or increase resources as needed and only pay for what you consume.
- Visibility/Observability – You should look for a solution that enables you to monitor your entire cloud infrastructure – not just specific resources. Plus, it must offer enough observability to differentiate between actual attacks and unusual behavior so that only accurate alerts come to your team.
- Seamless integrations and ease of use – It becomes pretty unhelpful if a solution doesn’t integrate into all the cloud providers and technologies you use. Complex integrations and tool management can be a pain for busy teams, so it’s something to avoid.
- Improved performance – Can it determine which applications and infrastructure are underperforming across different cloud environments and optimize accordingly? For example, Control Plane’s multi-cloud monitoring automatically detects customer requests and connects them to the closest servers delivering ultra-low latency.
- Real-time speed – Things move fast in the cloud. You should be able to monitor and optimize your infrastructure in real time and receive alerts and notifications promptly too.
- Improved security and compliance – Your tool should comply with all key regulations. Plus, it should allow you to prove compliance by recording logs, events, and metrics for auditing and reporting required by laws such as PCI DSS and SOC2.
10 Top Multi-Cloud Monitoring Software Solutions
1. Datadog
Datadog’s solution fosters collaboration between development, operations, security, and business teams. It goes beyond the cloud environment and helps organizations to integrate and automate infrastructure monitoring, application performance monitoring, and log management to deliver unified, real-time observability of their infrastructure and technology.
Best for company-wide unified monitoring.
“Monitoring distributed systems is extremely difficult, but Datadog has made it very easy just to plug and play and understand exactly what’s going on.”
2. Control Plane
Control Plane is a complete multi-cloud management solution that lets you deploy and run applications across cloud providers and on-premises infrastructure. Its cloud repatriation feature means you can move from the cloud to on-prem while still using any AWS, Azure, and GCP resources.
Plus, you only pay for what you consume, which can reduce cloud costs by more than 70%. It gives you complete freedom to create your infrastructure and scale it as needed, but also 99.999% availability and reliability, so you don’t have to worry about downtime and delays.
Best for companies looking for complete flexibility and cost savings.
“Control Plane eliminates 50% of our DevOps work. We have two DevOps engineers running out of things to do. It’s a good problem to have.”
3. LogicMonitor
LogicMonitor is an infrastructure monitoring solution that is both cloud-based and fully automatic. It helps IT, and development teams meet critical business demands and gain visibility in hybrid IT environments, offering customizable alert thresholds, workflows, and escalation chains.
Best for companies looking to enable faster IT innovation.
“The sheer breadth of supported technologies impressed me greatly. LogicMonitor caters to a wide range of systems, including servers, networks, applications, databases, and even cloud platforms like AWS and Azure.”
4. Instana
Instana enables companies to automatically discover and map all services and infrastructure, see their interdependencies, and update them in real-time so that development and operations teams can optimize their application performance.
Best for companies looking for rapid issue prevention and remediation.
“Instana is easier to install, maintain, and use. It’s significantly more cost-effective, especially for containerized environments.”
5. Site 24×7
Site 24X7 monitors real user experience on websites and applications on both mobile and desktop devices. At the same time, it also gives DevOps teams in-depth monitoring capabilities to monitor and troubleshoot infrastructure and applications from more than 100 locations.
Best for improving the end-user experience.
“We use Site24x7 to inform the public of our services’ status. Site24x7 gives us visibility into all the critical performance parameters of our resources and helps us stay on top of issues.”
6. Dynatrace
Dynatrace mixes observability, security, and AIOps (Artificial Intelligence for Operations). It leverages data across the entire stack to simplify cloud operations and offers AI-generated suggestions for performance improvement. You can integrate it with over 600 cloud providers and other technologies, such as communication and collaboration software, making it ideal for companies that require unification across different teams.
Best for speeding up DevOps with automation and unification.
“We get critical process insight and the ability to deep-dive into metrics, and traces, unlike any other tool. It has been battle-tested on many triage calls. Compared to its competitors, Dynatrace is simpler to use.”
7. Sumo Logic
Sumo Logic analyzes all your cloud data and strongly focuses on continuous security. It enables teams to modernize DevSecOps processes by spotting security vulnerabilities and operational issues faster, thus being able to remediate them more quickly. Real-time visibility is available from code development to deployment, so you can shift security left and speed up time to market.
Best for companies that want to transform lots of different cloud data into insights.
“Sumo Logic helps the security teams in a cloud-native environment and analyses and parses the machine log data. It ensures application reliability and security against the ever-rising threats in today’s cyber security domain.”
8. New Relic
New Relic enables application engineers to gather real-time insights and data about their software performance- from backend to frontend. It is a much more developer-focused platform; thus, there is a learning curve when getting started. It also includes features such as error tracking and OpenTelemetry, enabling you to standardize all your data and instrument your code.
Best for companies looking to optimize their sales and marketing with real-time data insights.
“New Relic is easy and intuitive to use, with many valuable visualizations on its systems. Agents can be installed in the blink of an eye; if there is no ready-to-use agent, you can use the API to submit your data.”
9. Sematext Cloud
Sematext Cloud integrates with your cloud and container platforms and collects data through logs and metrics. You can predefine what you want to track and customize the monitoring dashboards to see the most relevant information. Sematext scales automatically and monitors all new resources and applications added as your infrastructure scales. You can also monitor user experience – tracking activity on your website to understand what your prospects are most interested in.
Best for companies focused on application performance monitoring.
“Sematext Logs provides us a flexible, extensible, and reliable means of real-time monitoring of our environments.”
10. AWS CloudWatch
AWS CloudWatch is Amazon’s monitoring tool, but you can use it for on-premises and other cloud providers pending integrations. It lets you add logs on your resources and applications to track these and visualize activity on your infrastructure. It offers real-time analysis and enables you to store data for 15 months, which can help prove regulatory compliance.
Best for companies with resources and applications on AWS.
“It provides real-time monitoring and alerting, helping us to take the insights and recommendations to make infrastructure changes.”
Finding a multi-benefit multi-cloud solution
In a multi-cloud environment, you can’t afford to play around regarding performance and security. You must also handle workloads efficiently, with endpoints from multiple cloud accounts across different cloud solutions. There’s no question that a multi-cloud monitoring solution is needed here – removing the problem of lacking resources and enabling you to overcome most of the other challenges related to multi-clouds.
Whether you’re a newbie at multi-cloud environments or have been there and done that for your company, Control Plane can help you gain complete freedom of choice, enabling you to use any resource from AWS, Azure, and GCP; of cost, allowing you to only pay for what you use (really); and of location, offering low latency due to its intelligent DNS router.
You can sign up to try Control Plane here or chat with our team if you require guidance on your cloud migration and management process. We would love to help.