The application development landscape has shifted significantly, particularly with the significant paradigm shift to cloud technologies. Software companies have transitioned from monolithic programs on a few on-premises servers to highly distributed microservices. This shift comes with many benefits, including agility, security, and modularity, but it also poses a few challenges to monitoring.

Monitoring may seem to be a simple collection and analysis of metrics and logs to track an application's Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). While this is true for monolithic apps, monitoring microservices in cloud-native ecosystems is a whole new ball game. Full-stack visibility into the production environment is critical due to the complexity of cloud infrastructure and the sheer amount of data processed in microservices apps. Enter cloud-native monitoring. It allows DevOps teams to achieve full-stack observability into scaled-out programs running in orchestrated environments by combining monitoring, alerting, labeling, and analytics capabilities.

Indeed, knowing what to look for is paramount to gaining insight into cloud-native systems. This post will discuss cloud-native monitoring, why it's essential, and some of today's cloud-native monitoring technologies, including Mezmo.

What Is Cloud-Native Monitoring and Why Does It Matter? 

To improve application architecture in the cloud, companies are increasingly resorting to microservices-based systems. Contextualized monitoring is critical for understanding the complicated, interrelated nature of Kubernetes infrastructures. You won't be able to assess and fix problems at your required speed unless you can monitor your cloud servers, containers, and data. Cloud-native monitoring refers to the ability of modern SRE teams to extrapolate infrastructure behavior by looking at the parameters it exposes through metrics and logs. At scale, cloud-native monitoring comprises the following pillars:

• Metrics: Metrics aggregate data from a series of related, measurable events to get deeper insight.
• Alerts: Alerts are vital because they direct developers' attention to a potential issue based on unusual behavior. This way, they can address it on time.
• Tracing: Tracing entails the recording, organizing, and binding of data from connected events to give meaningful context.
• Logs: In cloud-native monitoring, logging is critical because it ensures that all discrete events are recorded and aggregated in one place.

Other benefits of cloud-native monitoring include:

• Application-level observability
• Help with security and compliance
• The ability of DevOps teams to take charge of their log data for streamlined debugging and troubleshooting

Examples of Cloud-Native Monitoring Tools

Mezmo

Mezmo is a log management solution that indexes, aggregates, and analyzes log data on a large scale. Through the Mezmo pipeline CLI, Mezmo provides a holistic solution for cloud-native monitoring, including powerful log searching, graphing, alerting, and full-stack observability. It can handle logs from various sources, including apps, cloud services, and orchestration platforms. Mezmo also comes with tools to help you manage your logs. The fully-featured online UI makes log data live-tailing, searching, parsing, graphing, and alerting easier. You have complete control over your logs, including the options to create custom parsing rules, export logs for long-term storage, and filter out noisy logs. Your teams will be armed with valuable contextual log data to troubleshoot and debug containerized applications thanks to Mezmo's Kubernetes Enrichment.

With Mezmo, users can manage all of their log data in one place while maintaining visibility into their infrastructure. As a result, they can streamline their operations through improved mean time to incident resolution. To learn more about Mezmo, you can request a demo. 

Microsoft Cloud Monitoring

If you run your applications on Microsoft Azure, you can use Microsoft Cloud Monitoring (MCM) to monitor your workloads. MCM gives fast insights across your workloads by monitoring programs, analyzing log files, and spotting security risks.

MCM comes with easy-to-use, built-in cloud monitoring tools that provide a holistic picture of the utilization, performance, and health of your apps, infrastructure, and workloads. You don't need to download any additional software with MCM because it's a part of Azure.

Amazon CloudWatch

Amazon Web Services (AWS) manages cloud resources and applications. It lets you keep track of metrics for Amazon EC2 instances and other AWS resources like Amazon EBS volumes. It allows you to set alarms, save log files, review statistics, and monitor or respond to AWS resource changes. Amazon CloudWatch provides information about your system's overall health and performance. This information helps in optimizing the operations of your application.  

Learning More

Cloud-native monitoring is an essential aspect of solving observability challenges faced by modern cloud-native architectures. Different monitoring tools incorporate logging, tracing, visualizing, and alerting to achieve such observability. An effective monitoring tool should go beyond the fundamental pillars to streamline engineering operations and reduce risks within the cloud infrastructure. Consequently, businesses will be more efficient, have shorter delivery cycles, and improve continuously through feedback and monitoring.

However, this is only possible if you utilize the right tools.