Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Managing cloud infrastructure is challenging enough without adding the burden of deploying and maintaining monitoring agents. What if there was a simpler, more efficient way to monitor your virtual machines (VMs)? In the first part of this series, we looked at the (link) and presented a better solution: agentless monitoring. Agentless monitoring is an efficient approach to observability that eliminates the need to install and manage software agents on each monitored device.

Cloud computing powers everything from startups to global enterprises. With it, a new business can scale quickly without investing in expensive servers, while large organizations can store vast amounts of data and run applications seamlessly across the world. Simply put, cloud computing delivers computing resources over the internet that are scalable, cost-effective, and accessible—anytime, anywhere. Let’s break down the fundamentals of cloud computing and why it matters.

So you had a great day playing with really awesome new tech, solving big business challenges, and feeling like you really nailed it. Then you wake up the next day to an alert from Azure telling you you've blown your monthly budget and its only the first week of the month. We've all been there... right? Using any cloud service comes with a cost, but for most services the budget risk is low. Cost calculated daily isn't a problem when usage is predictable, but not everything works like that.

Organizations around the world use Microsoft Azure to power their businesses. The cloud computing platform includes hundreds of products and services organizations can use to build and manage applications, but monitoring those environments can often feel like navigating a maze of fragmented data, tools, and processes.

AWS NAT Gateways are essential for private subnet access but can quickly become a costly burden, even when idle. With Kentik, cloud and network engineers gain deep visibility into NAT Gateway traffic, allowing them to identify underutilized gateways, analyze high-cost usage, and explore cost-saving alternatives like VPC Endpoints, Internet Gateways, or direct peering.

Entra ID is the new name for Azure Active Directory (Azure AD), Microsoft’s cloud-based identity and access management service. This rebranding, announced in July 2023, is part of Microsoft’s broader Entra product family, which focuses on securing access to digital resources and managing identities in a comprehensive way.

New UI features in Cloud Trace, part of Google Cloud Observability, make it easier to troubleshoot latency and errors in your applications.

Amazon Web Service offers cloud computing to organizations of all sizes. It provides low-cost cloud storage, nearly unlimited compute resources, and secure remote computing services. Still, many users find AWS confusing. Companies often struggle to understand AWS billing. Aligning cloud spend to actual operational activities for cost allocation is next to impossible. AWS also limits the amount of compute resources you can use based on your location.

Over the past few years, Kubernetes (K8s) has become the preferred method of orchestrating containers and microservices. Its self-healing, high scalability, and open-source nature make it appealing to a wide range of users. However, deploying, running, and scaling containerized applications and microservices with Kubernetes can be challenging. The Kubernetes community keeps growing, but there still aren’t that many experienced K8s engineers.