Monitoring in the Cloud

Philip Van de Vyver, Azure Architect at Arxus talks more about monitoring in the cloud. How has the whole monitoring way of working changed since the advent of the cloud, and what should you look out for?

The advent of the cloud has changed the way we deal with monitoring. Before, monitoring was mostly an on-prem thing, which was more workload specific. Now we have evolved to Monitoring as a Service (MaaS), with a focus on Azure. This also has the possibility to do on-prem monitoring but the cost remains in Azure because the resources we purchase for monitoring are in the cloud, which is of course an important difference.
By the way, the current monitoring scope includes many facets, for example there is OS, compliance, application and security monitoring. The whole branch of resources in the cloud we can monitor.

Azure Lighthouse

Very concretely, we are going to work with Cloud Custodian, an offering in the Azure Marketplace. Thanks to Azure Lighthouse we can get a delegation on the subscriptions of the customer and through this delegation we can manage the subscription. This package not only includes monitoring, but also Update Management and Back-up. And it doesn't stop there, thanks to Azure Lighthouse we can not only do the Monitoring at Scale but also the Management at Scale and thus take on the entire management. Technically, that means we will be working through Azure Policy, which allows us to turn on the diagnostic settings of resources and thus manage the alerts.

Security

In other words, thanks to Azure Lighthouse, we can monitor our different customers on a large scale and optimize the knowledge gained. For that we use Azure Workbooks which allows us to keep an eye on that Monitoring at Scale, resource specific, and from those Workbooks we can jump to the customer's resource and immediately do a roots analysis which allows us to quickly know what's going on and offer a solution.

Finally, security is also a part of a good Cloud Monitoring strategy We also use Azure Lighthouse for that. Through the Sentinel tool in Azure, we get access to a Sentinel workplace of the customer through Azure Lighthouse. The cost, management and connectors are all at the customer which makes onboarding the Sentinel workspace much easier. Again, we can offer Security management at Scale.