Logging, telemetry, server monitoring and cloud monitoring terms are often used incorrectly by the developers. Each term has its own significance and use when it comes to an application deployed in either Production or any lower level environment.

Cloud Platforms have their own out of the box logging and monitoring services that could be either paid or free depending on what the intention is as far as tracking the data.

As computing becomes increasingly complex and distributed, organizations are turning to cloud-based solutions to save money and improve efficiency. But what happens when something goes wrong? Unless your organization has in-house staff with the expertise to diagnose and fix issues, you’ll need another party or tool to help.

Let us discuss in more detail what this all means.

What is Logging?

Before we talk about monitoring, let us talk about logging. Logging is the process of recording data from a system or application in a systematic and organized way. It can be used to troubleshoot issues and identify problems before they become major.

Difference Between Logging and Telemetry

Logging is not limited to the monitoring of physical systems. It can be used to monitor the performance of applications, network traffic, and more. Telemetry, on the other hand, is specific to monitoring physical systems and their performance. In other words, Logging is the local collection of data while telemetry is the remote transmission of data. 

The main difference between logging and telemetry is that logging captures data from all aspects of a system while telemetry captures data only from physical systems. Logging can be used for troubleshooting whereas telemetry is used for performance analysis.

What is Server Monitoring?

Server monitoring is the process of monitoring a server to ensure that it is operating as expected. Traditionally, this has included CPU usage, or server being up or down. This can include checking for performance issues, checking for errors and suspicious activity, and monitoring system resources. Server monitoring also includes keeping an eye on system health and diagnosing problems. 

Server monitoring is designed to keep an eye on the health and performance of your servers, allowing you to identify and resolve issues before they become major problems. This can be a critical step if you’re relying on your servers for mission-critical tasks or if you want to ensure that your data is safe and secure.

What is Cloud Monitoring?

Whether you are using Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), Software as a Service (SaaS) or Function as a Service (FaaS) or Serverless, Cloud Monitoring provides visibility into the performance, uptime, and overall health of cloud-powered applications. It allows users to collect metrics, events, and metadata from Cloud services, hosted uptime probes, application instrumentation, and a variety of common application components. This data can then be visualized on charts and dashboards so that users can identify any potential issues. Additionally, users can create alerts so that they are notified when metrics are outside of expected ranges.

Cloud monitoring makes it easy to get an overview of your servers without having to go through all the hassle of setting up individual monitors for each one. Cloud monitoring is designed to provide real-time visibility into how your cloud resources are being used. This information can help you make informed decisions about how best to use your cloud resources, monitor costs, and optimize performance.

Whether it is AWS, Azure, GCP or any other cloud platform, all of them come with out of the box monitoring and logging tools.

How to start a career in cloud explained in this blog with helpful tips and free resources

Important Features of Cloud Monitoring

IaaS Monitoring –  At the IaaS layer, you need to manage and monitor the servers that power workloads and applications. This includes tasks like monitoring the OS, middleware, data and applications. You also need to manage and monitor software defined storage and networking.

PaaS Monitoring – When organizations opt for PaaS, they are only responsible for your applications and data. Developers don’t have to worry about maintaining the administrative tasks of the applications, middleware or operating system. 

Many people automatically assume that they don’t need monitoring for PaaS because they think that without servers and high availability, they don’t need it. However, this is not true and while Cloud provider gives you the tools to monitor the applications, it must be explicitly set up.

FaaS Monitoring – Services like AWS Lambda and Azure Functions enables developers to deploy applications as individual components of business logic. The cloud providers can then process requests for those functions at nearly infinitely scale, abstracting away the concept of servers. Monitoring serverless applications in theory works similar to PaaS but must be set up explicitly by the developers.

Differences Between Server Monitoring and Cloud Monitoring

There are many factors to consider when deciding which type of monitoring is right for your organization. Here are some key differences:

  • Cloud monitoring is typically less expensive than server monitoring.
  • Cloud monitoring can be deployed in minutes, while server monitoring may take hours or days to set up.
  • Cloud monitoring typically provides more general information than server monitoring, while server monitoring is more focused on specific aspects of server health and performance.
  • Cloud logging provides detailed information about all activity taking place in your cloud, including errors, events, and user interactions. This information can be used to monitor and troubleshoot issues as they happen, rather than waiting for reports or alerts to come in.

If you don’t want to rely solely on the monitoring provided by cloud platforms, you can use tools such as Dynatrace or Datadog that can seamlessly integrate within on-prem and cloud platforms to give you one common dashboard to look at.

Conclusion

Servers play an important role in the modern world, and it’s crucial that you have the resources to monitor them properly. Cloud monitoring and server monitoring are two different types of monitoring that can help you keep your servers running smoothly and protect your data.

However, this doesn’t end at server monitoring. With advancement in the type of services used – IaaS, SaaS, PaaS, FaaS – it is important that organizations take a holistic approach at logging, monitoring and telemetry.

Further Reading: Check out this blog on why DevSecOps is needed and ways to implement it in your company