Back in the 2010s, when “the cloud” was still a buzzword and the hype was everywhere, a future was painted where infrastructure would soon be almost completely off-premises. But here we are in the mid-2020s, and the reality is very different: most organizations still have much – if not most – of their infrastructure on-premises. Instead of hardware-free basements, companies are now navigating a complex hybrid IT landscape. And despite the meteoric rise of AI, which promises to put even more computing in the cloud, it is now clear that IT professionals need to reckon with hybrid infrastructure for a while still.
Vice President, Sales & Marketing at Paessler
This, of course, poses profound challenges for IT teams. Among the challenges: how to get an overview of the entire infrastructure. We sat down with Mike Gonzalez, Vice President, Sales & Marketing at Paessler, the monitoring experts, to find out more about the problems that IT professionals face with hybrid infrastructure, and how to use infrastructure monitoring to mitigate the issues.
What is the current status quo of the cloud vs. on-premises infrastructure?
Right now, the biggest portion of IT infrastructure is still hosted on-premises. In fact, according to our most recent customer survey, 76% of IT is on-premises and 24% in the cloud. Having said that, 60% of the IT professionals surveyed indicated that they expect to transition more into the cloud within the next two years, so the trend is moving in that direction.
Of course, managing infrastructure that spans hardware, geographic locations and multiple cloud service providers is a massive challenge.
What are these challenges with managing hybrid infrastructure?
I think first and foremost, the biggest challenge is getting an overview of everything. You’re dealing with different technologies, platforms and vendors, and they all have their own monitoring requirements. It’s very easy to end up with tool sprawl, where you need to use several different tools to piece together the big picture.
Another big challenge is security. You have one set of security risks with on-premises infrastructure, and another set for infrastructure in the cloud. And for hybrid environments, you bring these two sets of risks together and end up with a unique combination of security headaches.
And of course, ensuring optimal performance across a hybrid environment is difficult – you need to keep track of latency, response times and more across different platforms and locations.
What role does infrastructure monitoring play in managing hybrid environments?
The key to managing any aspect of infrastructure is information. What capacity are my server CPUs running at? What’s the temperature in my data center? What are the response times of my cloud services? These kinds of metrics help you make decisions, optimize, and solve problems in your infrastructure. The only way to get these metrics is through monitoring. Comprehensive monitoring also helps you detect signs of security breaches, such as unusual spikes in network traffic or anomalies.
The big key for hybrid infrastructure is that you need to have all your monitoring data in one place. It’s no use if you have your monitoring metrics for cloud service providers in one tool, monitoring metrics for network devices in another tool, and still another tool for your virtual environment, for example. You need everything together in one solution, because only that way can you view your entire infrastructure and understand how everything is working together. A single point of truth for your monitoring data means you can get a holistic overview of the health and status of your whole IT environment – and this is the ultimate goal for managing it all.
How does your monitoring software, Paessler PRTG, help IT professionals face the challenges of hybrid IT?
PRTG provides IT teams with a lot of options to monitor their environment. Just as a few examples: you can monitor using standard IT protocols and standards (like SNMP, WMI, MQTT and more), you can access REST interfaces of systems and devices to get monitoring data, or you can use custom scripts to extract data.
On the cloud side, PRTG features out-of-the-box functionality to monitor the services of big providers like Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure. This includes monitoring the status, performance, latency, and cost of cloud services. PRTG can also keep track of the availability of SaaS services like Dropbox, GitHub and more.
Additionally, PRTG helps makes cyber security in hybrid environments more robust: monitor bandwidth usage across your entire infrastructure for unusual activity, and track the status of your security devices, such as firewalls and intrusion detection systems.
But the biggest advantage PRTG brings is the ability to have all your monitoring metrics in a single monitoring solution. This lets you set up unified, comprehensive dashboards to visualize your entire infrastructure and help you see the status of everything at a glance. Configure who should get notified and when using the customizable notifications in PRTG, and you can be assured that you always know the latest status of your entire infrastructure.
Can you give some best practices for monitoring a hybrid environment with PRTG?
This could almost be an article in itself, but there are some basic concepts to keep in mind. Before you even start monitoring, you need a clear plan, which means knowing your monitoring goals. Figure out what you need to know about your environment to manage it and understand where to get the data you need.
Next, you need to pick the right PRTG sensors that can help you reach your monitoring goals. In PRTG, sensors are basic monitoring elements that measure values in your network, like the CPU load of a server or the availability of a cloud service. PRTG offers many out-of-the-box sensors, but also gives you the ability to customize your own for your specific requirements.
If you have distributed networks, or want to monitor parts of your network separately, you will also need to set up remote probes that feed monitoring data into your centralized PRTG monitoring.
And of course, once you’ve set up your monitoring, you want to create comprehensive dashboards based on what the IT teams need to see. For example: you could create a cloud-only dashboard that visualizes the status of your cloud services, and then another dashboard that shows a high-level summary of your entire network.
Alerts and notifications are other key areas to plan strategically. You obviously want to be notified when devices, systems or cloud services go down, but what about proactive problem solving? By configuring strategic thresholds, you can get alerts when there are warning signs of a potential issue before it impacts end users. For example, getting an alert that a storage device is at 70% of capacity or that your cloud service costs are approaching a certain amount can help you intervene before problems occur. The trick is to find the sweet spot that lets you stay up to date with what’s going on in your infrastructure, and that avoids notification overload.
Wrapping up
If you want to manage infrastructure that has both on-premises and cloud components, then you need to incorporate a holistic infrastructure monitoring solution. This means monitoring everything from hardware devices, systems, virtual environments, and cloud services. Not only that, but you need to put all this data together so you can see the big picture. Paessler PRTG monitoring gives IT professionals these tools and more, including comprehensive dashboards, threshold-based alerts, and much more.
Experience PRTG for yourself and download a free 30 day free now. Download PRTG here and try it out today.
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