Why Monitor Alibaba Cloud?

Over the years, thousands of enterprises, developers, and government organizations have come to rely heavily on the cloud computing and data processing services offered by the Alibaba Cloud to perform business-critical operations. If the cloud is inaccessible, or if one/more ECS instances on the cloud are unavailable/resource-starved, then the performance of the dependent business applications will suffer. Likewise, if the relational database services offered by the Alibaba cloud experience serious bottlenecks in query processing, mission-critical business applications using these services will experience performance degradations, and sometimes, even prolonged outages. This will have an adverse impact on the productivity and profitability of the enterprises that subscribe to the Alibaba cloud. Also, such issues, if not captured promptly and weeded out quickly, may compel the cloud service provider to cough up millions as penalties, due to their inability to deliver the guaranteed service levels to their subscribers! Continuous monitoring of the Alibaba cloud can help both cloud consumers and service providers quickly detect performance issues, accurately diagnose their root-cause, and rapidly resolve them, thus ensuring the high availability and quality of the cloud-based services.

Another common problem that monitoring can help cloud consumers address is that of cloud spend. Typically, every new service a cloud consumer subscribes to and every new instance that is deployed for them adds to their cloud usage cost. However, at the time of adding these services/instances to their cloud account, most cloud consumers are unaware of its impact on their monthly pay out. By having their cloud accounts monitored, these consumers can track their cloud spend on a monthly basis. This will help the cloud consumer compare the cloud spend across months, figure out if there has been a sudden/consistent increase in it, and if so, determine what could have contributed to the increase. Appropriate measures can then be initiated to minimize the cloud spend.