Monitor cloud-based instances and VMs in SAM
This section offers an overview about monitoring your cloud-based infrastructure in SAM. For details including configuration steps, see Monitor cloud instances and VMs in the SolarWinds Platform Product Guide.
As organizations migrate systems to the cloud to distribute workloads, deliver applications, and expand resources for growing databases, infrastructure can become difficult to map in sprawling environments, leading to lost resources or hidden instances.
To support hybrid environments, the SolarWinds Platform can retrieve data from the AWS EC2 and Microsoft Azure cloud service platforms to track availability, performance, applications, and more for instances and VMs. Examples of data gathered include status, storage capacity, IP addresses, and memory usage.
To retrieve status and metric data for monitored clouds (cloud metrics), the SolarWinds Platform sends API requests to the cloud service. The first 1 million requests per month are free, extra requests are charged by your cloud provider.
By combining SAM with the cloud infrastructure monitoring capabilities built into the SolarWinds Platform, you can:
- Manage hybrid environment metrics and status through a single console. Displaying on-premises, virtual, and cloud systems together helps you compare performance, locate bottlenecks, and better plan capacity and resource allocation.
- Track end user and business context for performance by gathering extended metrics that provide visibility into cloud and on-premises systems.
- Dynamically monitor cloud instances and VMs to better handle resource churn during provisioning. Instances and VMs can be removed as needed to support expanding environments or performance peaks.
- Determine usage trends and troubleshoot issues. Metrics captured over time provide historical references to track trends for resource consumption (such as CPU spikes and lulls) so you can determine when those trends become issues.
- Use cloud monitoring data, SolarWinds Platform alerts, and the Performance Analysis dashboard (PerfStack) to review historical performance and pinpoint when significant usage changes began to trigger issues.
Several SAM features support cloud infrastructure monitoring:
- Use SAM API Poller templates to monitor metrics for Azure and Microsoft 365.
- Use SAM application monitoring templates to poll cloud-based applications and services for specific metrics beyond the basic metrics gathered by cloud service APIs, such as OS and memory metrics.
- Monitor Azure Storage Accounts natively, using SAM cloud polling functionality.
- Monitor hardware health for Nutanix clusters, along with child Hyper-V and VMware nodes.
- Monitoring container services for Docker, Docker Swarm, and Kubernetes.
- Display cloud instance/VM details in AppStack for quick troubleshooting across your environment.
- Develop and deploy custom script monitors for PowerShell, Nagios, Linux/Unix, and Windows.
How do I configure it?
- Review the following resources:
- Configure your AWS or Microsoft Azure cloud account to interact with the SolarWinds Platform.
- Gather credentials in your cloud console.
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Add the first cloud account to the SolarWinds Platform Web Console.
If Monitor entities by tags is chosen as the Resources Monitoring Method for your Azure cloud account but no tags are specified, then all entities will be monitored.
- If you plan to use SolarWinds Platform agents, WMI, or SNMP to poll for metrics beyond those gathered by cloud service APIs (for example, metrics retrieved by SAM application monitors), configure cloud instances/VMs as managed nodes. See Manage your cloud in the SolarWinds Platform as a node.
If you exceed recommended cloud monitoring limits and receive a 503 Service Unavailable error when adding Azure accounts, click here for a workaround.
What does it look like?
After your cloud account is configured and polling begins, you can explore cloud instances and VMs on the Cloud Summary page. Go to My Dashboards > Cloud, then choose from classic Cloud Summary, New Cloud Summary, or view your provider-based dashboards.
Use the Cloud Instances Status Summary and Cloud Server Infrastructure widgets to review status and health at-a-glance. To quickly review cloud status, metrics, and node management details, hover over any cloud instance name.
The tooltip provides quick information for the cloud service and status.
When managed as a node, the tooltip provides enhanced data.
Cloud instances encountering issues display in the following widgets with linked instances and nodes to investigate:
- Active Cloud Alerts lists all active alerts affecting monitoring and managed cloud instances.
- Cloud Applications with Problems lists all applications with issues on cloud instances managed as nodes in SAM.
Select a cloud instance or VM to view its Details page. Exceeded thresholds are highlighted in warning and critical values, charts, and graphs with hover-over points to compare collected data and linked alerts. The following widgets provide important data to determine issues, as well as track performance and usage trends:
- Active Alerts lists all active alerts affecting the cloud instance.
- Min/Max/Average of Average CPU load displays average CPU load collected and calculated for the cloud instance.
- Min/Max/Average of Network Utilization provides a chart of the minimum, maximum, and average bits per second transmitted and received over a cloud instance for a custom period of time.
Extreme browser zoom levels can impact the layout and widget rendering of provider-based dashboards.
To learn more about cloud monitoring, see: