Monitoring tools give the cloud user a dashboard to view the metrics and behavior of the cloud environment over time. Think of these services as native cloud infrastructure monitoring tools that integrate seamlessly with other cloud services. AWS CloudWatch, Azure Monitor, and GCP Stackdriver monitoring are all native services that run on each respective cloud platform and provide similar levels of functionality.

Early in the development cycle of these services, they first integrated with other cloud services out the box. As time has progressed and more functionality has been added, these services now support the ingestion of custom metrics, allowing cloud users to feed application metrics that they configure into the monitoring services. Utilizing one pane of glass to have a complete stack monitoring solution has and should always be a goal of security-ops and administrative-ops teams.

Some important features to call out with these services are:

• Detailed monitoring every minute
• Set and trigger alarms when monitoring metrics reach certain thresholds
• Automate actions based on alarms
• Build custom dashboards with graphs and statistics

Unlike other monitoring solutions, the cloud monitoring services are always on, providing a distinct advantage in performance and availability (since they run in a distributed fashion and are managed by the cloud provider). These services integrate with other cloud services, increasing interoperability. Log files can be encrypted, mitigating one of the most common attack patterns.