Monitoring IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service)

The traditional way of building and maintaining physical hardware and software requires a huge capital investment. That's why most startups now opt for Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) to build their products. 

Instead of your company dealing with the components and management of physical servers and data centers, IaaS provides the complete infrastructure required during the application development lifecycle. Sourcing out your infrastructure is beneficial in many ways, but if you’re not monitoring IaaS, you’re missing a critical piece. 

IaaS monitoring tracks and manages the performance and availability of cloud infrastructure resources, such as computing power, storage, and network capabilities. So, in this article, you'll:

• Learn how IaaS monitoring works. 

• Understand the key metrics to monitor.

• Explore common tools for IaaS monitoring. 

IaaS, trends & IaaS monitoring

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) is one of the four cloud computing services. IaaS monitoring monitors and manages the underlying cloud infrastructure resources provided through an IaaS model. 

In an IaaS model, a cloud provider provides virtualized computing resources such as: 

• Storage

• Virtual machines

• Networking and other infrastructure components. 

Customers use these resources as needed, typically paying for what they use.

The IaaS market is gaining more popularity among startups and will expectedly hit 212.34 billion USD in revenue by 2028. And here’s why companies now prefer IaaS over traditional Infrastructure: 

1. It allows scaling resources as per needs. 

2. They pay only for what they consume. 

While the number of providers and users of IaaS is increasing due to its cost-efficiency, it comes with multiple security issues and challenges. This is where IaaS monitoring helps. With IaaS monitoring, you can: 

• Detect issues.

• Optimize resource utilization.

• Enhance user satisfaction. 

Users can ensure their cloud infrastructure operates smoothly by tracking real-time performance metrics such as response time and error rates. (More on this below.) 

Both parties (the provider and the consumer) work under Service Level Agreements (SLAs) that outline the specific resources and services cloud providers guarantee to provide. Most service providers claim to provide 99.98% availability 24/7. For this reason, IaaS monitoring ensures that no party violates the agreement. 

How does IaaS monitoring work?

You've sourced the infrastructure from third-party providers. Now what — how will you know if it’s working as it should? This is where SLAs and continuous resource monitoring play their part. 

IaaS monitoring informs how resources hosted on the cloud are performing. If the system detects any abnormalities in predefined instances and resources, it automatically sends alerts to the support team through SMS and email. 

Essential IaaS performance metrics to monitor

Here’s what metrics should be monitored to track the IaaS’s performance and see if its components are delivering the optimal performance to end users or not: 

• Availability measures the uptime and reliability of infrastructure components to ensure they are accessible and functioning as expected.

• Capacity gauges the amount and usage of resources, such as CPU, memory, and storage, to scale and prevent resource exhaustion.

• Throughput indicates the speed and efficiency of components in processing data or handling requests.

• Latency measures the delay or response time that impacts user experience and application performance.

• Error rate tracks the frequency and severity of errors or failures to identify and resolve issues before they escalate.

• Network bandwidth monitors data transfer efficiency between components to prevent network bottlenecks and slowdowns.

• Disk I/O (Input/Output) performance assesses the speed of storage operations that directly impact application loading times and data retrieval.

• Response time per transaction provides insights into the efficiency of specific processes to optimize critical functions for better user experience.

By monitoring these key metrics, organizations can ensure their IaaS infrastructure components run smoothly and efficiently.

(Understand how metrics affect network traffic.)

Preventing common user issues with IaaS monitoring

Here’s how organizations can use IaaS monitoring to prevent the basic issues that most of the customers face with IaaS:

• Define performance goals and baselines.

• Collect and store performance data from infrastructure components.

• Analyze and visualize performance data through charts, graphs, dashboards, and reports.

• Set rules, thresholds, and anomaly detection to identify issues before user impact.

• Troubleshoot and resolve performance issues through root cause analysis, logs, traces, and diagnostics.

Tools for IaaS monitoring 

Multiple third-party tools can be integrated with your cloud computing resources to detect and monitor IaaS's performance. Now, if you’re thinking, why should you even use IaaS monitoring tools? Here’s why:

• They detect issues before they even occur. 

• Optimize resource utilization.

• Provide cost-efficiency.

• Maintain service quality and accountability.

Some of the most common tooling options for this include Monitis, LogicMonitor, Azure Monitor and Amazon CloudWatch.  These are all point solutions, which may provide just the coverage you need. 

Of course, Splunk can help with all of your monitoring needs, from IaaS to PaaS and SaaS and, yes, even for the data, apps and infrastructure that continues to live on-premises. The best part is our monitoring is one part of a comprehensive data platform that unifies observability with cybersecurity. 

IaaS requires continuous monitoring 

While IaaS seems attractive for new startups, they encounter multiple management and monitoring challenges. And only continuous monitoring can keep your data secure and make resources available around the clock.