Streamlining Cloud Infrastructure Monitoring with Daily digests

Introduction

In the ever-evolving and scaling landscape of cloud computing, increasingly cloud engineers face the challenge of managing diverse and complex infrastructures spread across multiple regions and accounts. The traditional methods of monitoring, involving manual checks through cloud provider consoles, have proven to be not only time-consuming but also prone to errors. This blog post explores the inefficiencies in current monitoring practices and introduces the new Tailwarden Daily digest feature, a solution designed to save time and streamline the monitoring process of your cloud environment.

The Challenge: Time-Consuming Daily Monitoring

Diverse and Complex Environments

Cloud environments grow in complexity in an exponential way, you need not be a fully fledged multi-cloud based outfit to start feeling the pains of growing complexity as cloud environments scale and mature.

Spread Across Multiple Regions

Navigating through most cloud consoles can be a cumbersome experience when it comes to sorting and locating specific resources. Despite the inconvenience of toggling by region, it appears to be the accepted method for constructing a cloud console. This approach requires a constant awareness of the current control pane, making it essential to always confirm your location within the console. Consequently, this default reliance on region-based navigation results in a lack of visibility into panes that are not currently in focus.

Management of Multiple Accounts

The inconvenience of context switching and region toggling becomes even more pronounced when we introduce additional cloud accounts into the mix. Managing a series of cloud environments across multiple accounts traditionally lacks a native, single management pane, making effective management more challenging. While services like AWS Organizations and Azure Management Groups assist with account/subscription hierarchies and access management, they don't streamline the process of quickly pinpointing specific resources. For example, when dealing with issues like a DDoS attack or identifying the sources of a recent cost surge, these managed services fall short in providing a comprehensive management solution. Thus, there's still much to be desired on the management front.

Manual Checks are Prone to Errors

As humans, no matter how careful and meticulous we believe ourselves to be, we are inherently fallible. While an individual might have a foolproof system in place to prevent cloud management mistakes, challenges arise as teams expand, and others who are onboarded onto systems and processes they didn't design will inevitably make mistakes. Errors become more prevalent, with up to 50% of cloud outages attributed to human error, as revealed in a recent Cloud Security Alliance survey. And that’s why, prioritizing the avoidance of manual processes should be a key consideration in our pursuit of becoming exemplary cloud custodians.

You’re not alone, you’ve got Tailwarden

Tailwarden serves as a comprehensive cloud management platform, seamlessly facilitating the construction of your cloud asset inventory while providing detailed insights by breaking down costs at the resource level. One of its primary objectives is to empower cloud engineers and developers to utilize their time more effectively. Let's delve into a specific feature that aims to do just that.

If you don’t have a Tailwarden account just yet, request a demo here to get your free 14-day trial account.

Tailored Daily Digests

It all starts with a Custom view

Upon initiating Tailwarden, the first step involves connecting one or multiple cloud accounts. Subsequently, a process is initiated which fetches all resources present in the connected accounts. The fetched resources populate a cloud resource inventory accessible under the "Inventory" tab on the left-side panel, serving as the centralized source of truth for your cloud ecosystem.

From this inventory hub, you gain the ability to apply granular filters, enabling you to zero in on different subsets of resources within your environments. For instance, you can effortlessly pinpoint all the AWS resources tagged with the key/value pair of env/prod that are provisioned in the eu-central-1 region. Saving this filter as a custom view ensures quick future access, providing a tailored and efficient way to monitor specific aspects of your cloud infrastructure.

Moreover, Tailwarden offers the flexibility to apply various alerts and notifications to these custom views, including features like tagging and cost daily digests. This comprehensive functionality ensures that you not only have a dynamic and customizable view of your cloud resources but also receive timely insights and updates aligned with your specific monitoring needs.

Let’s talk notifications

Once you have chosen a custom view your would like to be notified on. It’s time to chose the notification type

• Cost breakdown digest: Sends a digest of your costs based on this view on a daily or weekly cadence sent out at a time of your choice to either a slack channel or via email.

• Tag audit digest: Sends a tag usage digest based on this view on a daily or weekly cadence sent out at a time of your choice to either a slack channel or via email.

• Budget alert: Sends an alert when the cost threshold is exceeded.

• Resource usage alert: Send an alert when the resource usage threshold is exceeded.

Setup a cost or tags audit digest in a just few clicks

‍Once you’ve chosen the target custom view to apply your daily digest now simply follow the steps

Get Custom Daily or Weekly Check-ups

Configuring your daily or weekly digest on Tailwarden eliminates the need for manual sorting through various cloud consoles to identify cost surges or tagging compliance discrepancies. By setting up the granularity frequency – be it daily or weekly – as well as specifying the time and channel for digest delivery, you empower yourself and your team with the most up-to-date and critical data. This streamlined approach ensures you have the information you need precisely when and where you want it, enhancing your capacity to effectively manage your infrastructure.

Benefits of the Daily digest approach

Comprehensive Infrastructure View

By using the cost and tag daily digests, tracking the evolution of granular and crucial segments in your dispersed or fragmented cloud environment becomes effortless. Leveraging the power of the cloud resource inventory, you can efficiently filter your provisioned resources and avoid the hassle of extensive searches by creating well-defined custom views. Once this groundwork is laid, applying the digest to the view transforms the ongoing management of resources into a passive and comfortable task.

Receiving detailed digest reports on a daily or weekly cadence directly streamlines the process of obtaining the information necessary to make crucial decisions regarding your cloud cost and tagging compliance. Tailwarden's approach ensures that you effortlessly stay informed and empowered in managing your cloud resources.

Proactive Issue Resolution

Automating the regular delivery of essential cloud account data, including the current state of cost and tagging compliance, significantly facilitates proactive management. Establishing a routine to review the overall health of your cloud infrastructure upon receiving notifications ensures that you consistently have the freshest data at your fingertips. This proactive approach sets the stage for prompt issue resolution, allowing you to address any concerns as they arise.

Conclusion

By providing tailored daily digests, eliminating time-consuming manual checks, and offering flexibility in delivery options, Tailwarden empowers you the cloud engineers to gain a unified and comprehensive view into your cloud infrastructures. With Tailwarden, the era of inefficient monitoring practices comes to an end, ushering in a new age of streamlined, proactive, and user-controlled cloud infrastructure management.

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