Cloud Service Monitoring with GroundWork Cloud Hub

April 14, 2020

Cloud Computing Services

Cloud Computing Services like AWS, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure are revolutionizing IT infrastructures at a rapid rate. However, businesses have not completely adopted Cloud services, and many of us are still running hybrid on-premise and cloud solutions. The GroundWork solution is to unify all monitoring, whether it be on-premise or in the cloud. This article introduces you to the GroundWork Cloud Hub connector architecture, demonstrating how easy it is to start gathering cloud metrics and inventory from the most popular cloud computing platforms today.

GroundWork Cloud Hub

Cloud Hub is a connector architecture that gathers inventory and metrics from Cloud Computing sources. Traditional monitoring systems like Nagios worked with inventories of hosts and service checks on those hosts. With the cloud, the inventory is much more rich. Cloud services are made up of the entire spectrum cloud services:

• VM Instances
• Serverless Applications and Functions
• Databases
• Cloud Storage
• Cloud Network Services
• Machine Learning

And more services are being added over time.

Simply Select your Cloud Service

Cloud Hub supports the most popular cloud services out of the box. Adding a connection is as simple as selecting your cloud service.

And then, add your connection credentials. Here we see how to configure an AWS connector. You just need to provide your AWS region endpoint and access keys, and the connection is ready to go.

Note that if you are running Cloud Hub on an AWS server, you don’t even need to provide credentials, you can simply check the box to Enable IAM Roles, and we automatically do the authentication for you.

Each connector usually has advanced features, such as creating host groups based on AWS tag names.

Categorized Views

Since cloud providers often have hundreds of metrics, Cloud Hub automatically categorizes your metrics for you.

We call these categories Views.

Metrics and Thresholds

GroundWork provides a set of custom-selected metrics and thresholds so you can immediately start monitoring your cloud infrastructure with a few clicks. This convention over configuration philosophy is seen throughout GroundWork Monitor. For advanced users, we continue to provide the ability to go deeper into configuration.

Additional metrics are discovered by category and added to the list of monitored metrics:

Metric thresholds can be configured for all hosts or per host:

Synthetic Metrics

Metrics can also be aggregated to create new metrics. This type of metric is called a synthetic metric. Synthetic metrics are built upon expressions of existing metrics. A synthetic metric can be as simple as a math expression:

ELB.HealthyHostCount + ELB.UnHealthyHostCount

Cloud Hub also provides helper functions to perform common conversions like converting bytes to megabytes:

GW:MB2(memory.usage)
GW:GB2(physical_memory_used)

Or more advanced functions to calculate percentage used:

GW:percentageUsed(summary.quickStats.overallCpuUsage,summary.runtime.maxCpuUsage)

Or other mathematical functions:

(GW:toDouble(fd_open) / GW:toDouble(fd_max)) * 100.0
GW:divideToPercentage(physical_memory_used,physical_memory_total)
max(100, memory.usage)

After creating your connector, you can start and stop it in the Cloud Hub administration window:

In an upcoming Blog post, we’ll have a closer look at the Docker connector, and see how Cloud Hub creates inventory and displays metrics in the GroundWork Monitor 8 Status Summary page.

GroundWork Open Source, Inc.
www.gwos.com