Category Archives: Tools

Tools and technologies used for Cloud and Datacenter

CloudTools, Tools

Cloud Billing and predictive analysis tools

The Cloud Billing report gives full cost analysis for cloud services consumed. Different reports such as Daily, Monthly and Yearly helps in analyzing consumption trends and helps in cost optimization. You can plan and assess the monthly, quarterly or annual budgeting requirement on cloud spend.

Multiple tools are available to help provide cross platform billing solutions for cloud

CloudCheckr ( https://cloudcheckr.com ):

CloudCheckr is a comprehensive cloud management solution, helping businesses manage and automate cost as well as security for their Azure, AWS and Google based public cloud environments . Below are the core functionalities

  • Cost and Expense Management – CloudCheckr provides cost allocation, spend optimization, invoicing and charge backs. Custom reports and alerts ensure governance and accountability as environments scale.
  • Security and Compliance – Total visibility across cloud infrastructure enables protection for state and activity monitoring, turning insight to action while meeting compliance demands.
  • Asset Management – Cross-account dashboards provide sophisticated reporting for enterprise-wide inventory based on tags, geography, function and more to proactively optimize workloads.
  • Resource Utilization – CloudCheckr provides summary and detailed usage statistics for resources across AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud, offering actionable intelligence to right-size and scale services efficiently.
  • Self-Healing Automation – CloudCheckr enables users to save money, time, and effort to increase operational efficiencies with automated actions for your cloud.

Cloudyn ( https://www.cloudyn.com/ ) :

Cloudyn, a Microsoft subsidiary ( https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/cost-management/overview ), allows you to track cloud usage and expenditures for your Azure resources and other cloud providers including AWS and Google. Easy-to-understand dashboard reports help with cost allocation and showbacks/chargebacks as well. Cloudyn helps optimize your cloud spending by identifying underutilized resources that you can then manage and adjust . Cloudyn provides following cost management reporting

  • Monitor usage and spending : Reports help you monitor spending to analyze and track cloud usage, costs, and trends. Using Over Time reports, you can detect anomalies that differ from normal trends. Inefficiencies in your cloud deployment are visible in optimization reports
  • Manage costs: Cost allocation manages costs by analyzing your costs based on your tagging policy. You can use tags on your custom accounts, resources, and entities to refine cost allocation. Alerting helps manage costs by notifying you automatically when unusual spending or overspending occurs
  • Improve efficiency: You can determine optimal VM usage and identify idle VMs or remove idle VMs and unattached disks with Cloudyn. Using information in Sizing Optimization and Inefficiency reports, you can create a plan to down-size or remove idle VMs

Embotics® vCommander® https://www.embotics.com/

vCommander is Cloud Management Platform (CMP) that enables cloud automation by integrating seamlessly with on-premise datacenters and public cloud infrastructure. vCommander orchestrates hybrid cloud provisioning and provides governance and cost optimization for both legacy and cloud-native applications. vCommander provides a single pane of glass by working in parallel with your existing public and private cloud infrastructure, including VMware vSphere, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft® Azure, Google Cloud Platform, Kubernetes and Microsoft® Hyper-V SCVMM. Core functionalities of vCommander are

  • Service Request Automation – Self-service provisioning and management allow users to view and manage VMs, including the ability to request new VMs or request changes to existing VMs
  • Chargeback and IT Costing – vCommander assigns and tracks virtual asset costs in real time, with comprehensive reporting on virtual infrastructure costs and growth trends
  • Capacity and Performance – vCommander predicts and identifies constraining resources so that you can address bottlenecks before they happen
  • Lifecycle and Policy Management – vCommander’s robust policy engine automates VM lifecycle management, ensuring that VMs are decommissioned within set time limits. Flexible notification and expiry extension options ensure that users are well informed and able to keep VMs active for as long as they are needed
  • Search and Reports – vCommander delivers immediate value with best-practice virtual infrastructure reports, VM sprawl information, and capacity and growth indicators.

ORBITERA ( https://www.orbitera.com/billing/ ) –

The leading multi-cloud commerce solution, and see how it enables simple, seamless, and scalable buying and selling of software and services in the cloud. The core competencies are

  • Consumption or Subscription Billing: Quickly generate accurate, easy-to-read bills across public, private, and hybrid clouds.
  • Custom Pricebooks: Optimize margins with flexible payment models and customer-specific pricebooks. Define prices from single line items to entire pricebooks for each customer or customer tier with a single click.
  • Integrated Dashboard: Aggregate billing data across clouds and providers into a single-pane dashboard. Easily access and analyze detailed, user-level behavior and cloud cost information.
  • Third Party Cloud Integration: Accurately parse customer-level billing reports with complete integration of cloud infrastructure provider billing data. Orbitera supports Google Cloud Platform, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, CenturyLink, IBM SoftLayer, Acronis, SingleHop, Intermedia and more.
  • Channel Management: Empower channel partners to manage and bill across multiple tiers of sellers

APPTIO ( https://www.apptio.com/ )

Provides cost optimization tools for Hybrid and Public Cloud. Apptio’s software uses machine learning to translate technology costs across the entire IT portfolio (including on-premises systems, vendors, projects, and cloud systems) into a holistic, business-centric view. Customers leverage this view to set future targets, measure business results and drive investment decisions.

  • Through a range of software-as-a-service (SaaS) tools, Apptio gives IT access to the tools and dashboards needed to monitor various IT resources across increasingly complex cloud estates. This includes IT financial management, cloud cost management and vendor insights.
  • Get a single view of Hybrid IT and compare on-premise against cost in multiple cloud platforms
  • Take action on optimization recommendations across public cloud, private cost and on premises
  • Understand public cloud cost and usage to avoid surprises and avoid accountability
  • Manage IaaS and PaaS consumption by infra, app and business units to make better decisions

CloudTools, Tools

Tools for Cloud Monitoring and Management

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As an add on services on top of Cloud services, Cloud vendors are coming up with tools to help enterprise IT for managing, monitoring, application deployment, orchestrate and track cloud services. These tools are built to help IT experts and business to automate the cloud management process and reduce the cost of Cloud ownership.

Below are the list of some cloud management and DevOps tools  for cloud management and monitoring

Chef

Chef turns infrastructure into code. With Chef, you can automate how you build, deploy, and manage your infrastructure. Your infrastructure becomes as versionable, testable, and repeatable as application code. Chef server stores your recipes as well as other configuration data. The Chef client is installed on each server, virtual machine, container, or networking device you manage. The client periodically polls Chef server latest policy and state of your network. If anything on the node is out of date, the client brings it up to date.

Chef is a company & configuration management tool written in Ruby and Erlang. Chef is used to streamline the task of configuring and maintaining a company’s servers, and can integrate with cloud-based platforms such as Rackspace,Internap, Amazon EC2, Google Cloud Platform, OpenStack, SoftLayer, and Microsoft Azure to automatically provision and configure new machines.

Puppet

Puppet Labs helps sysadmins automate configuration and management of machines and the software running on them. With our puppet , businesses can make rapid, repeatable changes and automatically enforce the consistency of systems and devices, across physical and virtual machines, on prem or in the cloud.

Puppet Enterprise helps automate every stage of the application delivery cycle, from initial provisioning of compute resources to storage, network, security, application and middleware provisioning to automated deployment across your data centers or availability zones. Because your infrastructure is defined as code, you can easily move workloads from the data center to the cloud.

You can use Puppet Enterprise for all of the major cloud service providers: Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure,  VMware,  OpenStack, Google Compute Engine

AmazonCloudWatch

Amazon CloudWatch is a monitoring service for AWS cloud resources and the applications you run on AWS. It monitors EC2 for resource matrix like CPU, memory, data transfer, AWS components like RDS DB, EBS volumes, LB, Map Reduce flow. It also allows to use customer matrix for monitoring. set alarms for setting threshold and sending automated alerts. CloudWatch Dashboards enable you to create re-usable graphs of AWS resources and custom metrics so you can quickly monitor operational status and identify issues at a glance

Google Cloud Monitoring Tool

Gain insight into the performance and availability of your cloud-powered applications. Review performance metrics and logs for Google Cloud Platform services and VMs, and create custom dashboards.

Azure Management Studio

One tool to manage your Microsoft Azure cloud storage, diagnostics data and application workflows.   It takes control of your Microsoft Azure cloud storage, monitors Microsoft Azure diagnostics data and streamline Microsoft Azure workflow for cloud provisioning.

ManageEngine – Azure Performance Monitoring Tool

ManageEngine Free Azure Performance Monitor tool helps system administrator or developer to monitor resource utilization of Web/Worker Role instances. This tool can connect to the Windows Azure environment, monitor live feed data and historical data of Web/Worker Role Instances. The list of components as  a part of monitoring include Dashboard View, Graphs for Performance Counters, Historical Data, Live Data, Event Logs

IBM Cloud Monitoring

IBM® SmartCloud Monitoring provides holistic cloud availability, performance and capacity monitoring, broad health dashboards, and granular, detail views of virtual infrastructure components, as well as the virtual machine instances running in the cloud.

Rackspace Cloud Monitoring ( Integrated part of cloud )

Monitoring tool integrated with every cloud provides events processing  and sending notifications,  Customize data collection, threshold criteria, and notification alerts so that monitoring is tailored for workload and organization needs.

BMC Cloud Operation Management Tool

BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management integrates with TrueSight Capacity Optimization and TrueSight Operations Management to help IT deliver fast, reliable cloud services. Intelligent analytics offer you better visibility and control—improving performance, optimizing your resource usage, and reducing your cloud costs.

Apprenda

Apprenda is a full-service enterprise PaaS stack for .NET and Java applications. Specifically, Apprenda is a “PaaS engine” that can be layered atop any arbitrary infrastructure composed of Windows and Linux OS instances. Developers upload apps to a Apprenda PaaS and, in a few button clicks, deploy the application. The Apprenda PaaS takes care of all of the mission-critical heavy lifting of allocating resources, configuring the app, and deploying it to the infrastructure. All management workflows are provided by the platform and “wrapped” around guest applications.

Cloudability

Cloudability is a financial management tool for monitoring and analyzing all cloud expenses across an organization.  It Track critical trends and spikes with customizable dashboards, reports and email, right-size your spending with usage analytics and Reserved Instance portfolio management and regulate your spending with enterprise-wide reporting for ops, finance and management

Monitis

Independently monitor  cloud providers including: Amazon®, Rackspace® and GoGrid®.  It Track virtual server instances, trigger event and notifications in case of server failures, oversee web servers, databases, mail servers, TCP ports and SSH access all based on user rules for existing and automatically launched new server instances. It also allows to add monitors and notifications automatically for newly launched servers based on user defined rules.

Boundary

It provides  early warnings about cloud problems and outages over at Amazon Web Services and Windows Azure. Customers are impressed and rivals are taking note. The secret sauce: Boundary looks at aggregate cloud data from multiple customers, then determines if there are any red alerts in the data

RightScale

RightScale provides configuration, monitoring, automation, and governance of cloud computing infrastructure and applications.  It provides on-demand access to cloud and accelerate application development,  balance agility and control with lifecycle automation and governance and derive insights from past cloud spend to forecast and optimize cloud costs.

DC Tools, Tools

DCIM – Datacenter Infrastructure management tool

 

DCIM  ( Datacenter Infrastructure Management )tool is  for monitoring and capacity planning of the datacenter. 

DCIM is a complete Datacenter management tool, which gives single solution to all Datacenter releated components, such as monitoring, inventory management ( asset mgmt ), support multi room, multi site Datacenters,   Hardware layout view ( Servers, Network and Storage), As a Data Center modeling solution,  DCIM  also captures facilities such as power and cooling alongwith tpyical resource monitoring provided by monitoring solutions.

So in nutshell DCIM is a tool for monitoring , capacity planning and operational support of the datacenter in its entirety.

DCIM tool is available as an opensource tool or as vendor driven. Below are the links for some of DCIM tools for free download or purchasing.

openDCIM – An opensource based free DCIM tool. Although this tool is limited in its functionality and capabilities in terms of DCIM.

NETZoomDC  –  A comprehensive tools for Data Center management, spanned  across multiple dimensions of Data Center.

ManageEngine  –  Another tool for Facilities Management, ITIL Ready, Application and End user performance and IT Operation management.

SERVERCHECK – A sensor based centralized server monitoring tool.

Device42 –  A DCIM tool, which shows Datacenter Layout, generate rack diagrams, IT Patch Panel Mgmt, Device Information, Manage Spare parts, power and thermal mgmt with variety of auto discovery for network, virtual or physical infrastructure.