Geneos for cloud and container monitoring
More businesses are scaling their operations by moving critical application stacks to cloud environments to take advantage of key benefits. These include scalability to meet demand, resilience against outages or attacks, cost efficiency, and greater capacity for innovation. Cloud environments also accelerate time to market, giving organizations the flexibility to deploy new services quickly.
Containers complement these advantages by further enhancing scalability and enabling businesses to deploy software efficiently across diverse systems.
Cloud and container monitoring: why it’s essential Copied
Although cloud and container deployments offer flexibility, their benefits can only be fully realized when applications, platforms, services, and workflows operate at peak performance.
Monitoring cloud and container deployments means observing and assessing the performance, availability, and health of cloud, physical, and virtual applications, as well as tracking container utilization. It requires identifying critical monitoring data across distributed environments to build a comprehensive observability strategy.
To achieve this, businesses need systems that prevent outages, detect issues immediately, and enable rapid remediation. This is similar to having air traffic control at airports, which prevents overloaded runways, coordinates plane traffic, and responds quickly to reported incidents.
In the same way, monitoring serves as the control tower that keeps operations efficient, coordinated, and reliable. To ensure success, every cloud and container deployment must be supported by the right monitoring tools.
Using Geneos to monitor cloud and container deployments Copied
Making sense of the various metrics, states, logs, and traces emitted by these highly dynamic environments is at the core of what ITRS Geneos offers.
Geneos, powered by ITRS Analytics, is a real-time monitoring and observability solution that allows you to monitor your entire IT estate, from on-prem deployments to hybrid environments. Geneos provides solutions tailored to monitor multi-cloud and container environments to provide complete visibility into your IT assets.
With Geneos, you can:
- Monitor real-time metrics, logs, events, and traces from your cloud and container deployments in a single pane of glass view.
- Use dynamic Collection Agent plugins and built-in mappings to model cloud resources consistently across providers.
- Apply rules, alerts, and actions to maintain reliability and performance at scale.
- Create dashboards to visualize your data.
- Publish data to ITRS Analytics and utilize fit-for-purpose applications for further data processing and enrichment.
Geneos offers intelligent, hybrid IT monitoring. You only need one platform to monitor your on-prem infrastructure, cloud applications in AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud, and container deployments in Kubernetes or OpenShift.
Use cases Copied
| Monitoring | Purpose | Use case | Business value |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cloud monitoring | Real-time monitoring of cloud-based IT infrastructure, services, and applications to track their health and performance |
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| Container monitoring | Real-time monitoring of metrics, events, logs, and traces to track the health of containerized applications and infrastructure |
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AWS Copied
Geneos monitors your AWS infrastructure using the AWS Collection Agent plugin.
The AWS Collection Agent plugin monitors your entire AWS infrastructure, including services, databases, servers, containers, in real-time. It uses the AWS SDK for Java API to access data from AWS CloudWatch and provides an API Destination that can interact with AWS services. Results are displayed in dynamic dataviews, allowing for an easy-to-use and scalable cloud monitoring solution.
The plugin provides real-time visibility into the operational status of several AWS services, including Bedrock, CloudWatch, Billing, EC2, EBS, Redshift, and S3. Built-in collectors in the plugin are designed to gather metrics, logs, and events from various AWS services.
- For technical teams: Reduce mean time to detection (MTTD) and resolution (MTTR) with seamless insights into AWS infrastructure health, enabling swift issue resolution.
- For business stakeholders: Monitor the financial impact of expanding applications and manage AWS resource costs more effectively.
Get started: Monitor your AWS infrastructure through Geneos
Refer to the AWS Collection Agent plugin documentation for details on deployment options and available collectors.
Azure Copied
Geneos monitors your Azure infrastructure using the Azure Collection Agent plugin.
The Azure Collection Agent plugin is used to monitor Azure resources through Azure Monitor. The plugin collects real-time metrics, events, and logs using a combination of API calls to the Azure Java SDK and REST API.
If you have Azure diagnostics set up to an Event Hub, the Azure plugin supports the ability to collect real-time metrics, platform logs, alerts, and events from the Azure Event Hub service. This provides higher throughput of metrics and serves as an alternative to polling the Azure Monitor API, preventing you from breaching your API usage limit by migrating to Event Hub streaming.
- For technical teams: Collect and analyze large volumes of Azure service data to detect metric anomalies and address latency issues.
- For business stakeholders: Scale monitoring dynamically to match evolving Azure workloads and cloud deployments.
Get started: Monitor your Azure infrastructure through Geneos
Refer to the Azure Collection Agent plugin documentation for details on deployment options and available collectors.
Google Cloud Platform Copied
Geneos monitors your Google Cloud infrastructure using the Google Cloud Platform Collection Agent plugin.
The plugin monitors Google Cloud services and logs through the Google Cloud Platform. Built-in collectors are available to monitor supported services and log metrics. By default, all supported services are monitored for complete visibility; however, the configuration is easily customizable to limit monitoring to specific services.
The plugin also contains an optional configuration to enable or disable self-monitoring, allowing you to track and manage the number of calls that the plugin makes to the monitoring API.
- For technical teams: Pinpoint root causes of issues such as resource exhaustion, network glitches, or application bottlenecks.
- For business stakeholders: Optimize resource allocation with data-driven insights to balance cost efficiency and performance.
Get started: Monitor your Google Cloud infrastructure through Geneos
Refer to the Google Cloud Platform Collection Agent plugin documentation for details on configuration and available collectors.
Containerized workloads Copied
Geneos offers comprehensive real-time monitoring for containerized applications running in orchestrated environments like Kubernetes and OpenShift. This ensures complete visibility into the container ecosystem, from individual pods and containers to the entire cluster infrastructure, while maintaining optimal performance and rapid issue resolution in dynamic environments.
Geneos container monitoring leverages a distributed architecture where lightweight Netprobe agents are deployed as DaemonSets across cluster nodes, automatically discovering and monitoring new containers as they are created, scaled, or terminated. It collects metrics, logs, and events from containerized applications using low-latency agents that communicate with a centralized Gateway, providing real-time insights without impacting performance.
- For technical teams: Automatically detect and monitor new containers, pods, and services as they are deployed or scaled, while using centralized logging and comprehensive metrics to quickly resolve issues.
- For business stakeholders: Use data-driven insights to right-size container resources and cluster infrastructure, optimizing both cloud spending and resource allocation.
Get started: Monitor your containerized workloads through Geneos
Refer to Data collection in an orchestrated environment to learn more.
Continuous expansion of Geneos monitoring capabilities Copied
Geneos continually adapts to evolving business needs as organizations scale their cloud operations. With Geneos 7, the range of services that can be monitored across AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud has expanded, and additional solutions for cloud-native deployments are already in development.
As the list of cloud services requiring monitoring continues to grow, Geneos remains committed to delivering reliable real-time monitoring and complete visibility into cloud infrastructure across platforms.
Keep up to date with the latest Geneos capabilities by following What’s new in ITRS Geneos.