Introduction to Cloud Monitoring

LM Cloud provides seamless setup and API-based monitoring of AWS, GCP, and Microsoft Azure environments. It also scales monitoring for your entire cloud ecosystem. LM Cloud offers executive-level dashboards and deep-dive technical insights into AWS, GCP, and Microsoft Azure together with other infrastructure on one unified platform. In addition, LogicMonitor can monitor the billing information about your cloud accounts (for example, line items in an AWS Cost and Usage Report).

LogicMonitor’s cloud monitoring strategy includes the following components for measuring the overall health and performance of your cloud infrastructure:

Component	Description
Resource Performance and Events	Performance data, such as metrics for CloudWatch, Azure Monitor, and LogicMonitor Collector (Application, OS-level, and custom)Event data, such as CloudWatch Events and Azure Activity Log Events
Cloud Provider Availability	Availability data, such as data provided by AWS and Azure status RSS feeds Note: Data is measured by the LogicMonitor Collector and scheduled maintenance events. Service Limit Utilization data.
Spend and Billing Information	Return On Investment (ROI) metrics, including spend data per region, service, or tagReserved instances offer expiration dates

When you add a cloud account to LogicMonitor, you can use a setup wizard that automatically discovers your cloud account and adds it to your LogicMonitor resources. The wizard collects permissions, services, and billing information about your cloud account. After the information you provide is submitted and verified, your cloud environment is added as a resource to LogicMonitor.

LogicMonitor collects data about your cloud account using the following methods:

• Application program interface (API) offered by the cloud provider
• LogicMonitor Collector

Resource Tree for Cloud Resources

Cloud resources automatically discovered by the setup wizard are displayed in the Resources Tree. DataSources that are pre-configured to perform API calls and queries are automatically applied to discovered resources. If you have a collector deployed within your cloud environment, traditional collector DataSources based on SNMP or WMI, are also automatically applied to discovered resources.

Cloud resources are displayed in the Resources Tree in the following way:

• Cloud Account Group—Top-level group that contains all monitored cloud resources and services. This group uses the name provided in the setup wizard.
• Cloud Service Group—Service-level group that includes all resources for a specific cloud service. Each service can include the following:
  • Resource or resource group
  • DataSource or DataSource group
  • Instance or instance group
• Cloud Account Resource—Account-level resource that displays cloud account information that is not tied to a specific service. This resource is named based on the name provided in the setup wizard and includes information about the following:
  • Account-level health
  • Service limit utlization
  • Provider service disruptions or outages

Cloud Provider Tags

If you use tags (key-value pairs) in your cloud provider, you can leverage the same tags to help identify and organize your cloud resources. After the resource is discovered and added to LogicMonitor, any tags associated with that resource are added as a resource property in the following format:

system.<cloud-provider-name>.tag.NAME=VALUE

NAME and VALUE refer to the name and value of the tag, respectively. Tag filters are case-sensitive. For example, the following table displays how LogicMonitor property names correspond to an AWS tag name:

LogicMonitor Property Name	AWS Tag Name
system.aws.tag.team	team
system.aws.tag.aws:cloudformation:stack-name	aws:cloudformation:stack-name

You can reference tags throughout your LogicMonitor account. For example, to create a dynamic group of AWS resources that have a specific tag, you could use the following AppliesTo (custom query):

system.aws.tag.NAME=~“VALUE”

Dashboards and Reports for Cloud Resources

LogicMonitor automatically creates dashboards and reports when you add an AWS, Microsoft Azure, or GCP account into monitoring. This provides you with instant visibility into your cloud environments and includes both overview and service-specific views. These automatically generated dashboards and reports provide a starting point based on best practices, but you can customize them for your specific environment. For more information, see Dashboards Overview.

The information displayed in the dashboards and reports depends on the services you select for monitoring. For example, If you have not provided S3 bucket information in which your billing data is stored, the Billing widgets are not displayed on an AWS Overview dashboard.

Automatically generated dashboards and reports are placed in an automatically generated dashboard group and report group that are named based on the name you assign the AWS, Microsoft Azure, or GCP account in LogicMonitor. For example, when you add a new AWS account named ‘Prod AWS’, a Dashboard group named ‘Prod AWS Dashboards’ and a Report group named ‘Prod AWS Reports’ is generated.

The following dashboards and reports are automatically generated for AWS, Microsoft Azure, and GCP accounts:

• Cloud environment overview
  An overview dashboard is added for all new cloud accounts that includes an overview of your cloud environment. In addition, the dashboard displays the service-specific NOC status, any alerts, any reported cloud availability disruptions, and billing data (if you have selected billing for monitoring).
• Service-specific dashboards for AWS EC2 and EBS
  Each service-specific dashboard includes a NOC of the resources, the cost related to the service, any service limit utilization that can be displayed, relevant service alerts, critical metrics for the service, and any issues with the cloud provider availability.
• Service utilization
  Reports are automatically generated for new cloud accounts you add into LogicMonitor and can display information that is better suited to report format. The report format makes it easy to share information across teams, or you can review reports every week.