NAT Gateway monitoring

The Network Address Translation (NAT) Gateway enables instances in a private subnet to access the internet without exposing those instances to incoming internet traffic. It provides a way to initiate outbound connections from private resources while keeping them secure.

Overview

Monitoring the NAT Gateway becomes important because it acts as a critical path for outbound internet traffic. Any disruption, latency, or misconfiguration can cause downstream issues that are hard to trace without visibility into the gateway itself.

Site24x7’s integration with OCI NAT Gateway helps bridge this gap by offering end-to-end monitoring. It captures usage patterns, tracks performance metrics, and alerts you to anomalies so that you can act quickly before users or dependent systems are impacted. The integration is especially useful for teams managing critical workloads that rely on stable outbound internet access, like update servers, backend jobs, or data sync services.

Use case

A healthcare analytics platform hosted in OCI relies on a set of compute instances to periodically download medical datasets from approved third-party APIs. These instances are configured without public IPs for security reasons and use a NAT Gateway for outbound access.

One day, data sync jobs start failing intermittently. Site24x7 flags a drop in outbound traffic from the NAT Gateway, along with an increase in error count and identifies that the NAT Gateway hit a soft limit due to a configuration change in the route settings.

With this insight, the operations team corrects the route setup and restores traffic flow. Without Site24x7’s monitoring, the team would have had to manually investigate logs across different components to spot the issue. By continuously tracking gateway metrics and setting up alerts on traffic thresholds and error counts, Site24x7 helps to avoid similar disruptions and ensures reliable data delivery for time-sensitive analytics.

Benefits of Site24x7's NAT Gateway integration

Integrate your NAT Gateway with Site24x7 and leverage the following benefits:

• Centralized visibility: Track NAT Gateway metrics along with other OCI resources like compute instances, VCNs, and route tables.
• Proactive alerts: Set up thresholds and receive instant alerts on threshold breaches, enabling quick response to potential problems.
• Performance tracking: View key metrics like bytes in/out and active connections over time to understand usage trends.
• Troubleshooting support: Use historical data to identify when and where connectivity issues occurred.

Setup and configuration

• Site24x7 uses cross-tenancy access to monitor your resources using Site24x7's tenancy user. Log in to your Site24x7 account and create a specific policy to allow Site24x7 to view your resources without affecting your security.
• On the Integrate OCI Monitor page, select NAT Gateway from the Services to be discovered list.

Policies and permissions

Ensure that the associated OCI policy has the following statement:

• "read nat-gateways"

Polling frequency

Site24x7 queries OCI service-level APIs according to the set polling frequency (from once a minute to once a day) to collect metrics from a NAT Gateway monitor.

Supported metrics

These are the supported metrics for a NAT Gateway monitor:

Threshold configuration

To configure thresholds for a NAT Gateway monitor:

1. Log in to your Site24x7 account and navigate to Admin > Configuration Profiles > Threshold and Availability.
2. Click Add Threshold Profile.
3. Select NAT Gateway from the Monitor Type drop-down menu and provide an appropriate name in the Display Name field.
4. The supported metrics are displayed in the Threshold Configuration section. You can set threshold values for all the metrics mentioned above.
5. Click Save.

Licensing

• Each NAT Gateway monitor utilizes one basic monitor license.

Viewing NAT Gateway data

To monitor your NAT Gateway environment, log in to your Site24x7 account and navigate to Cloud > OCI > NAT Gateway.

Monitor data

The monitor data for the NAT Gateway monitor is given below.

Summary

The Summary tab offers a comprehensive overview of the events timeline and metrics, presenting insightful charts that shed light on the performance of NAT Gateway monitor.

Configuration

The Configuration tab summarizes essential details of NAT Gateway monitor, including its NAT IP, Created Time, State, and other configuration details.

Zia Forecast

The Zia Forecast tab displays the forecast chart with future points of a performance metric (measurement of resource usage) based on historical time series data. Fifteen days of historical data is used to predict what your metric usage will be in the next seven days.

Outages

The Outages tab provides details on an outage's start time, end time, duration, and comments (if any).

Inventory

Obtain details like Resource Name, Region, Monitor Licensing Category, and much more from the Inventory tab. The Threshold and Availability Profile and the Notification Profile can be set according to the user and viewed in this tab.

Log Report

This tab offers a consolidated report of the NAT Gateway monitor's log status, which can be downloaded as a CSV file.

Alert Logs

This tab displays a chronological list of all triggered alerts related to the NAT Gatway monitor. This tab helps you trace alert history and severity to assess issues and validate threshold settings.