Public and Private Cloud Monitoring: Challenges and Solutions

Organizations today are managing an increasing number of private and public cloud environments. This can lead to several monitoring challenges because cloud environments are dynamic, distributed, and often rely on many moving parts that change all the time. Without the right approach, IT teams can struggle with blind spots, performance drops, security gaps, or all of the above.

This piece goes over the challenges and solutions for monitoring both private and public clouds. It also explores key cloud monitoring metrics and how to develop a proactive monitoring strategy that keeps your cloud services healthy and reliable.

Understanding cloud monitoring

Cloud monitoring is the practice of tracking, analyzing, managing, and improving the performance, security, availability, and fault-tolerance of cloud-based services and resources.

It’s fundamentally different from traditional, on-premise monitoring, because it needs to handle resources that can scale up or down in an instant, move across regions, be shared across teams and projects, and often run on infrastructure you don’t fully control.

Here are some additional reasons why you need a specialized monitoring strategy for private and public cloud environments:

• There are shared responsibility models that add complexity to security and compliance
• Visibility can be limited without the right tools and integrations
• Costs can quickly get out of control without usage monitoring
• Cloud-native applications often rely on microservices, containers, and APIs that need deeper, real-time tracking
• Performance issues can come from external factors like internet routing, third-party services, or regional outages
• Compliance requirements can vary by region, so you need to keep an eye on where data and workloads run

Private cloud monitoring challenges

Even though private clouds give organizations more control over their data and infrastructure, they come with their own set of monitoring challenges.

Limited visibility across virtualized resources

In private clouds, workloads often run on highly virtualized environments. This can make it hard to see what’s really happening at the hardware, hypervisor, and VM levels.

How to address this:

• Use monitoring tools that give visibility into both the physical and virtual layers
• Correlate metrics from hypervisors, VMs, storage, and networks
• Set up detailed logging and auditing for better traceability

Siloed infrastructure and tools

Many private clouds grow over time, with different teams using different tools. This can create silos where data is not shared properly and issues are hard to trace.

How to address this:

• Use a centralized monitoring platform like Site24x7 that integrates with all parts of your stack
• Break down silos by standardizing metrics and alerts across teams
• Encourage cross-team collaboration on performance and incident reviews

Resource sprawl and shadow IT

When teams can spin up VMs or storage on demand, it can lead to unused resources or unauthorized systems running without oversight. This wastes money and increases the attack surface.

How to address this:

• Track resource usage regularly and remove idle or unused instances
• Use policy-based controls to limit who can create resources
• Run regular audits to find shadow IT and bring it under management

Performance bottlenecks in shared environments

In private clouds, multiple workloads can share the same underlying hardware. Without proper monitoring, resource contention can cause unpredictable slowdowns.

How to address this:

• Monitor CPU, memory, and storage IO at the host and VM level
• Use capacity planning to allocate resources wisely
• Set alerts for resource saturation before it impacts performance

Compliance and data residency

Private clouds often handle sensitive data that must stay in certain locations. If workloads move or backup copies are made incorrectly, you could face compliance risks.

How to address this:

• Track where data and backups physically reside
• Use monitoring tools that support geo-tagging of resources
• Run regular compliance checks and audits

Public cloud monitoring Challenges

Using a public cloud is generally more convenient than setting up and scaling a private cloud, but public clouds have their own challenges too. Unlike private clouds, you share the underlying infrastructure with other customers, and you have less direct control over parts of the stack. This means you need to watch for risks that come with scale, shared resources, and open access.

Publicly accessible VMs and misconfigured services

In public clouds, it’s easy to accidentally expose VMs or storage buckets to the internet. One simple misconfiguration can lead to data leaks or breaches.

How to address this:

• Regularly scan for open ports and publicly accessible endpoints
• Use security groups and firewalls to restrict access
• Set up automated alerts for any new public exposures

Lack of control over underlying infrastructure

With a public cloud platform, you don’t own the hardware. If the provider has an outage or performance drop, you still need to handle the impact on your services.

How to address this:

• Monitor provider status dashboards and API health
• Use multi-region or multi-cloud setups to reduce dependency on one provider
• Build failover and redundancy into your architecture

Limited access to system-level telemetry

Building on the last point, another common challenge in public cloud environments is the restricted access to system-level telemetry. Since you don’t manage the underlying infrastructure, you often can’t view kernel logs, hypervisor metrics, or low-level system behavior. This can make root-cause analysis harder in some cases.

How to address this:

• Use agents or sidecars that run within your instances to collect deeper system data
• Rely on application-level and container-level monitoring to fill in the gaps
• Combine logs, metrics, and traces to improve observability at higher layers

Rapid scaling and auto-Provisioning

Public cloud workloads can scale up and down in minutes, but this can lead to blind spots if your monitoring doesn’t keep up.

How to address this:

• Use monitoring tools that auto-discover new instances
• Tag resources so they’re easy to track as they come and go
• Automate cleanup of unused resources to keep costs in check

Shadow IT and unapproved deployments

Anyone with a cloud account can spin up services. This can create risks when teams launch resources outside of approved processes.

How to address this:

• Enforce policies through IAM and role-based access
• Run regular audits to find untracked resources
• Educate teams about the cost and security impact of shadow IT

Unpredictable costs

In the public cloud, costs can spike if you’re not monitoring usage closely. Without good cost visibility, budgets can get out of hand fast.

How to address this:

• Set up budget alerts and usage thresholds
• Monitor usage trends by project and team
• Use cost dashboards to find waste and right-size resources

Inconsistent monitoring across multiple services

Public cloud environments often use a mix of services like compute, storage, databases, serverless, and managed APIs. Each service has its own metrics and logging format, which can make it hard to get a unified view.

How to address this:

• Normalize metrics and logs into a consistent format for easier analysis
• Create unified dashboards that bring together data across services and regions
• Use a centralized monitoring platform like Site24x7 that supports native integrations with a wide range of cloud services

Cloud monitoring metrics to focus on

Most of the challenges outlined above can be solved by developing a comprehensive cloud monitoring strategy. But before exploring the steps to do that, let’s go over the key cloud monitoring metrics you should focus on.

Performance metrics

These metrics help you understand how well your cloud services and resources are running.

• CPU usage: Tracks how much processing power is being used
• Memory usage: Shows how much RAM your workloads consume
• Disk I/O: Measures read and write speeds on storage volumes
• Network latency: Checks the time it takes for data to travel between services
• Application response time: Monitors how fast your applications respond to user requests

Availability and uptime metrics

This category focuses on whether your services are running and reachable.

• Uptime percentage: Tracks how long your services stay available
• Error rates: Measures the number of failed requests or transactions
• Service health checks: Verifies that endpoints and APIs are working as expected
• Failover success rate: Shows how well your systems switch to backup resources

Security metrics

These metrics help you keep an eye on potential threats and misconfigurations.

• Unauthorized access attempts: Logs failed login or access attempts
• Open ports and endpoints: Tracks publicly exposed resources
• Firewall and security group changes: Alerts on unexpected changes
• Compliance audit logs: Captures who did what and when

Cost and resource usage metrics

Keep an eye on costs and resource usage to avoid surprises on your cloud bill.

• Resource utilization rates: Shows how efficiently you use compute, storage, and bandwidth
• Idle or underused resources: Identifies instances that can be shut down or right-sized
• Spending trends: Tracks costs by project, team, or region
• Forecast vs. actual spend: Compares planned budgets with real usage

Application metrics

These metrics show how well your applications are performing for end users.

• Transaction times: Measures how long key business transactions take
• Throughput: Tracks the number of transactions or requests handled
• Error rates and exceptions: Monitors application-level failures
• Dependency health: Checks the status of connected services and APIs

Network metrics

Network metrics help you see if data is flowing smoothly between your services and users.

• Bandwidth usage: Monitors total data in and out of your cloud resources
• Packet loss: Tracks data lost in transit, which can affect performance
• Connection errors: Measures failed or dropped connections
• Traffic patterns: Shows peak times and potential bottlenecks

Log-Based Metrics

Logs give you deep insights into what’s happening inside your systems.

• Error logs: Highlights application and system errors
• Access logs: Tracks who accessed what and when
• Audit logs: Keeps a record of configuration changes and admin actions
• Event correlation: Helps spot patterns or repeated issues over time

Developing a proactive cloud monitoring strategy

Moving on, let’s talk about how you can develop a comprehensive and proactive monitoring strategy for both your public and private cloud environments.

1. Start by understanding what you need to monitor, who needs the data, and why. Identify your key workloads, critical applications, and any compliance requirements.
2. Document how your services, applications, and dependencies fit together across public and private clouds. This helps you spot weak points and ensures nothing falls through the cracks.
3. To avoid tool sprawl, choose a platform that covers both private and public clouds end to end. Site24x7 is one such platform. It combines performance, security, log, and cost monitoring in one place, giving you a single source of truth for your entire cloud stack.
4. Use the metric categories covered earlier to track performance, availability, security, cost, and logs. The goal is to get a live picture of what’s happening at every layer.
5. Set up smart thresholds and automated alerts so you know when something drifts from normal. To reduce alert fatigue, you can use a tool like Site24x7 to customize alerts for different scenarios and teams.
6. Correlate logs, events, and metrics to find the root cause of problems faster. Site24x7 offers built-in log management, so you can collect, search, and analyze logs from your cloud workloads all in one place.
7. Use the monitoring tool’s AI features to spot sudden spikes, drops, or unusual patterns in your metrics and logs. This gives you early warnings for problems you might not have set static thresholds for yet.
8. Make time to review performance trends, resource usage, and cloud spending. This helps you right-size resources, avoid waste, and plan for future needs.
9. A proactive strategy is never finished. Test your alerting, simulate failures, and update your monitoring setup as your cloud environment grows. Modern tools like Site24x7 make it easy to adjust thresholds, add new services, and refine dashboards as your needs change.

Private and public cloud monitoring best practices

Finally, here’s a list of best practices that will help you avoid many of the common cloud monitoring challenges and keep your private and public cloud environments healthy, secure, and cost-efficient over time.

• Build monitoring into your CI/CD pipeline so that new services and updates are automatically tracked from day one. This prevents gaps when new workloads get deployed without proper visibility.
• Test your monitoring alerts regularly with chaos engineering or controlled failure scenarios. This helps you find weaknesses in your setup before real incidents happen.
• Document monitoring runbooks for common issues and make sure all teams know how to respond when alerts fire. Clear runbooks save time and reduce confusion during an incident.
• Combine synthetic monitoring and real user monitoring (RUM) to get both outside-in and inside-out views of application performance. This helps catch issues that internal metrics alone can miss.
• Don’t rely only on dashboards. Set up regular reports and reviews with stakeholders to share trends, learnings, and areas that need improvement. This keeps monitoring aligned with business goals.
• Keep an eye on third-party dependencies like APIs and managed services that your cloud workloads rely on. Many incidents happen outside your direct control, so track their health too.
• Use tagging consistently for resources, applications, and environments. Good tags make it easier to filter data, break down costs, and isolate issues faster.
• Store historical monitoring data long enough to spot seasonal trends and recurring patterns. This is useful for capacity planning, budgeting, and identifying root causes of long-term issues.
• Rotate and audit access to your monitoring tools regularly. Limit who can change alert settings or disable checks to prevent accidental blind spots.
• Run post-incident reviews that include what monitoring caught, what it missed, and how you can improve your detection and response next time.
• Set clear ownership for each monitored resource or service. Make sure every alert has a responsible team so that nothing gets overlooked during incidents.
• Use automated remediation where possible for known issues, like restarting a stuck service or scaling up resources when thresholds are breached. Modern monitoring tools like Site24x7 provide built-in features to support this.
• Track configuration drift in your cloud environments and tie it back to your monitoring. Unexpected changes can cause outages if they go unnoticed.
• Separate production and non-production monitoring environments to avoid mixing test data with live performance trends. This keeps your metrics cleaner and easier to act on.
• Create backup monitoring systems and test them regularly to make sure you can still collect and alert on critical metrics during tool outages or provider downtimes.
• Engage developers in building monitoring into application code, such as custom metrics and detailed log output. This gives you better data than infrastructure metrics alone.
• Use role-based access control (RBAC) to make sure teams see only what they need and can’t accidentally change critical monitoring settings.
• Keep up with your cloud provider’s updates and new monitoring features. They often release plugins, better integrations, or API improvements you can adopt.

Conclusion

To effectively manage and monitor public and private cloud environments, modern organizations need the right mix of tools, processes, and good habits that keep them ahead of issues instead of just reacting to them.

We hope that this piece has given you a clear and comprehensive understanding of the main challenges, key metrics to watch, and practical steps to build a proactive cloud monitoring strategy that works for your setup.

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