Seven best practices for hybrid cloud infrastructure monitoring

As workloads span on-premises data centers, cloud providers, and hybrid environments, storage administrators and IT operations teams face unprecedented complexity. Without proper visibility, performance bottlenecks, security vulnerabilities, and costly downtime become inevitable. 

But not all infrastructure monitoring systems are created equal. While many organizations employ a mixture of tools to cobble together an overview of their hybrid cloud infrastructure, others rely on robust solutions like NetApp^® Data Infrastructure Insights to provide a single, unified view across heterogeneous ecosystems. To determine the right solution for your team, use these seven pillars of hybrid cloud infrastructure monitoring as your guideposts.  

To monitor a hybrid cloud infrastructure effectively, you need comprehensive visibility across your entire infrastructure landscape. Traditional monitoring approaches often silo on-premises systems and cloud environments, leaving dangerous blind spots that can lead to performance issues and outages.  

To avoid these silos, deploy monitoring solutions that can collect telemetry data from diverse infrastructure components, such as storage arrays, VMs, containers, network devices, and cloud services. Modern monitoring solutions use standardized data models that eliminate manual data normalization. This means that metrics remain comparable across different vendors and platforms, clearly showing how various infrastructure components interact. 

Using fragmented monitoring tools slows troubleshooting and complicates resource management. A unified monitoring solution consolidates performance metrics, configuration data, and alerts from multiple sources into one dashboard. This comprehensive view drastically reduces the time spent troubleshooting and helps you get visibility into your complex hybrid infrastructure. 

Advanced monitoring solutions now incorporate AI and machine learning, transforming reactive troubleshooting into proactive infrastructure management. By analyzing historical patterns and real-time data, AI can detect anomalies and predict potential issues before they affect business operations.  

AI-powered monitoring systems continuously learn from your infrastructure's baseline behavior patterns, becoming more accurate the longer they’re employed. When performance metrics deviate from normal ranges, these systems automatically flag anomalies and correlate them with recent infrastructure changes. This capability significantly reduces the noise from false alerts so that genuine issues receive immediate attention. 

To monitor hybrid environments successfully, you need to closely track storage, network, and compute metrics. Key indicators like IOPS, latency, bandwidth, CPU, and memory usage help you spot issues early and keep systems running smoothly.  

Essential metrics for hybrid cloud infrastructure include: 

• Storage performance. By tracking key metrics such as IOPS, latency, and throughput across all storage systems, you gain early warning signs when storage performance degrades. 
• Network metrics. By monitoring bandwidth utilization and latency between sites and cloud regions, you can keep your storage environments running efficiently. 
• Compute resources. CPU use, memory consumption, and VM performance provide insights into your system’s efficiency so you can better identify underutilization and plan resource allocation. 

Just as important, correlating data across these layers speeds up troubleshooting and helps teams quickly identify what’s really causing performance slowdowns—whether it’s storage, network, or compute. This approach makes your infrastructure more reliable and keeps your business moving forward. 

Hybrid cloud environments introduce complex security challenges that require specialized approaches to infrastructure monitoring. Security monitoring must address threats across multiple environments while ensuring compliance with relevant regulations, such as SOC2 and GDPR. IT governance, a critical framework for aligning IT practices with business goals, is another key component of a strong infrastructure monitoring solution.  

Integrated governance principles such as strategic alignment, risk management, and performance measurement enable IT teams to proactively identify bottlenecks, optimize resource allocation, and ensure adherence to regulatory standards. Effective IT governance within infrastructure monitoring not only makes operations more efficient; it empowers organizations to make data-driven decisions. 

Compliance requirements often mandate detailed logging and reporting. Choose monitoring solutions that can generate audit-ready reports showing configuration changes, access logs, and security events. These reports reduce the manual effort required for regulatory audits while ensuring consistent documentation practices, so your team can focus on driving business value rather than being tied up in logging and reports. 

Using baselining to proactively set thresholds for anomaly detection helps identify unusual activity before it escalates into critical issues.   Along with proactive alerting, automated escalation procedures can route alerts through different communication channels and teams based on severity levels and response times. As your environments scale, these procedures must continually be fine-tuned so that your team can quickly remediate issues and troubleshoot with precision. 

Hybrid cloud infrastructure monitoring provides valuable insights that help you allocate resources and control storage costs across multiple environments. To optimize costs effectively, you need to understand both utilization patterns and pricing models.

Robust monitoring solutions can identify storage systems, compute instances, and network resources that are consistently underutilized. They can also generate detailed recommendations for host decommissioning and areas to reclaim powered-off or idle VMs. These insights enable storage teams to consolidate workloads, right size resources, and eliminate waste.

Effective hybrid cloud monitoring must accommodate infrastructure growth and changing business requirements. Scalable monitoring ensures that your visibility grows alongside your infrastructure, providing consistent usage reports, complete visibility regardless of complexity, and embedded security.

Monitoring architecture should support diverse data sources and integration requirements. As your infrastructure evolves to include new technologies, containers, or cloud services, your monitoring capabilities should adapt seamlessly.

These seven best practices create a foundation for reliable, secure, and cost-effective hybrid cloud operations. Effective monitoring transforms infrastructure management from reactive troubleshooting into strategic optimization, enabling your team to focus on business outcomes rather than system maintenance. 

Advanced infrastructure monitoring tools like NetApp Data Infrastructure Insights provide a single, cohesive view across your heterogenous environments, allowing you to track resource consumption, get detailed usage metrics, predict storage needs, and easily scale to accommodate complex hybrid growth. With Data Infrastructure Insights, you get a reliable infrastructure monitoring tool that gives you complete visibility into your hybrid cloud environments with proactive alerting and real-time insights to make business-critical decisions with confidence.

Ready to enhance your hybrid cloud infrastructure monitoring? Explore how Data Infrastructure Insights can provide the visibility and insights your team needs to optimize performance, reduce costs, and maintain reliable operations across your entire hybrid environment.