Top 5 Observability Tools for Hybrid Multicloud Environments

Getting all your cloud providers, environments and platforms to work well together can be extremely difficult. You have to contend with inconsistent monitoring and logging practices, integrate and correlate data from various silos, and manage different configuration settings. You also have to ensure low latency and high performance, balance costs, and maintain consistent security and compliance across environments. Thankfully, all these challenges can be addressed with a well-thought-out strategy that hinges on the tools you use.

Third-party monitoring and observability tools provide insights into your environments’ complex functions and behaviors. A well-rounded observability tool can help you address the common challenges associated with visibility in hybrid multicloud systems.

The following roundup reviews five such tools:

1. Dynatrace
2. Grafana
3. Datadog
4. New Relic
5. Splunk

How to choose your monitoring and observability tools

If your organization is among the many that use a hybrid multicloud architecture, then it’s important for your observability tool to be able to gather, integrate and expand data from many sources across cloud providers, on-premises systems and a complete technology stack. This includes open source community frameworks and toolkits like OpenTelemetry and Prometheus.

The best options can easily facilitate adaptive surveillance, which dynamically adjusts based on real-time threat intelligence, as well as automated identification for faster threat identification and response time. Modern observability tools and platforms have begun integrating AI and machine learning (ML). These technologies provide enhanced reactivity and allow deeper insights into the system’s performance and behavior.

A great way to assess the quality of an observability tool is through its advanced analytics and visualization functions. You can use features like AI/ML-powered anomaly detection, real-time alerts and predictive analytics to stay proactive and reduce potential downtime. If an incident does occur, root cause analytics can help you figure out why it happened. These functions and features must be packaged in a well-designed user interface with customizable dashboards. This makes it easier to access the necessary metrics, logs and visualization, and simplifies configuration, deployment and maintenance across environments.

The entries in this roundup were assessed and compared with these criteria in mind.

Dynatrace

Dynatrace aims to empower various teams in an organization—such as developers, operators, DevOps and business teams—to independently access and utilize monitoring data without relying on centralized IT or operations teams. This encourages autonomy, efficiency, customization and scalability.

Here are some of the details:

• Configuration complexity depends on the environments you’re working with.
• Highly customizable UI and dashboards let you tailor the tool to your workflow.
• It offers end-to-end visibility across the entire tech stack—applications, infrastructure and user experience.
• It integrates with 715+ technologies and clouds.
• It provides real-time data collection and analysis using an AI engine.
• There are a host of security features for proactive threat hunting and protection.

Grafana

Grafana is ideal for anyone looking for a robust open source solution. It allows for deeper integration and customizability than its closed source counterparts. You can essentially fork it and build your own version (e.g., Plutono). Grafana’s open source nature is one of the many reasons it’s found wide usage in various industries, including IT, finance, healthcare and manufacturing.

Here are some of the notable features:

• You choose where to host and run the tool, but configuring and running it yourself can be time-consuming.
• It allows you to create tailored dashboards.
• Built-in AI features help you automate tasks, identify anomalies faster, and optimize costs and engineering hours.
• There’s support for a wide range of plugins and extensions.
• You can set up alerts based on your data and configure notifications to inform you of real-time events.
• Security features include role-based access control, multiple authentication methods and DDoS attack prevention.

Datadog

Datadog is another well-established name in monitoring and observability whose origin precedes the proliferation of hybrid and multicloud environments. The company and platform were founded in 2010. Today, Datadog offers comprehensive integration with 450+ technologies, AI-powered insights and a host of other features.

Here’s what you can expect:

• The tool offers standard deployment and configuration procedures, with deployment available in Kubernetes or with Helm.
• There are preconfigured dashboards for each installed integration, with the option to modify or create custom dashboards.
• It’s an open source agent with out-of-the-box integrations as well as modification options using Python.
• It includes AI-powered features to enhance observability and streamline incident management.
• Flexible, robust real-time monitoring allows you to set up alerts on critical data in the platforms you already use.
• Security features include observability into application-level attacks leveraging Datadog Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and in-app detection rules plus cloud security management across your entire cloud infrastructure.

New Relic

When New Relic was introduced in 2007, its primary focus was application performance monitoring. It’s now an observability and monitoring platform that provides insights into application performance and offers comprehensive tools for monitoring mobile, browser and synthetic performance.

Here are some of its features:

• New Relic offers a “free forever” tier that includes infrastructure and APM agents.
• The web client’s interface may feel overcrowded with tools and resources you don’t need, but customization is available to improve UX.
• There are prebuilt and customizable dashboards plus the option for custom visualizations.
• An open source infrastructure agent encourages community-driven development and innovation.
• It includes generative AI and natural language query (NLQ) features for quick identification and resolution of issues.
• It offers real-time, continuous monitoring with a UX tracking feature and real-time log analysis.
• Alerts are integrated with the tool’s AIOps capabilities for automatic root cause analysis.
• It uses industry-standard encryption protocols as well as SAML, SSO and RBAC features to manage access, and employs privacy by design principles to maintain compliance with data protection laws.

Splunk

Splunk is the oldest tool on this list (established in 2003) and is now part of Cisco. It was designed to search, monitor and analyze machine-generated data in real time. It helps organizations and teams gain valuable insights from their data to enhance security, observability and operational efficiency.

Here are some of Splunk’s noteworthy features:

• Unlike the alternatives, with Splunk, you must assess your requirements before setup and then choose the right version of its software.
• Configuration and deployment are highly involved and thus best for admins who want more control.
• It operates similarly to a high-level relational database that you query through a proprietary search processing language.
• There are no out-of-the-box templates; you must build dashboards from scratch.
• Its analytics workspace enables you to interactively analyze your data after you’ve set up data points and indexes.
• Monitoring features include infrastructure monitoring, APM, real user monitoring and synthetic monitoring.
• Security features include integrated threat detection, investigation and response workflows as well as industry-standard encryption protocols.

Address the challenges of multicloud monitoring

Being able to comprehensively monitor infrastructure and view and organize massive amounts of data are two of the biggest challenges in modern IT management, cybersecurity and DevOps. This is especially true for hybrid multicloud environments. Fortunately, there are a lot of options to help you address these challenges.

However, because every team or organization’s set of hybrid and multicloud environments is unique, no individual tool can comfortably meet all requirements. It’s a good idea to identify your specific observability goals and requirements along with your project budget. You can then choose a tool (or tools) that will help you achieve your objectives in the best and most cost-effective way possible.

Equinix Fabric®, our software-defined interconnection solution, offers monitoring and observability capabilities to help ensure the availability and performance of connected services. Adding Fabric’s Terraform integration can provide Infrastructure as Code (IaC) to your observability services.

In addition, Equinix data centers provide a neutral, accessible platform on which to host your observability tools, thus ensuring those tools are able to aggregate monitoring data from across your hybrid multicloud environment.

Download our multicloud networking guide to explore key questions enterprises should ask when architecting a multicloud network.