Cloud network monitoring

On this page

1. What is cloud network monitoring?
2. Why it matters in cloud environments?
3. Challenges in cloud network monitoring
   • Technical challenges
   • Operational challenges
4. Key components of cloud network monitoring
5. Native vs. third-party monitoring tools
6. How to set up multi-cloud network monitoring
   • Architectural considerations
   • Data collection methods
   • Key metrics to watch
7. Best practices for cloud network monitoring

What is cloud network monitoring?

Cloud network monitoring is the continuous process of observing and analyzing how data moves across a cloud environment. It’s not just about checking if a server is up; it’s about understanding the entire data journey, from service-to-service communication to end-user application performance. With this broader scope, monitoring provides the insights needed to maintain reliability, security, and efficiency in environments that are inherently dynamic. It typically covers aspects such as:

• Traffic flows between services and regions
• DNS resolution and routing health
• Latency and packet delivery rates
• Firewall rules and security groups
• Application response times and dependencies

Unlike on-premises networks, cloud networks are distributed, virtualized, and constantly changing. Monitoring ensures organizations can keep pace with those changes without losing sight of performance, security, or cost efficiency.

For example, an e-commerce company scaling during holiday sales must ensure smooth checkout across regions. With monitoring, IT teams can detect abnormal latency between cloud regions and reroute traffic before customers abandon their carts.

Why it matters in cloud environments?

Cloud environments are complex, multi-layered ecosystems where changes happen rapidly and often outside of an organization’s direct control. Without monitoring, IT teams lack the visibility to diagnose issues, optimize resources, or respond to threats effectively. In other words, cloud network monitoring functions like a control room, giving a real-time view into how network and application behavior align with business performance. Here’s why it’s essential:

• Visibility without blind spots: Spot bottlenecks in minutes, not hours, and trace issues from the app layer down to the network.
• Business continuity: Catch packet loss or DNS resolution issues before users are impacted. For a SaaS provider, this could mean avoiding widespread downtime across global user bases.
• Cost awareness: Expose unused bandwidth, idle resources, and inefficient routes to prevent overspending.
• Security reinforcement: Detect unusual traffic flows, misconfigured firewalls, and suspicious access attempts to stay compliant and secure.

Monitoring, in this sense, is what bridges the gap between the technical health of cloud infrastructure and the tangible experience of customers and users.

Challenges in cloud network monitoring

Monitoring in the cloud introduces unique challenges that differ from traditional on-premises approaches. These challenges fall broadly into two categories: technical limitations driven by the nature of cloud infrastructure, and operational hurdles faced by IT teams in managing complexity at scale.

Technical challenges

• No physical access: Since you don’t own the infrastructure, traditional SNMP-based monitoring isn’t always possible.
• Constant scaling: IP addresses, workloads, and routing paths change dynamically, complicating consistent visibility.
• Provider silos: AWS, Azure, GCP, and Oracle each provide native tools, but they only work well within their own ecosystems.
• Shared responsibility model: While cloud providers secure infrastructure, customers must monitor and secure application performance and network paths.

Operational challenges

• Tool sprawl: Organizations often juggle multiple vendor-specific dashboards, making it hard to build a unified view.
• Skill gaps: Cloud-native networking concepts like VPCs, VNets, and peering require specialized knowledge that traditional IT teams may lack.
• Incident response delays: Without correlated visibility across application and network layers, troubleshooting takes longer.
• Cost management complexity: Cloud billing models are usage-based and granular, making it difficult to link network activity directly to spend.

Applications Manager addresses both technical and operational challenges by consolidating data from multi-cloud and hybrid environments into a single, correlated view. This unified approach allows teams to maintain end-to-end visibility, simplify troubleshooting, and connect performance metrics to both costs and user experience. By reducing reliance on siloed tools and providing contextual insights, it makes monitoring more practical and actionable in complex cloud ecosystems.

Key components of cloud network monitoring

A strong monitoring strategy should cover these bases:

• Traffic flow monitoring - Who’s talking to whom, and how much? Example: Tracking sudden spikes in east-west traffic to detect unusual lateral movement.
• Latency and packet loss - How fast does data travel across regions or between hybrid endpoints?
• DNS and routing health - Is name resolution reliable, and are routes optimized for performance?
• Security groups & firewalls - Are misconfigurations exposing your apps? Regular monitoring ensures rules evolve safely with scaling workloads.
• Application and business metrics - Response times, error rates, user experience scores, and even revenue-impacting metrics help correlate network health with business outcomes.

For instance, if a banking app experiences higher-than-usual transaction errors, monitoring can reveal whether the root cause is slow database connectivity in one cloud region.

Native vs. third-party monitoring tools

When it comes to tools, you have native options provided by cloud vendors and third-party platforms that help unify visibility.

Native tools

• AWS CloudWatch & VPC Flow Logs - These offer deep integration with AWS services, providing metrics, logging, and network flow analysis within the AWS ecosystem.
• Azure Monitor and Network Watcher - This tool enables packet capture, flow logging, and NSG diagnostics, giving detailed insight into network traffic in Azure.
• GCP Cloud Monitoring and VPC Flow Logs - Google Cloud’s telemetry service helps monitor and analyze traffic patterns within VPC networks.
• Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) Monitoring & VCN Flow Logs - Offers built-in monitoring metrics, alarms, and dashboards, along with VCN flow logs and additional tools such as Network Visualizer, Path Analyzer, and VTAP for analyzing and troubleshooting network traffic.

These native tools are effective if you operate primarily within a single cloud. However, their usefulness diminishes when extended to multi-cloud or hybrid environments, where scaling and centralized visibility become more complex. From the AWS and Azure side, Applications Manager supports a large category of services covering compute, databases, storage, security, and network layers enabling teams to gain unified insights across their cloud resources.

Third-party tools comparison

The table below compares leading third-party monitoring platforms across core capabilities. Features are marked as:

Applications Manager is the most comprehensive, combining application performance, network monitoring, firewall visibility, and cost optimization in one unified platform. Its AI-driven insights and integrated dashboard make it ideal for hybrid and multi-cloud strategies.

How to set up multi-cloud network monitoring

Architectural considerations

• Use lightweight agents or APIs to collect performance data without heavy overhead.
• Centralize dashboards across multiple clouds for unified visibility.
• Ensure scalability for dynamic workloads by automating configuration changes.

Data collection methods

• Flow logs (VPC Flow Logs, NSG Flow Logs, etc.) for traffic telemetry.
• Packet traces & synthetic tests for active troubleshooting and user journey validation.
• Application performance counters to measure end-to-end performance.

Key metrics to watch

• Network metrics include bandwidth utilization, latency, jitter, firewall drops, and interconnect latency. Monitoring these helps identify congestion, inefficient routes, and security rule misconfigurations.
• Application metrics such as response times, transaction completion rates, and API performance provide visibility into how network conditions affect end-user experience.
• Business metrics like conversion rates, downtime costs, and revenue per minute of availability directly connect infrastructure performance to business outcomes.

For example, a SaaS provider may track both latency and customer churn, discovering that slow responses in APAC regions correlate with higher trial abandonment.

Best practices for cloud network monitoring

1. Establish baselines by defining what “normal” latency, throughput, and resource usage look like.
2. Set proactive AI-driven alerts to detect traffic anomalies, packet loss, DNS resolution issues, or unusual security events before they affect users.
3. Correlate application & network metrics so that application slowdowns can be quickly tied to network bottlenecks.
4. Audit firewall and security rules regularly to prevent misconfigurations as workloads scale dynamically.
5. Use synthetic monitoring to stimulate user journeys, ensuring that application availability and performance match real-world experience.
6. Optimize costs by identifying underutilized interconnects, idle bandwidth, and inefficient routes that may inflate cloud spending.

With Applications Manager, you can combine these best practices into a single pane of glass that covers performance, security, AI-powered anomaly detection, and cost optimization. We offer unified visibility and actionable insights that help teams maintain reliability and efficiency as their cloud footprint grows. Try us today!