A brief guide to selecting the right cloud monitoring tools for your business

Organizations maintaining business continuity is more vital than ever as businesses move their applications and infrastructure to the cloud. Cloud monitoring tools help teams keep on top of performance, availability, and security. But, given the wide range of tools available, how do you select the appropriate one for your business to use?

Whether your company is a startup or a well-known enterprise, this guide will walk you through the most important elements to consider when choosing a cloud monitoring solution—explained in clear, simple language.

What is cloud monitoring and why is it important?

Cloud monitoring is a method of watching and tracking the performance, availability, and health of systems, applications, and infrastructure hosted in the cloud. It enables businesses to respond to important questions such as:

  • Is my app or website working correctly?
  • Are my cloud servers under significant load?
  • Is anything damaged or about to break?

Monitoring tools enable early issue detection, therefore enabling your team to respond promptly and guaranteeing a smooth experience for your consumers and users.

What to look for in a cloud monitoring tool?

1. Support for your cloud providers  

Not all cloud platforms are compatible with every monitoring tool. While some tools are made to support several cloud environments, others are meant especially for AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud. A tool that can offer centralized monitoring across all of them will be useful if your organization uses more than one cloud provider—or intends to.

2. Coverage across your entire stack

A decent cloud monitoring system should let you see into all that counts, including:

  • Cloud infrastructure—servers, VMs, and storage
  • APIs and applications
  • Caching systems and databases
  • Orchestration tools and containers—like Kubernetes
  • Network efficiency

Look for tools that can track across these layers without requiring a complicated configuration.

3. Real-time alerts and notifications

Monitoring is only helpful if you know when something goes wrong. The right tool should offer:

  • Real-time alerts for performance issues or outages
  • Customizable thresholds and alert conditions
  • Integration with communication tools like Slack, Microsoft Teams, PagerDuty, ServiceNow, or email

This ensures your team can respond to problems before they impact users.

4. Ease of use and setup

Not every team has a dedicated DevOps or monitoring engineer. That’s why ease of use is essential. A good monitoring tool should have:

  • A simple setup process with built-in integrations
  • User-friendly dashboards and visualizations
  • Helpful documentation and customer support

This makes it easier to get started and keeps your team focused on solving problems—not configuring tools.

5. Scalability and cost efficiency

As your business grows, your monitoring needs will grow too. Choose a tool that can scale with your infrastructure without dramatically increasing costs. Understand the pricing model—whether it’s based on data volume, number of hosts, or number of users—and make sure it fits your budget.

6. Clear dashboards and reporting

Effective dashboards let you quickly see what’s working and what’s not. Look for tools that allow you to:

  • Customize views for different teams or services
  • Track performance trends over time
  • Share dashboards and reports across your organization

Good visualization capabilities make troubleshooting and decision-making much easier.

7. Security and compliance features

If your business handles sensitive data or operates in regulated industries, your monitoring tools must support security and compliance standards. Look for features like:

  • Data encryption in transit and at rest
  • Role-based access control (RBAC)
  • Compliance certifications (e.g., SOC 2, GDPR, HIPAA)
  • Data residency options, if applicable

Keeping your monitoring data secure is just as important as monitoring your infrastructure.

Choosing the cloud monitoring solution that matters

As your business grows in the cloud, so does the complexity of managing and maintaining performance across services, platforms, and regions. Relying on disconnected tools and limited visibility can quickly lead to blind spots, delayed incident response, and unnecessary downtime.

By adopting a modern, unified cloud monitoring solution like Applications Manager, you gain real-time visibility into your entire environment—applications, infrastructure, and services—all in one place. It empowers your team to detect issues early, respond faster, and make smarter decisions backed by data. More importantly, it lays the foundation for scalable, secure, and reliable operations.

If you're serious about performance, customer experience, and operational efficiency, investing in the right cloud monitoring platform like Applications Manager isn't just helpful—it's essential. If you already use Applications Manager, you may want to check out our documentation to get started with cloud monitoring. If you're new to Applications Manager, you can request a personalized demo or download our 30-day free trial.