Cloud Observer: Cloud Instances Discovery and Management

Maintaining cloud instances is a tremendous challenge. Ensuring an accurate view of the provisioned resources requires efficient processes and time, which many teams simply do not have due to their daily operational activities. In addition, with the rapid adoption of multi-cloud, IT departments are not always aware of all the new applications being produced and deployed by organizations. Complexity is further amplified due to knowledge, skills, access and non-uniformity across clouds.

Cloud Observer from EfficientIP has been developed to address these challenges, and equip your teams such as ITOps or NetSecOps with an easy-to-use, powerful and secure discovery tool to detect, track, and consolidate information on any provisioned cloud resources and networks. The information is presented via a central, and unified network management interface and through open APIs.

Highlights

• Automatically discover any cloud instances and associated network information across multiple clouds

• Expand visibility and bring valuable insight on cloud instances from a single pane of glass to enable cost control, reporting and audit

• Reduce operating costs by providing the state of cloud instances and identifying unused resources

• Improve risk management and compliance with better and accurate data

• Enrich network security by determining the attack-surface across on-premise and cloud

• Elaborate or further develop Network Automation through the use of secure open APIs

Cloud Observer At a Glance

By monitoring your cloud-provisioned resources including network properties, Cloud Observer provides comprehensive visibility of cloud instances deployment and usage and the necessary data reports to reclaim or detect any cloud instances, improving risk management and compliance.

Offering insight and a consolidated view on your cloud assets from a single pane of glass also simplifies daily operations and increases overall efficiency. You can delegate common administrative actions while remaining in control of your cloud instances. Thanks to its open APIs, you can also easily integrate Cloud Observer as part of your end-to-end automation process and save time.

Through the central and unified management, Cloud Observer enables you to quickly identify state, usage and capacity including IP addresses’ changes over time, as well as access insightful analytics and reporting improving the control of costs and network capacity planning process.

Key Features

Networking and Instances Discovery

Cloud Observer uses plugins to discover instances and related networking in the cloud, one plugin per cloud provider. These plugins utilize the APIs of the cloud provider to crawl and discover what is deployed and present this in a harmonized and unified way.

The plugins provided include, but are not limited to, provided include, but are not limited to, Amazon AWS, Google GCP, Microsoft Azure, VMware vCenter, Proxmox, and Cisco Meraki, as well as a customizable “External” plugin that can be used to interface with clouds or systems other than those offered by EfficientIP.

Data Visualization

Cloud Observer discovers disparate information and metadata about instances and their associated networks, harmonizing data from multiple cloud providers and making it accessible in a unified way. Data is kept up-to-date and accurate. By organizing and standardizing the data, users can easily visualize resources across any cloud environments at a glance, such as all VPCs associated with an application in a region. The data and metadata of Cloud instances includes but is not limited to:

• Name, last date of status change, status, CPU, Operating System, memory, storage, instance type,

• Virtual Private Clouds or other Networks,

• Addresses: Public IP Address, MAC address,

• Tags or labels that are metadata dependent on the cloud provider. If populated at the time of creation of the instance, it includes but is not limited to Owner, Environment, Application, Cost Center, Availability Zone, Region.

Key Benefits

With Cloud Observer, your company can:

• Obtain centralized valuable insight on Cloud Instances and associated networks plus their usage and resources from a single pane of glass for better management and/ or audit purpose

• Unify and standardize information about Cloud instances across multiple clouds

• Monitor resource changes and state for accountability and cost optimization

• Track instances across clouds to locate them in case of suspicious activity, usage, state and inventory purposes, improving your risk management and compliance

• Increase operational efficiency by using secure APIs to extract data and feed your automation processes

• Reduce the time spent on resource-draining troubleshooting sessions with clearer visibility of the cloud and how it is utilized

Information is organized in “folders” for easy navigation and filtering and reporting purposes. It includes folder name, number of instances, number of IP addresses, first date of discovery, date of last update, last date of status change, status and more.

Data Tracking

Cloud instances can be tracked over time and changes in the IP addresses or status reflected into Cloud Observer enhancing risk management and ensuring compliance.

Data Reporting

You can also get valuable analytics including the IP space usage of the number of instances per Region or Type, including their running state.

Cloud Observer offers rich ways to export data including CSV, HTML, XML, EXCEL or PDF by picking up from a list the information to display in the report. The reports can be generated immediately or scheduled.

Alert Creation and Management

From the web interface, you can create alerts on the views of instances from your choice according to defined criteria and add them to your bookmarks. You can then insert alerts in your DDI dashboard including their bookmarks for quick retrieval and viewing. You can also be informed of a new alert by email helping to better manage risks and meet compliance.

Integration with Other Products and IT Ecosystem Tools

Information collected by Cloud Observer can be pushed to other management modules. The product is tightly integrated with SOLIDserver™ DDI (DNS-DHCP-IP Address Management) and related modules such as Network Object Manager. It enables rapid population of automatically discovered instances and networks (Virtual Private Clouds), with full control over how they are structured within Network Object Manager. This supports comparison between the intended state of the network (what was originally planned), as reflected in IPAM, and the actual state of the network, as discovered through Cloud Observer, to identify drift. Built-in IPAM data reconciliation capabilities then suggest remediation actions to improve data quality and accuracy, helping maintain an effective Network Source of Truth for scalable automation, network validation, and compliance. Cloud Observer data and metadata can also be queried via APIs, allowing integration with other tools in the IT ecosystem.