What are the best tools for cloud monitoring?

As organizations accelerate cloud adoption, the complexity of managing applications, infrastructure, and resources across AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, hybrid environments, and private clouds has grown exponentially. Traditional monitoring solutions struggle to keep up with dynamic scaling, distributed services, container-based workloads, and the need for real-time insights.

This has made cloud monitoring tools essential for ensuring:

  • High availability and uptime

  • Controlled operational costs

  • Faster troubleshooting

  • Smoother application performance

  • Proactive detection of performance or reliability issues

In this comprehensive guide, we explore the best tools for cloud monitoring, how they differ, the key capabilities IT teams should search for, and why ManageEngine Applications Manager stands out as a complete solution for hybrid and multi-cloud ecosystems.

What is cloud monitoring? 

Cloud monitoring is the continuous tracking, analysis, and optimization of cloud services, applications, and infrastructure. It includes monitoring:

  • Compute resources (VMs, containers, and serverless resources).

  • Databases and data pipelines.

  • Application performance and dependencies.

  • Storage, networking, and load balancers.

  • Costs and utilization.

The primary goal is simple: Identify issues before users notice them and fix them faster.

Modern platforms such as ManageEngine Applications Manager bring together cloud, application, and infrastructure visibility into a unified dashboard, helping operations teams troubleshoot quickly and operate with confidence. Learn more about what is cloud monitoring here.

Why modern organizations need cloud monitoring tools? 

Digital businesses today face challenges such as:

  • Microservices and containers introduce more moving parts.

  • Cloud environments scale up and down instantly.

  • Multi-cloud setups require unified dashboards.

  • Downtime costs can be massive.

  • Cloud waste leads to budget overruns.

But these challenges can be overcome with the help of a cloud monitoring tool. It helps find the answer to critical cloud performance related questions like:

  • Which cloud resource is slowing down and why?

  • Is the app issue coming from the database, network, or server?

  • Are we overspending on unused cloud instances?

  • Will the service run out of capacity next week?

Key features to look for in the best cloud monitoring tools

Selecting the right cloud monitoring platform is critical for ensuring high availability, optimal performance, and cost efficiency across complex, multi-cloud environments. When evaluating tools, look for the following capabilities:

1. Unified visibility across multi-cloud and hybrid environments 

Modern enterprises often run workloads across multiple cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, GCP), container orchestration platforms like Kubernetes, and on-premises infrastructure such as VMware or private clouds. A top-tier monitoring tool should:

  • Consolidate performance metrics, logs, and events from all environments into a single console.

  • Provide unified dashboards that display health, performance, and dependencies across all resources.

  • Support hybrid cloud monitoring, giving teams end-to-end visibility into application flows across both cloud and on-premises infrastructure.

Applications Manager achieves this by providing a single-pane-of-glass view for all environments, eliminating the need for multiple disparate tools and reducing monitoring complexity.

2. Automated discovery and scaling support 

Cloud workloads are dynamic, with resources continuously being provisioned, scaled, or decommissioned. A robust monitoring solution should:

  • Auto-discover new resources as they come online, whether VMs, containers, or serverless functions.

  • Automatically update monitors and thresholds to reflect scaling changes.

  • Reduce manual configuration effort, enabling monitoring to keep pace with highly elastic environments.

This ensures that no critical resource goes unmonitored, even as your infrastructure scales dynamically.

3. Real-time metrics, logs, traces, and event correlation 

Effective monitoring requires a holistic view of systems and applications:

  • Performance metrics: CPU, memory, storage, network, and application-specific KPIs provide early signs of performance degradation.

  • Distributed traces: Track requests as they pass through multiple services to pinpoint latency or failures.

  • Logs and events: Collect structured and unstructured logs and system events, then correlate them to identify patterns or anomalies.

  • Dashboards and alerts: Centralized dashboards provide actionable insights at a glance, while real-time alerts ensure quick response to critical issues.

  • Dependency mapping: Visualize service dependencies to understand how failures propagate across systems.

Integrating these data streams significantly reduces mean time to resolution (MTTR) by helping teams immediately locate the root cause, avoid trial-and-error troubleshooting, and minimize downtime.

4. Intelligent alerting and noise reduction

Traditional monitoring often generates alert fatigue. Modern tools should offer:

  • AI-assisted anomaly detection: Identify deviations from normal patterns automatically.

  • Threshold-based and dynamic baselining: Alerts trigger only for actionable events.

  • Automated remediation: Some tools can trigger predefined corrective actions to resolve known issues.

This ensures engineers focus only on critical issues, improving operational efficiency and reducing alert fatigue.

5. Cloud cost optimization and budget control

Cloud costs can spiral due to over-provisioned VMs, unused storage, or uncontrolled auto-scaling. Effective monitoring platforms provide:

  • Resource utilization insights: Identify idle or underused resources.

  • Cost forecasting: Estimate upcoming spend based on trends and usage patterns.

  • Optimization recommendations: Suggest resizing, decommissioning, or rightsizing resources to minimize waste of cloud resources and the associated costs.

Best tools for cloud monitoring

Below are the top solutions widely adopted across industries, starting with the most comprehensive.

1. ManageEngine Applications Manager

Applications Manager is a unified monitoring platform that provides end-to-end visibility across cloud, on-premises, and hybrid infrastructure. It eliminates the complexity of managing multiple partial tools by combining infrastructure, application, and digital experience monitoring in a single console.

Key capabilities
  • Multi-cloud monitoring from one console 

    Track performance and availability across:

  • Deep application performance monitoring (APM)

    • Monitor response times, transaction flows, and bottlenecks.

    • Track user experience metrics and business-critical transactions to ensure SLA compliance.

  • AI-assisted diagnostics

    • Automated root cause analysis (RCA) identifies the source of performance degradation within seconds.

    • Visual dependency mapping clarifies service interconnections for faster troubleshooting.

  • Cloud cost insights

    • Identify unused resources and over-provisioned instances.

    • Forecast future resource requirements and suggest optimizations.

  • Over 150 ready-to-use monitors

    • Servers, databases, middleware, messaging systems, virtual machines, containers, application servers, and business applications.

Who is it best for? 

  • SMEs to large enterprises running hybrid or distributed environments.

  • Organizations seeking a single, powerful platform for monitoring applications, infrastructure, and cloud without enterprise-level complexity or cost.

What sets it apart from the competition?

  • Combines cloud monitoring, infrastructure monitoring, container/serverless monitoring, APM, digital experience monitoring, intelligent fault management, and advanced analytics into one unified console.

  • Reduces MTTR, improves system reliability, optimizes cloud spending, and delivers actionable insights for IT and business teams alike.

2. AWS CloudWatch  

If your environment is built heavily around AWS, CloudWatch is a logical starting point.

Strengths 

  • Native to AWS

  • Tracks logs, metrics, events, and alarms

  • Works well with Lambda, EC2, ELB, EKS, and other AWS components

Limitations 

  • Limited in multi-cloud or hybrid visibility

  • Costs rise significantly with logs and data ingestion

  • Not ideal for deep application performance insights

Many organizations combine CloudWatch with Applications Manager to achieve unified visibility across clouds, not just AWS.

3. Azure Monitor

For Azure-based workloads, Azure Monitor provides:

  • VM alerts

  • Network insights

  • Service health tracking

  • Integrations with Application Insights

Where it falls short

  • No consolidated view beyond Azure

  • Requires additional configuration for distributed tracing and log correlation

  • Costs can increase with large data retention

Applications Manager adds value by giving companies a complete cross-cloud and on-premises monitoring layer, including Azure.

4. Google Cloud Operations Suite (Stackdriver)  

Built for Google Cloud users, this suite offers:

  • Monitoring

  • Logging

  • Tracing

  • Error reporting

Great for GCP workloads but less effective if teams run workloads across AWS or Azure simultaneously.

5. Datadog

Datadog is a SaaS-based observability platform with:

  • Dashboards.

  • Log and trace correlation.

  • Wide integrations.

However:

  • Licensing and ingestion costs rise sharply at scale.

  • Full coverage often requires multiple add-ons.

6. Dynatrace

Dynatrace offers strong AI-driven monitoring across distributed environments.

Pros 

  • Automated problem detection

  • Strong dependency mapping

  • Deeply detailed analytics

Cons 

  • Licensing is complex

  • High TCO

  • More suited for large global enterprises

Why Applications Manager stands out

Applications Manager is especially strong for businesses that:

  • Run hybrid architectures.

  • Want one platform instead of many.

  • Want APM and cloud monitoring in the same tool.

  • Need predictable, budget-friendly pricing.

It is one of the few solutions offering:

Download a free, 30-day trial today!

Conclusion 

Cloud monitoring is no longer optional. With applications and workloads distributed across containers, hybrid clouds, and microservices, IT teams need a single source of truth for troubleshooting, performance visibility, and cost optimization.

While tools like CloudWatch, Azure Monitor, and Datadog work well within their ecosystems, ManageEngine Applications Manager provides a unified, cost-effective approach to monitoring the entire IT stack, from cloud to application to infrastructure.

If your organization wants to improve uptime, accelerate troubleshooting, and make cloud investments more predictable, Applications Manager is one of the strongest choices available today.