If your company follow the ITIL framework or any kind of framework,you will notice that one of the main components is monitoring.
Setting up a monitoring infrastructure is easy, the hard part is to tune alerts, maintain the monitoring infrastructure, make sure it can scale out, etc. It is almost a full time job if you are doing monitoring right and proactively. There are different tools on premises that can help you with that like, Splunk, SCOM, Nagios, etc.
I would challenge you to think outside the box a little bit, monitoring is important in you business but is not a critical core technology that makes the company money. Sure, it make sure the systems that makes the company money are monitored and up but the world is not going to end. As everything moves into the cloud I would recommend to start looking at analytic solution from Microsoft Operations Management Suite (OMS). This is a log management tool that can collect, analyze, and access real-time information about your systems.
The tool offers a (FREE TIER) that lets you upload up to 500 MB of data into OMS per day. It is easy to setup an account to start collection logs; to get this going you just need to install a small agent on the servers that you want to monitor and within seconds you will start gathering data
The top view out of the box experience plus some solutions from the gallery. One cool feature that OMS it keeps track of changes on your operation system. Have you ever asked yourself what changed ?
How long does it takes you to find what computers are missing updates, or to see if last night patches were properly applied? Well OMS offers Update Assessment work space. This work space let you gather updates information from your environment
If your company size range from small to medium size, this is a great way to offload monitoring to the cloud, Think about it this way less servers to manage, patch, reboot, etc. One of the best thing about OMS is that it took me about an 1 hour to get it going. How long did it take you to set up your on-premises monitoring solution ?
And yes it can monitor any cloud as long as the ports are open between your servers and OMS.
