10 tools for cloud monitoring and vuln detection

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When designing a cloud system, you need two categories of monitoring and defense:

  1. Performance Monitoring (CPU, memory, latency, throughput, scaling issues).
  2. Security Monitoring (detecting intrusions, vulnerabilities, abnormal behaviors).

Here are 10 tools that cover both aspects:

🔹 Performance & Reliability Monitoring

  1. Prometheus + Grafana

    • Prometheus scrapes metrics (e.g., Kubernetes pods, VM stats).
    • Grafana visualizes them in dashboards with alerts (CPU spikes, latency).
    • Source: Prometheus GitHub.

  2. Datadog

    • SaaS monitoring for infrastructure, applications, logs, and cloud-native services.
    • Detects anomalies with AI-based alerting.
    • Integrates with AWS, GCP, Azure.

  3. AWS CloudWatch / GCP Cloud Monitoring / Azure Monitor

    • Native cloud performance monitoring.
    • Collects logs, metrics, traces, and sets alarms for autoscaling or incidents.

  4. New Relic

    • Application Performance Monitoring (APM) with distributed tracing.
    • Useful for microservices and serverless architectures.

  5. Elastic Observability (ELK Stack: Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana, Beats)

    • Collects, stores, and analyzes logs/metrics.
    • Can integrate with SIEM for threat detection.

🔹 Security & Vulnerability Detection

  1. Wazuh (Open Source SIEM/XDR)

    • Detects intrusions, vulnerabilities, and compliance issues.
    • File integrity monitoring, log analysis, malware detection.
    • Source: Wazuh GitHub.

  2. Snort / Suricata (IDS/IPS)

    • Network-based Intrusion Detection/Prevention.
    • Signatures + anomaly-based detection to catch infiltration.
    • Suricata adds multi-threading and deep packet inspection.

  3. Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) tools like Prisma Cloud (Palo Alto)

    • Continuously scans cloud configs for misconfigurations (open S3 buckets, weak IAM roles).
    • Detects compliance drift (CIS, NIST, SOC2).

  4. Aqua Security / Falco

    • Runtime protection for containers & Kubernetes.
    • Falco monitors syscalls for suspicious behavior (crypto-mining, privilege escalation).
    • Source: Falco GitHub.

  5. CrowdStrike Falcon / SentinelOne / Microsoft Defender for Cloud

  • Endpoint Detection & Response (EDR) extended to cloud workloads.
  • Detects malware, ransomware, lateral movement inside the cloud.

✅ Combined Architecture:

  • Performance side: Prometheus + Grafana + ELK or Datadog.
  • Security side: Wazuh (SIEM) + Falco (runtime) + Suricata/Snort (network IDS).
  • Cloud-native posture: Prisma Cloud or Defender for Cloud to catch misconfigurations.
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