Simple Log Service:CloudLens

CloudLens provides unified observability by using Simple Log Service. You can use CloudLens to perform association analysis on log data, metric data, and metering data. CloudLens also provides the following features for Alibaba Cloud services: resource usage analysis, performance monitoring, security analysis, data protection, anomaly detection, and access analysis. You can use CloudLens applications to construct the observability of cloud services with optimized costs, performance, security, data protection, stability, and access analysis. This helps you efficiently use the cloud services.

CloudLens applications

Background information

After enterprises deploy their business on the cloud, they can quickly build innovative iterations for their business based on the elasticity and rapid innovation of cloud services. The use of cloud services plays an important role in the business system architecture of an enterprise. Enterprises that have migrated their business to the cloud are using an increasing number of types of cloud services. Therefore, the observability of cloud services becomes more and more important for building observable full-stack solutions.

Pain points and challenges

Enterprises face the following pain points and challenges after they migrate their business to the cloud:

Use and O&M management of cloud services

• Data silos: Data is scattered in multiple systems and cannot be managed on a centralized platform.

• User-unfriendly association analysis: No unified method can be used to perform association analysis on data, such as the logs, metrics, and metering data of cloud services.

• Low timeliness and flexibility: Real-time alerting and large-scale data analysis cannot be implemented. Flexible analysis by granularity, dimension, and operator cannot be performed.

• High barriers to entry and lack of best practices: If you are not familiar with a cloud service, you cannot perform effective analysis on the performance of the service based on metric data. You may encounter multiple issues, such as inappropriate operations, unexpected responses, and invalid security configurations.

Observability construction of cloud services

• Resource usage management: Control the usage and cost of resources and check whether inappropriate operations are performed on resources.

• Performance monitoring: Check the data of performance metrics to identify anomalies. Implement real-time alerting to ensure business continuity.

• Security and compliance: Ensure access security and data security.

• Stability: Identify exceptions, failures, and availability-related issues at the earliest opportunity. Improve troubleshooting efficiency through log analysis and O&M monitoring.

• Access governance analysis: Analyze business operations and the trend of access to products.

  Enterprises need to optimize the methods to use cloud services to minimize costs and risks.

Benefits

• Centralized collection of O&M data from cloud services: You can use the automatic collection feature of CloudLens to collect metering data, metrics, access logs, and audit logs across accounts and regions.

• Comprehensive observability capabilities for cloud services: CloudLens provides the following features for cloud services: usage analysis, access analysis, performance analysis, anomaly detection, security analysis, and data protection.

• Data platform with flexible data subscription: CloudLens allows you to use consumer groups, APIs, and Grafana to subscribe to data.

Architecture

CloudLens functions based on the storage and analysis capabilities of Simple Log Service. You can use CloudLens to collect various types of data, such as logs, metrics, and trace data of cloud services, trails, metering data of key configurations, key events, and multi-account information. You can create an integrated, scenario-specific dashboard on which you can perform access analysis, usage analysis, exception monitoring, performance monitoring, security analysis, and data protection. The dashboard helps you obtain the usage and activity information about the following categories of cloud services within your organization: storage, security, networking, traffic, and databases.

CloudLens supports association analysis of data, such as logs, metrics, and metering data. CloudLens also provides various features, such as data transformation, query and analysis, visualization, alert subscription, intelligent inspection, and troubleshooting guidance.

Each CloudLens application provides a data access management module and a common feature module. The data access management module allows you to implement access management, destination Logstore management, and automatic collection. You can go to the homepage of each CloudLens application by using the Simple Log Service console or the console of the related cloud service.

Features

• Usage analysis: allows you to view data and query statistics in multiple dimensions. You can also configure resource usage alerts and check inappropriate operations or unexpected responses.

• Access analysis: allows you to analyze access requests to guide your service usage and business operations.

• Anomaly detection: allows you to identify issues such as high error rates and low availability at the earliest opportunity and improve the stability of your business. This feature applies when you need to monitor service tickets, service usage exceptions, and unexpected fees, such as OSS IP theft over the Internet, frequent retrieval of IA or archived objects, and early deletion of storage types. CloudLens provides built-in alert monitoring rules. You can also create custom alert monitoring rules.

• Security analysis: allows you to view information such as permissions and encryption to monitor malicious access. This prevents security risks that are caused by improper use of cloud services.

• Performance monitoring: allows you to monitor performance metrics for real-time alerting.

  The ability to obtain performance metrics varies based on cloud services.

• Data protection: allows you to view the data protection status and obtain data protection suggestions. You are prompted to use the data protection feature or corresponding cloud services. For example, you can use the storage feature to monitor and view the status of disaster recovery, snapshots, and version management, and use Cloud Backup to enable the data protection feature.

Scenarios