Editor’s Note: This is a guest contribution from ScienceLogic’s CTO Antonio Piraino.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is all grown up. While Enterprise IT is often thought of in terms of a rogue deployment of your applications, or even as a competitor, enterprises are now using it for more and more critical business applications. All the benefits you think you’re going to get are fantastic, but you need to set yourself up for success with Smart IT, which empowers organizations to visualize, automate, and modernize their IT operations.

Smart IT means being able to have the information that is relevant and actionable in order to make smarter operational decisions. This maximizes efficiency and effectiveness to achieve positive results from moving targets like AWS.

An at-a-glance, comprehensive view of AWS performance and health metrics across all Amazon account services, multiple regions and for public, private, and hybrid cloud environments in a single pane of glass is required to meet all of the best practices for a successful AWS strategy. For instance, in the ScienceLogic dashboard shown below, you actually get a view into all of those different components in ScienceLogic’s AWS Power-Pack.

The ScienceLogic AWS Power-Pack includes monitoring templates that pull extensive performance, health, and cost information. It is also vendor agnostic, so you’ll see everything across all Amazon accounts and services for as far back as you need to be able to see it to make smarter business decisions moving forward.

It’s important while you’re operating in that cloud environment to not just have a snapshot or an accumulation of costs, but to also have some sort of ongoing or trending ability to understand what your costs are going to be going forward, and where your workloads are best leveraged and utilized. Extensive reports and dashboards provided in the AWS Power-Pack are necessary for obtaining configuration info, key performance metrics, and historic trending and future estimates of Amazon costs.

By showing this information side-by-side and over time within ScienceLogic’s tool, you now have the ability to be a smart conservator of your IT budget with the knowledge to move instances to more cost-effective regions, while still preserving acceptable performance versus risk levels.

When you have the appropriate data points and visibility into your IT infrastructure, and operational performance within Amazon or any of the other cloud platforms on a holistic basis, you can make Smart IT decisions. As your use of AWS grows and you deploy hybrid cloud solutions, it’s more and more important to deploy the right monitoring tools for the high visibility needed.