Maestro Analytics: Essentials at the Fingertips

Infrastructure analytics is one of the cornerstones for effective cloud management.

Each cloud provider offers its own set of features and services for such purpose. We can say that AWS QuickSight, Google Data Studio, and Microsoft BI are among the top of the native analytics and BI offerings. They are deeply integrated into their native infrastructures, provide the detailed review of the infrastructure state, events and cost, and allow to take a deep dive into details, being powered by strong internal mechanisms and AI/ML engines. However, in many cases they provide a huge volume of data which needs a BI expert to cope with, as well as may have limited customization possibilities in terms of the covered data scope.

Also, if you use more than one cloud, or have private datacenters, the fact that each of these tools is limited to its vendor, may be a reason for you to find a third-party analytics tool. Here is where you may consider solutions such as CloudHealth, AppOptics, or IBM Cognos. 

However, if you use Maestro, what should you select?

We have created Maestro as a framework that unifies the controls over the virtual infrastructures in different cloud platforms, and of course, Analytics is an important part of this framework.  Maestro is not meant to replace native tools, but it is meant to add extra possibilities atop those they provide.

Thus, when creating Maestro Analytics, we tried to take the best of the modern trends in this area, and to provide a tool which would be comprehensive, customizable for the user’s needs, but wouldn’t need specific skills and effort to start working with.

See the video below for the brief Analytics features overview:

So, what does Maestro Analytics do?

For an analytic tool to be effective, it should allow the following three possibilities to its users:

• Reviewing the generalized account data and data by specific filters
• Dive deeper into the details of specific numbers to investigate them
• Take actions to fix the detected issues, optimize improve performance

Once any of these options is absent, you need to find and onboard additional tools and procedures.

Maestro provides all the three possibilities.

Maestro Analytics  is built in such a way that it allows to quickly estimate the state of the infrastructure and detect the areas – virtualization regions, services, specific user’s resources – that do not meet your initial expectations and should be investigated in details.

It is important, that Maestro does not need to repeat and display all the massive data you can find in the native analytics services. Instead, you have the refined most essential summaries and optimization recommendations, together with the ability to make a deeper dive to the costs and resources details, if necessary.

How easy is it to use?

The Analytics dashboard is available out of the box to any account using Maestro. You can display the information for a specific cloud and region, as well as aggregate it for the whole hybrid infrastructure.

By default, the Dasboard includes a set of widgets, covering:

• Current project expenses (current cost and the status of the budget quota utilization)
• Tagged and untagged resources balance and costs
• Qualys security scan summary
• Costs breakdown by different aspects (services, regions, resource types, storages, owners, and stacks)
• Optimization possibilities (depending on the cloud)

For most widgets, you can switch between table and graph view, in order to have a better look at the presented data.

Once the default set and order of widgets does not meet your needs, you can customize them by creating and saving your own views – and switch between them depending on the current tasks.

Thus, you can start using Maestro Analytics immediately after connecting your account. Of course, we will need some tome to collect historical data for providing more details, but the basics are already there for you

Is this all?

The Dashboard is only one part of the Analytics functionality Maestro has. The other one – email reports and notifications which keep you updated on the monthly and weekly statistics, provide the detailed information about the detected security issues, costs forecasts and resources optimization possibilities.

We will for sure discussed in an additional post.

Keep track of the updates!