Maestro Insights: Best Practices in a Couple of Clicks
Cloud usage patterns, as well as the request for the specific types of cloud-related expertise, develop in cycles.
Initially, the core aim of the cloud management tools was to provide the possibility to perform the basic infrastructure management operations. The ability to create, change and remove resources was enough to meet the majority of technical and business tasks.
Still, the more the cloud technology developed, the more complicated the infrastructures became. Additional services arose, bringing more value to the customers, and needing more effort to track them properly.
To be able to perform these operations successfully, and to take best of the cloud-native offerings, you need to spend plenty of time and effort for respective education and certification – and do this on a regular basis, because the changes in the area are faster than ever.
To balance between the services usability and the necessary skill levels, cloud providers started creating simple tools that would allow less skilled users perform the standard tasks properly. This especially applies to the services focusing on infrastructure issues detection and cost optimization. Thus, such services as AWS Trusted Advisor or Azure Advisor arose, along with less sophisticated native tools and services.
However, these tools are good once you focus a single cloud provider. If you use multiple clouds, and provider-native tools, respectively, the amount of sources, data and recommendations may need lots of effort to deal with.
And that’s where Maestro Insights come in.
Unlike deep-dive native services (which are still available for you through Maestro Console wizard), Maestro Insights highlights the main issues in infrastructure from the point of view of security, usage and cost optimization, and all you have to do is a quick review of the key findings.
In fact, you can do only several clicks and a few steps to make sure that your infrastructure is ok:
A. Review the main idea of the finding
B. Check level of its criticality
C. Check recommendation ranking based on industry best practices.
D. Click the Fix It button leading to the Maestro functionality that can be used for issue elimination (for example, opens the Schedules wizard for unscheduled instances)
The Insights view, available on the Management tab, includes the information on the most important findings (ranging from “minimum” to “critical”) in the following aspects:
Actually, the information in Insights is not new – Maestro already had had it before and shared in a set of reports, including the Instance Detailed report, Vulnerabilities report, and other.
What Maestro Insights does is aggregating the information from different engines and tools (security, billing, scheduling, instances meta information) – and then processing it to define the level of the instance compliance with Cloud usage best practices.
For each Insight, Maestro has its own rules and approaches – but at the end of the day, you can see a unified result, recommendations and the single Fix it button – not for all the findings (which may be overwhelming and time-consuming), but for the most critical ones – those that need immediate action.
The current functionality is based on Maestro own built-in mechanisms. However, in the nearest future we also plan to integrate the recommendations from the native Cloud provider’s advisors.
Initially, the core aim of the cloud management tools was to provide the possibility to perform the basic infrastructure management operations. The ability to create, change and remove resources was enough to meet the majority of technical and business tasks.
Still, the more the cloud technology developed, the more complicated the infrastructures became. Additional services arose, bringing more value to the customers, and needing more effort to track them properly.
Does wisdom come extra effort?
Eventually, effective infrastructure setup, analytics, management, and optimization turned out to be not a scope for a typical IT department expert, but a set of separate specializations within the Cloud-related community.To be able to perform these operations successfully, and to take best of the cloud-native offerings, you need to spend plenty of time and effort for respective education and certification – and do this on a regular basis, because the changes in the area are faster than ever.
To balance between the services usability and the necessary skill levels, cloud providers started creating simple tools that would allow less skilled users perform the standard tasks properly. This especially applies to the services focusing on infrastructure issues detection and cost optimization. Thus, such services as AWS Trusted Advisor or Azure Advisor arose, along with less sophisticated native tools and services.
However, these tools are good once you focus a single cloud provider. If you use multiple clouds, and provider-native tools, respectively, the amount of sources, data and recommendations may need lots of effort to deal with.
And that’s where Maestro Insights come in.
What is Maestro Insights - Briefly?
Maestro Insights is a compliance monitoring tool, which allows to quickly review if your virtual machines meet the basic industry-standard compliance requirements.Unlike deep-dive native services (which are still available for you through Maestro Console wizard), Maestro Insights highlights the main issues in infrastructure from the point of view of security, usage and cost optimization, and all you have to do is a quick review of the key findings.
In fact, you can do only several clicks and a few steps to make sure that your infrastructure is ok:
A. Review the main idea of the finding
B. Check level of its criticality
C. Check recommendation ranking based on industry best practices.
D. Click the Fix It button leading to the Maestro functionality that can be used for issue elimination (for example, opens the Schedules wizard for unscheduled instances)
Maestro Insights – What’s Inside?
Maestro Insights allows its users to have a panoramic view of each of their instance state and status, helps to identify and fix issues in several dimensions.The Insights view, available on the Management tab, includes the information on the most important findings (ranging from “minimum” to “critical”) in the following aspects:
- Vulnerability scan results. The status is based on the results of the Qualys and/or Nessus vulnerability scanning.
- Instance tags. Proper tagging is a necessary condition for effective cost optimization and infrastructure transparency. Untagged resources cannot be tracked and analyzed properly, that’s why the absence of tags is considered a critical issue.
- Instance cost. Maestro tracks the costs of all virtual resources in close to real-life mode. Identifying the most expensive virtual instances provides an extra point for investigation and further usage and cost optimization. Thus, the instances which are within the top 10 by cost are marked as critical. Those that are the most expensive, get the minimum criticality status.
- Instance lifetime. The recommended lifetime of a standard instance is 1 month. The instances existing for too long are considered ineffective, as they can either be forgotten and underutilized, or, if they are regularly used, migration to a newer instance types could bring cost-performance benefit. Thus, the older the instance is, the higher is its risk status.
- Instance schedules. Scheduling is one of the cornerstones for effective infrastructure usage and cost optimization, as may bring up to 70% of costs reducing. The instances that are not stopped and started automatically according to their workload rhythms, should be reviewed for schedules creation.
- Ownership. Maestro introduced the ownership concept in order to make every resource covered by a specific person, responsible for it. An owner is the main contact point for any questions or issues related to the instance, that’s why it is critically important that each resource is assigned to someone from the project team. The absence of owner or the issues with the owner’s SSH access to the instance, raise the ownership issue criticality.
How does it work?
Although from the user’s point of view, the Insights functionality might look quite simple, the mechanism behind it is quite interesting and complex.Actually, the information in Insights is not new – Maestro already had had it before and shared in a set of reports, including the Instance Detailed report, Vulnerabilities report, and other.
What Maestro Insights does is aggregating the information from different engines and tools (security, billing, scheduling, instances meta information) – and then processing it to define the level of the instance compliance with Cloud usage best practices.
For each Insight, Maestro has its own rules and approaches – but at the end of the day, you can see a unified result, recommendations and the single Fix it button – not for all the findings (which may be overwhelming and time-consuming), but for the most critical ones – those that need immediate action.
To sum up
Maestro Insights is not aimed to replace the deep dive analytics and the capacities of native tools in compliance assessment and remediation recommendations. Instead, it provides a simplified quick path to fixing critical issues across the core aspects of the instance security and optimization-related configuration.The current functionality is based on Maestro own built-in mechanisms. However, in the nearest future we also plan to integrate the recommendations from the native Cloud provider’s advisors.
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