Maestro Blog

Have you ever built a "perfect" dashboard only to realize that no one uses it? Have you spent weeks crafting a detailed report that was supposed to provide your customers with more context, but instead provided your support team with more customers? Most of developers did it, for sure. The question is – how we improve the situation when users tend to skip or misunderstand charts and reports we share with them. Maestro team, together with EPAM Syndicate Rule Engine (SRE) team, developed an interesting solution, based on a simple core idea. The numerous reports, charts, and dashboards should be addressed to the needs of specific user groups. This is how the idea of four-layer reporting was born: Operational level reports – those representing the on the go changes and actions, and making it easy to track specific events and alerts. Project reports – those covering the project-level statistics and allowing to find general project changes, trends, and responsib...

Effective cloud usage for an enterprise requires various tools, including resource management, corporate integrations, and establishing effective communication with end users. By default, cloud providers offer crucial alerts out-of-the-box, with additional alerts being customizable and provisioned as a service. This setup works well once you use only one provider and a small infrastructure. However, in multi-cloud and hybrid cloud environments, tracking complex infrastructures efficiently becomes more challenging. Enterprises have different methods to address these challenges, ranging from manual sorting to integrating third-party tools. However, not all these methods are flexible enough to respond promptly to technological updates and market demands. This is where the need for a better solution emerges, leading to our case study on migrating to Maestro. Problem Statement An enterprise using a hybrid cloud with AWS, Azure, GCP, and OpenStack-based infrastructure uti...

Having the detailed information about virtual infrastructure "as is" is not enough for effective infrastructure management, financial governance, security assessment, and remediation. In fact, a team can use the raw data, but if it comes to large cross-cloud infrastructures, processing it would take lots of time and effort. This is where automated and ML-empowered analytics comes to the stage. Maestro incorporates an effective approach that lets the user benefit from the analytics and recommendation mechanisms offered by the public cloud providers themselves, as well as from Maestro own tools. The outcome of the analysis are recommendations that can be used to improve virtual infrastructures in different dimensions.  The user can take not a resource-, but a recommendation-oriented view on the infrastructure, with different types of recommendations being addressed to the users with different roles and goals.  For example, security insights are addressed to security experts,...

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...

Working with Maestro involves lots of processes and actions. To be in full control of your virtual infrastructures and to be able to plan your further activities based on trends, it is very important to receive timely and detailed information on the state, performance, and costs of your virtual resources. Maestro includes advanced analytics both in Maestro UI and its reporting system. Analytics dashboard Analytics dashboard provides cloud users with the real-time data about their infrastructures and costs. Structurally, the Analytics dashboard is a collection of widgets with relevant data. There are three types of widgets – table for displaying data in the table form, graph for displaying data in the graphical form (for some widgets, you can switch between the two types), and metrics for displaying different metrics. These widgets can be rearranged on the dashboard (with the exception of the fixed ones), added to the dashboard via the Manage widgets wizard. All the graphs have a built-...

Effective management of cloud resources should accomodate different factors. One of these factors is the size of the infrastructure. If the tenant manager has no tools or doesn't recognize the specifics of the tenant resources, it makes their management time-consuming and might cause considerable money losses. One of the focuses of Maestro v.3.33 is to provide a tenant manager responsible for costs and billing with the analytics of such level, scope, and elaboration that is optimal for the size and complexity of the managed cloud infrastructure. By their size, cloud infrastructures can be roughly divided 4 groups: Small infrastructures consisting of several virtual instances usually require the analytics based on the exact instances – their creation, start and stop times, individual telemetry, etc. Medium infrastructures consisting of dozens of instances created manually usually require the analytics based the instances vulnerabilities, costs of the instances, their workload, e...

Billing and costs are one of the primary concerns for any business owner. Thus, Maestro sees great importance in providing its users effective cost optimization tools. We provide a multi-level analytic mechanism that allows tenant management monitoring the process of cost optimization in an effective manner. Maestro focuses on improving this multi-level analytic mechanism in order to make it optimal in usage. Multi-level Analytic Mechanism for Cost Optimization The first level of this mechanism is related to using budgets . Managers of tenant set quotas for their tenants and are informed about their depletion. Besides, Maestro allows setting additional actions for the new infrastructures intended for cost optimization: automatically stop all instances when the quota is depleted, requesting approval for the new instances, deny running new instance after the quota is depleted. More details about this mechanism are here . The second level is presented with the Forecast report . This...

If you want to effectively manage your cloud resources or the cloud resources of your tenant, you would like to keep a keen eye on all the logins and state-changing events in your cloud infrastructure. With this release, we are glad to announce a new feature that will make your auditing experience simple as ABC. From now on, you can customize your audit notifications, send and receive notifications about different audit event groups, and create specific audit reports for a day, week, or month by means of the same tool, Custom audit notifications wizard. Custom audit notifications wizard is available for all tenant members and can be run either from the Audit tab or from the Content View : From the Custom audit notifications wizard, you can Create new custom audit notifications with the necessary parameters such as mailing frequency, event group and subgroup, initiator of the event and the recipient of the notification, etc. Edit and update your already existing custom...