Cloud Visibility Tools

Table of contents

What is cloud visibility?What are cloud visibility tools?Types of cloud visibility tools General-purpose cloud visibility tools Why general-purpose cloud visibility tools fall short in multi-cloud Use case-specific visibility tools Multi-cloud visibility Network monitoring and observability Security monitoring Choosing a cloud visibility tool Kentik Solutions for Cloud Visibility Optimizing cloud egress and reducing unnecessary spend Finding heavy talkers and noisy neighbors Cloud data transfer charges and cost control FAQs about Cloud Visibility How can I get end-to-end visibility across hybrid and multi-cloud networks?How do enterprises monitor connectivity across AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud simultaneously?How do I monitor cloud gateways, NAT, and load balancers end-to-end?How can I identify suboptimal egress points in multi-cloud architectures?How can I identify noisy neighbors in shared cloud infrastructure?How can I track and reduce cloud data transfer charges from traffic flows?How do I monitor inter-availability-zone and inter-region performance?What’s the best way to map and monitor Internet-facing services?How do I visualize traffic distribution across regions and clouds?

What is cloud visibility?

Cloud visibility refers to the ability to have a comprehensive view into all the activity within your cloud network. This gives you greater control over your cloud infrastructure so you can monitor cloud security, any performance issues, and optimize cloud costs.

What are cloud visibility tools?

Cloud visibility tools allow IT teams, network engineers, security analysts and other stakeholders to understand what is happening within cloud environments. They allow these teams to monitor, troubleshoot, and optimize their cloud resources within all types of cloud environments and private data centers.

Cloud visibility tools come in many forms. The best ones for you depend on which types of cloud visibility you need, how your cloud environment is configured, and the public cloud being used (AWS, Google Cloud, Azure, etc.).

Types of cloud visibility tools

General-purpose cloud visibility tools

The most generic category of cloud visibility tool consists of tools offered by cloud providers to help monitor and track their cloud environments. Examples include AWS CloudWatch and Google Cloud’s operation suite (formerly known as Stackdriver).

These tools aren’t designed for a specific type of visibility, like cloud security monitoring or cloud infrastructure monitoring. Instead, they can collect data from all kinds of cloud resources — infrastructure, data centers, SaaS resources, cloud load balancers and so on — to provide a high-level overview of what is happening inside a cloud environment.

Why general-purpose cloud visibility tools fall short in multi-cloud

That said, general-purpose cloud visibility tools typically don’t provide fine-grained context into particular types of issues. For example, they aren’t useful for drilling down and gaining nuanced context on security issues or infrastructure problems.

These tools also usually work only within a given cloud; AWS’s visibility tools only support AWS, for example. That’s a limitation if you use multiple clouds because you won’t be able to monitor all of them with a single cloud provider’s tool.

For both of these reasons, generic visibility tools like CloudWatch are helpful as a starting point for building a complex cloud visibility solution, but they rarely suffice on their own.

In contrast, solutions like Kentik Cloud ingest VPC/VNet flow logs and telemetry from AWS, Azure, Google Cloud and other providers and correlates it with on-prem and Internet traffic so you get a single, end-to-end view of connectivity and performance across your entire hybrid and multi-cloud environment.

Use case-specific visibility tools

Several other types of cloud visibility tools are available that focus on specific use cases.

Multi-cloud visibility

Visibility and observability tools developed by independent vendors offer the ability to monitor multiple cloud environments at once. These tools can usually monitor on-premises infrastructure or private clouds as well. For this reason, IT operations teams often use these types of tools as the basis for tracking a business’s IT estate as a whole.

Network monitoring and observability

To gain deep visibility into the state of cloud networks, you’ll want a network observability tool designed to collect and correlate data from the networks that exist within a single cloud environment and networks that connect different clouds as part of a hybrid or multi-cloud architecture. Below is an example of a network intelligence platform collecting and displaying data in a multi-cloud environment.

cloud visibility solutions from Kentik provide insight into cloud services as well as on-prem network components

Modern cloud visibility tool: Solutions like Kentik provide insight into cloud services as well as on-prem network components.

Enterprises can send flow logs and cloud telemetry from AWS, Azure and Google Cloud into Kentik, where it’s normalized into one data model so they can query, alert on and visualize multi-cloud connectivity side-by-side instead of juggling multiple cloud-specific tools.

In this short video, we demonstrate how Kentik provides comprehensive network observability for hybrid cloud environments, encompassing both on-premises and public cloud resources. We start with the Kentik map, showcasing active on-prem sites and cloud environments, then dive into specific examples of how to view and analyze traffic and connectivity:

Hybrid cloud environments are a common architecture for modern networks that span both on-premises and public cloud resources. In this demo, we'll take a look at how Kentik provides network observability for application traffic traversing traditional on-premises networks, like campus or data center, out to your public cloud environment. For this demo, we're starting with the Kentik map. And here we could see many active on-prem sites and cloud environments represented on the same graphic. If we drill down into this site grouping in Northern New Jersey, for example, we could see the individual sites, the individual devices and links, all of which you can expand to look at things like metrics, traffic information, and so on. For now, let's zoom out though and focus on AWS. If we show connections, we can see the overall connectivity between AWS and all of our on-prem sites. Now this is an overview of traffic to all our on-prem sites, and we can filter for things like application, country, region, site. You can see that the list is pretty extensive. Now from the public clouds, we're collecting information like AWS VPC flow logs and cloud metrics, from Azure NSG flow logs and cloud metrics, and similar from Oracle and Google. From on-prem networks like campus and data center, we're collecting telemetry using SNMP, streaming telemetry. We're ingesting information from your IPAM and DNS. We're also grabbing custom info like site and application tags and, really, any other metadata that might help provide business context for an organization by tying all of this information to the flow data that we're also collecting. From service providers, we're ingesting global routing tables, we're monitoring BGP, and we're using technologies like Paris TraceRoute to map loss latency and jitter, hop by hop, along the path on the public Internet. Another way to see your hybrid traffic is with our topology graphic. Now I'm using this site, which is a data center in Dallas, Texas, it looks looks like. And when I show its connections, we see that it has connectivity to the Internet up into the right, and you can drill into that by clicking the link, and also to two different public clouds, which we can see by this arrow going to the left. And it looks like our Dallas data center has connections to both AWS and Azure. Now we could click on Azure and select show connections to see what our Azure instance is talking to. And when I do that, it looks like it's just our Dallas data center. And to look at the traffic between Azure and Dallas, we would just click on the link and that opens the details pane on the right. Now that's a quick overview of traffic volume, but we can get much more granular by filtering for any of these options here. So if I choose application, we get a breakdown of the application traffic on that connection for the last hour. Now notice that from here I can also pivot to data explorer where we can filter this specific telemetry further and get as granular as we need to. Data Explorer allows us to filter for many different options. You can change the time range, change the visualization, run a comparison, add very complex filtering statements and so on. Back to our map, let's look at AWS. I'll select view topology to see how our AWS traffic is talking to our on-prem resources, And this is gonna allow us to look at cloud networking components. So here on this first on-prem router, we could see how it sends AWS bound traffic to this Direct Connect, then onto this Direct Connect gateway, and then scrolling down to this transit gateway to go to our AWS US west one region. Now we could drill into the traffic within that region as well, but for this demo, let's go back to the top so you could see that many of these resources are actually clickable, meaning that you can click on any device or almost any device or link and then drill down even more. And that way you could see if there are any back end connection errors. So here's information about that on-prem router. Here's the info about that Direct Connect. And I'll scroll down and you could see all that information about the transit gateway. So things like traffic information, device and interface metrics, BGP session status, the route table, all our attachments. And this way we can see if there are issues like a NAT gateway allocation error or maybe a transit gateway with no route and packet drops. The last piece is the path on the internet between your on-prem site and your public cloud instance. Kentik has synthetic testing agents deployed around the world to monitor all the major public clouds, but you can also deploy synthetic tests within your own locations as well as in your own public cloud environments to run periodic network performance tests across the Internet, which you can then alert on and see historically as well. So as you can see here, this test is running to check network connectivity and performance between our on-prem location and our AWS environment. And by looking at the path view, we can actually see hop by hop the entire path between our on-prem location and our AWS environment, including where there could be latency or maybe packet loss. Kentik's approach to hybrid cloud visibility is crucial for maintaining a high performing and reliable network that spans on-prem, public cloud, and the public Internet. To learn more, visit kentik.com/cloud or reach out to your local Kentik representative.

It’s only by contextualizing networking data that you can gain meaningful insight into complex cloud networks, where traffic constantly moves between clouds and where abstractions like VPCs and software-defined networks can make network visibility particularly challenging.

Security monitoring

Security information and event management (SIEM) and security orchestration, automation and response (SOAR) tools can detect and help manage security risks in the cloud. Security operations teams and analysts typically use them to track the security status of cloud environments. This helps ensure consistent security and compliance standards while eliminating blind spots commonly seen in cloud environments.

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Choosing a cloud visibility tool

When evaluating visibility tools for use in the cloud, consider factors like the following:

Does the tool work with all public, private, and hybrid clouds you need to support?
Does the tool help you to analyze data, or is its functionality mainly limited to data collection?
Can the tool map discrete data sets (such as data from a network switch and data from a public cloud flow log) to provide focused context into complex performance or availability issues? Or does the tool leave it to you to determine relationships between different types of data?
How is the tool deployed? Does it require agents to be installed across your cloud environments, or can you deploy it automatically, in an agentless way?
How many cloud resources does the tool consume to run? This is important because tools with high resource consumption may burden your environment and because you’ll pay for the compute and memory resources that the tools consume if you run the tool in the public cloud.

Kentik Solutions for Cloud Visibility

There’s a belief that cloud computing will provide automation and reduce the need for visibility. However, experienced cloud and infrastructure engineers report just the opposite. With the widespread migration of applications and workloads to public clouds, understanding cloud visibility tools is more important than ever.

The Kentik Network Intelligence Platform lets network pros monitor, run, and troubleshoot across on‑prem, WAN/SD‑WAN, and multicloud. Kentik addresses all three pillars of modern network monitoring with traffic visibility, synthetic testing, and Kentik NMS for device/telemetry health. Kentik AI accelerates triage and cause analysis, and Kentik Traffic Costs brings real‑time cost intelligence into day‑to‑day operations.

Kentik offers additional benefits over cloud-specific visibility tools including:

Optimizing cloud egress and reducing unnecessary spend

Kentik breaks down cloud egress by region, VPC, gateway and interconnect so you can see exactly where traffic is leaving your environments; this makes it easy to spot flows hair-pinning through the wrong regions or edges and adjust connectivity or routing policies to move egress to more efficient points.

Finding heavy talkers and noisy neighbors

Kentik lets you break down traffic by VPC, subnet, instance or tag so you can quickly identify heavy talkers or flows that generate disproportionate traffic or egress, which helps reveal noisy neighbors or tenants in shared cloud environments.

Cloud data transfer charges and cost control

By attributing traffic to specific regions, services, gateways and interconnects and tying that back to provider pricing, Kentik shows which flows drive cloud data-transfer charges so you can optimize architecture, move services, or change connectivity and then verify the impact on both traffic and cost.

To see how Kentik can bring the benefits of network intelligence to your organization, request a demo or sign up for a free trial today.

FAQs about Cloud Visibility

How can I get end-to-end visibility across hybrid and multi-cloud networks?

Kentik Cloud gives you end-to-end visibility by ingesting VPC/VNet flow logs and telemetry from AWS, Azure, Google Cloud and more, and correlating that with on-prem, intra-cloud (e.g., VPC-to-VPC, region-to-region), and Internet traffic in one platform. With Kentik Map you can literally see your hybrid topology — data centers, cloud regions, interconnects, and traffic — in a single interactive map, making it easy to trace paths and troubleshoot issues across the entire hybrid/multi-cloud environment.

How do enterprises monitor connectivity across AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud simultaneously?

Kentik unifies telemetry from AWS, Azure, Google Cloud and other providers so you don’t need three different tools and consoles. VPC/VNet flow logs and cloud metrics from each provider are normalized into one data model, which means you can query, alert, and dashboard connectivity across all clouds side-by-side for both real-time and historical analysis.

How do I monitor cloud gateways, NAT, and load balancers end-to-end?

Kentik ingests VPC and Transit Gateway flow logs and correlates them with NAT gateways, cloud firewalls, and load balancers so you can see exactly how traffic traverses those middleboxes. Kentik Map’s Load Balancer details and NAT-focused analytics let you monitor health, throughput, and even cost impact for these components end-to-end — from on-prem through cloud edges and back.

How can I identify suboptimal egress points in multi-cloud architectures?

Kentik analyzes where cloud egress actually happens — by region, VPC, gateway, and interconnect — and shows which paths and edges carry the bulk of your traffic. With hybrid-cloud cost and traffic views, you can quickly spot suboptimal egress points (for example, flows hair-pinning through the wrong region) and redesign connectivity or routing policies to shift traffic to more efficient exits.

How can I identify noisy neighbors in shared cloud infrastructure?

Kentik lets you break down cloud traffic by VPC, subnet, instance, or tag, making it easy to surface ‘elephant flows’ or resources that generate disproportionate traffic or egress. Those heavy-talker views help you identify noisy neighbors in shared infrastructure — whether that’s a single microservice, a rogue instance, or a particular tenant in a multi-tenant environment.

How can I track and reduce cloud data transfer charges from traffic flows?

Kentik uses flow data and cloud visibility to attribute traffic to regions, services, and gateways — then ties that back to egress pricing so you can see exactly which flows are driving your cloud data-transfer charges. From there, you can adjust architecture (move services closer, change regions, use private connectivity or peering) and watch in Kentik as both traffic patterns and costs improve over time.

How do I monitor inter-availability-zone and inter-region performance?

Kentik ingests region- and AZ-level flow logs so you can chart traffic and performance between availability zones and regions — including latency, volume, and error patterns. For GCP, AWS, and others, Kentik highlights traffic across services like Dedicated Interconnect or Transit Gateway, making it easier to detect when a specific region-pair or AZ-pair is underperforming.

What’s the best way to map and monitor Internet-facing services?

Kentik’s hybrid map and cloud-traffic views make it easy to find and monitor Internet-facing services: you can see which cloud subnets, load balancers, and gateways expose traffic to the public Internet and how those paths run through your interconnects and data centers. Combined with traffic analytics and alerting, that gives you a live map and monitoring framework for every Internet-facing service in your hybrid architecture.

How do I visualize traffic distribution across regions and clouds?

Use a platform that maps your hybrid topology and lets you query traffic by cloud provider and region. Kentik Map visualizes cloud regions and interconnects, while Data Explorer and Insights let you break traffic down by cloud provider/region/subnet to understand distribution across clouds and geographies.

Updated: December 31, 2025