When working with a managed service provider (MSP) who manages your cloud services, it is important to understand what tooling they use. The use of proprietary tooling is may complicate an exit-procedure. When vendor specific instead of vendor agnostic tooling is used, adding a second cloud provider for a specific service may be costly and complicated. Make sure you are prepared, well informed and aware of possible consequences.
Infrastructure
In the cloud (IaaS/PaaS) suppliers collect monitoring data and avail that data to their customers. An agnostic tool is needed when multiple solutions are used to combine those different sources of monitoring data.
Runtime
Depending on your configurations runtime affects specific application components which need to be monitored.
Application
For application uptime and availability monitoring a third party tool is used. Most likely the MSP will be selecting this tool on your behalf.
If this is the case, questions to ask the managing party are:
- How is the tooling configured?
- What are you monitoring?
- What will happen when underlying, 3rd party infrastructure is down impacting application availability?
- How is the infrastructure monitored?
- How does their tooling respond to external alerts?
- What is the course of action when infra alerts arrive?
Your managing party should be able to produce a flowchart to show they are in control of that part of the service chain for which they are responsible.