Monitoring, Logging, and Cost Management

Understanding how to monitor your IBM Cloud resources and manage costs is essential for running a healthy cloud environment. This lesson covers IBM Cloud Monitoring, IBM Log Analysis, Activity Tracker, and billing tools.

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IBM Cloud Monitoring

IBM Cloud Monitoring (powered by Sysdig) provides visibility into the performance of your infrastructure and applications:

Metrics

Automatically collects metrics from IBM Cloud services:

Service	Example Metrics
Virtual Servers	CPU utilisation, memory usage, disk I/O, network traffic
Kubernetes / OpenShift	Pod CPU/memory, node status, deployment replicas
Cloud Databases	Connections, IOPS, storage usage, replication lag
Code Engine	Invocations, duration, concurrency
Cloud Object Storage	Request count, bandwidth, error rate

Alerts

Define alert rules to trigger notifications when metrics breach thresholds:

• Metric alerts — trigger when a metric exceeds a value
• Anomaly detection — automatic alerting on unusual patterns
• Notification channels — email, Slack, PagerDuty, webhooks

Example: Alert when Virtual Server CPU utilisation exceeds 85% for 10 consecutive minutes.

Dashboards

Create custom dashboards to visualise metrics:

• Pre-built dashboards for common services
• Custom dashboards with charts, gauges, and tables
• Share dashboards with team members
• Drill down into specific resources or time ranges

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IBM Log Analysis

IBM Log Analysis (powered by LogDNA / Mezmo) collects, searches, and analyses logs:

Key Features

Feature	Description
Log ingestion	Collect logs from VMs, Kubernetes, services, and applications
Live tail	Stream logs in real time
Search and filter	Full-text search with structured field queries
Views and alerts	Save filtered views and trigger alerts on log patterns
Archiving	Archive logs to Cloud Object Storage for long-term retention

Log Sources

Source	Collection Method
Virtual Servers	Log Analysis agent
Kubernetes / OpenShift	Automatic via cluster integration
Code Engine	Automatic
IBM Cloud services	Platform logs (automatic)
Custom applications	REST API or agent

Log Levels

Filter logs by severity:

• CRITICAL — system is unusable
• ERROR — error conditions
• WARNING — warning conditions
• INFO — informational messages
• DEBUG — debug-level messages

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Activity Tracker

Activity Tracker (powered by IBM Cloud Logs) records API calls and events for auditing:

What It Records