Most enterprise IT estates are not purely cloud or purely on-prem. A NOC today typically watches AWS, Azure, or GCP resources alongside physical servers, network gear, and legacy applications that have no cloud equivalent. Each cloud provider ships its own native monitoring, and each one stops at the edge of its own platform.
What native cloud monitoring gives you
CloudWatch, Azure Monitor, and Google Cloud Operations are capable tools within their own platforms. They collect metrics and logs, support basic alerting and dashboards, and integrate natively with the rest of their ecosystem. For a team running entirely in one cloud, that can be enough on its own.
Where it stops being enough
The moment infrastructure spans more than one environment, native tools create blind spots rather than closing them:
- Single-platform scope. CloudWatch sees AWS. Azure Monitor sees Azure. Neither sees the other, and neither sees your on-prem network or legacy applications.
- No cross-environment correlation. An application outage caused by a database issue in one cloud and a network issue on-prem shows up as two unrelated alerts in two separate consoles, not one incident.
- Alerting conventions differ by provider. Severity levels, naming, and notification channels are not consistent across AWS, Azure, and GCP, so a NOC watching all three is translating between three different vocabularies under pressure.
- More dashboards, not more visibility. Adding a cloud platform usually means adding a console, not replacing one. A hybrid estate can leave a NOC watching four or five screens for a single incident.
What correlation adds
An event correlation layer sits above the native tools rather than replacing them. It pulls events from CloudWatch, Azure Monitor, Google Cloud Operations, and on-prem sources into one stream, applies consistent severity and naming, and groups related events, cloud and on-prem alike, into a single incident. The NOC analyst working a ticket does not need to know which platform the root cause started on; the correlation layer has already done that mapping.
This matters most during migration windows, when workloads are split across on-prem and cloud for months or years, and during multi-cloud operation, when different teams or acquisitions bring different providers into the same estate. In both cases, the correlation layer is what keeps one incident from being worked as two, or three.
What to check before you add a layer like this
- Does it genuinely pull from all three major clouds, not just the one your team started with?
- Does it correlate cloud and on-prem events together, or run them as parallel, separate streams?
- Can it work alongside your existing monitoring tools, or does it require ripping them out first?
- How much setup does cross-environment correlation take, versus months of rule-tuning?
Where ECM fits
ECM (Event Correlation Manager) connects to AWS, Azure, and GCP, alongside on-prem monitoring tools such as SolarWinds, Nagios, Zabbix, Zenoss, Dynatrace, Datadog, and Splunk, and correlates all of it into a single incident stream. For teams still running legacy consoles such as IBM Netcool, HP OpenView, BMC Helix, or Micro Focus Operations Bridge alongside their cloud estate, ECM can replace those consoles outright rather than adding yet another one.
Teams using ECM see 95% alert noise reduction and 2× MTTR improvement, results that compound as more environments, cloud and on-prem, get folded into the same view.
ECM is free for up to 100 managed entities, in the cloud or on-premises, with no credit card required. You can start free in the cloud or book a demo to see it against your own mixed environment.