Multi-Cloud Infrastructure Monitoring: How to Watch Azure and AWS Without Five Separate Tools
Monitoring Azure and AWS in one place means using tooling built for cross-cloud visibility from the start — not stacking a cloud-native monitoring tool for each provider and hoping someone manually correlates the two when an incident spans both. 89% of organizations report running a multi-cloud strategy, but most monitoring stacks are still assembled one cloud-native tool at a time, which means the multi-cloud reality of the infrastructure and the single-cloud reality of the tooling are actively working against each other.
The real multi-cloud monitoring problem
Each cloud provider builds monitoring tooling for its own platform — CloudWatch for AWS, Azure Monitor for Azure — and both are genuinely good at watching their own cloud. Neither has any visibility into the other. When an incident spans both, which happens more often than teams expect (a service in AWS calling a dependency hosted in Azure, or a migration in progress leaving resources split across both), there is no single timeline, no single alert stream, and no single place to look. Someone has to manually open both consoles and piece together a cross-cloud story by hand, under time pressure, during the incident itself.
Drift and misconfiguration have the same problem from a different angle: a team can have excellent Azure Policy compliance and excellent AWS Config compliance and still have zero visibility into whether their overall security posture is consistent across both — because each tool only ever reports on its own cloud.
The tool sprawl trap
The instinctive fix — add a monitoring tool per cloud, per function — makes the underlying problem worse, not better. A team ends up with CloudWatch for AWS metrics, Azure Monitor for Azure metrics, a separate cost tool per cloud, a separate compliance scanner per cloud, and a separate drift-detection approach per cloud (if any exists at all for the IaC tool in use). Every added tool is one more login, one more dashboard, and one more thing that doesn't talk to the others — the sprawl compounds the exact fragmentation multi-cloud monitoring is supposed to solve.
What a unified multi-cloud monitoring workflow covers
A genuinely unified workflow treats "which cloud" as metadata, not as the organizing principle of the tooling. The same six domains get watched the same way regardless of provider:
- Compute — EC2 instances, Azure VMs, App Service, AKS and EKS node pools, watched for health and capacity the same way regardless of which cloud they run in.
- Networking — VPCs, NSGs, load balancers, VPN tunnels, DNS, and firewalls, so a network issue that spans a VPN tunnel between AWS and Azure shows up as one problem, not two unrelated alerts.
- Storage — S3 and Azure Blob encryption, access policy, and replication health checked against the same standard on both clouds.
- Identity and access — IAM roles and Azure RBAC assignments, policy drift, and managed identity health, so a permission audit covers both clouds at once instead of two separate reviews.
- Pipelines and deployments — GitHub Actions and Azure DevOps failures across Terraform, Bicep, ARM, and CloudFormation, correlated regardless of which cloud the pipeline is deploying to.
- Live resource health — availability, performance thresholds, and capacity warnings surfaced from both clouds' native alerting (CloudWatch alarms, Azure Monitor Action Groups) into one place.
Detecting misconfigurations across multiple cloud accounts
Multi-account AWS and multi-subscription Azure setups add another layer: even within a single cloud, misconfigurations can hide in an account or subscription nobody is actively watching. A unified monitoring approach needs to enumerate every account and subscription in scope and apply the same checks — wildcard IAM, open management ports, unencrypted storage — across all of them, not just the production account someone remembers to check.
Frequently asked questions
What is multi-cloud infrastructure monitoring?
Multi-cloud infrastructure monitoring is watching compute, networking, storage, identity, pipelines, and resource health across more than one cloud provider — typically Azure and AWS — from a single, unified view instead of separate cloud-native tools per provider.
How do I monitor Azure and AWS together?
Use monitoring tooling built for cross-cloud visibility from the start, covering the same domains (compute, networking, storage, identity, pipelines, resource health) on both clouds consistently, rather than running CloudWatch and Azure Monitor separately and manually correlating incidents that span both.
What are the challenges of multi-cloud infrastructure management?
The core challenge is that each cloud provider's native tooling only sees its own cloud, so incidents, drift, and misconfigurations that span both clouds — or even ones that are simply inconsistent between the two — have no single place to be detected, forcing manual correlation during incidents.
How do I detect misconfigurations across multiple cloud accounts?
Enumerate every AWS account and Azure subscription in scope and apply the same misconfiguration checks — overprivileged IAM, open management ports, unencrypted storage, overpermissive network rules — consistently across all of them, not just the primary or production account.
What tools support both Azure and AWS monitoring?
Look for tooling explicitly built for cross-cloud visibility — covering compute, networking, storage, identity, pipelines, and live resource health across both providers in one dashboard — rather than assembling separate cloud-native tools per provider and correlating them manually.
One dashboard, both clouds
Cloud Decoded provides a single pane across Azure and AWS — drift, misconfigurations, pipeline failures, and live resource health, all in one dashboard.