Top enterprise hybrid cloud management tools to review

Why hybrid cloud management matters

In recent years, public cloud vendors have rolled out a new generation of frameworks for hybrid cloud creation -- most notably, Azure Stack Hub and HCI, Azure Arc, AWS Outposts and Google Cloud Anthos. At the same time, more conventional hybrid cloud management platforms, such as VMware Cloud Foundation and Cisco Intersight, continue to thrive. In addition, Kubernetes can be useful as a platform for hybrid cloud management, especially for organizations that use Kubernetes services, like Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) Anywhere, to manage workloads deployed on private infrastructure using Amazon's managed Kubernetes service.

These platforms provide a centralized way to deploy and administer workloads across a cloud environment that mixes private infrastructure with public cloud resources. Integration between these entities is a significant improvement over earlier hybrid cloud architectures, which more closely resembled a private cloud and a public cloud running side by side. Modern tooling has made creating a hybrid cloud environment easier than ever.

Yet, hybrid cloud management remains a major challenge, and the platforms and frameworks mentioned above don't fully solve it. They simplify and centralize the deployment of public cloud services on private infrastructure, but they don't always address hybrid cloud management requirements, such as workload provisioning, log aggregation and analysis, and governance enforcement. These tasks often require additional functionality beyond what's available in hybrid cloud frameworks.

The importance of visibility in hybrid cloud

Hybrid clouds are, by their nature, especially complex and not fully centralized. Because they mix private and public cloud infrastructure and services, they make it harder to centralize monitoring and management than would be the case with a cloud environment that includes only private or only public resources.

Hybrid cloud management demands an especially deep level of visibility. Visibility ensures that organizations have an accurate, continuously updated understanding of the status of all their cloud infrastructure and workloads, including both the private and public cloud components.

The lack of effective hybrid cloud visibility can create challenges, such as the following:

• Service disruptions resulting from failure to detect outages or performance anomalies across the various workloads hosted within a hybrid cloud.
• The inability to predict or optimize cloud spending due to poor visibility into the costs of both the private and public cloud infrastructure.
• Security risks, which could arise due to inconsistent access controls and governance policies across the private and public parts of the cloud environment.
• Difficulty modernizing or migrating hybrid cloud workloads because of a lack of understanding of where each workload resides, what its requirements are and so on.

3 types of hybrid cloud management tools

The hybrid cloud management landscape is complex. Tools have overlapping functionality. And, since there are multiple approaches to implementing a hybrid cloud architecture -- such as building it directly on top of cloud infrastructure or using a platform like Kubernetes as an abstraction layer -- not all tools apply to all hybrid cloud configurations.

That said, hybrid cloud management tools are generally categorized as one of three types of tools:

1. Native tools built into frameworks for building a hybrid cloud.
2. Third-party tools that integrate with hybrid environments but are not natively included in them.
3. Tools for managing the physical infrastructure that serves as the foundation for hybrid clouds.

1. Native hybrid cloud management tools

The first category of management tools consists primarily of public cloud services that can extend into hybrid cloud environments. For example, if AWS Outposts is used to build a hybrid cloud architecture, the AWS public cloud's standard management tools -- including CloudWatch and CloudTrail -- can be used to help monitor the hybrid environment and manage logs. The Azure Stack suite of products provides a similar experience by integrating with Microsoft Azure public cloud's standard monitoring tools. Anthos does this as well, using Google Cloud Console.

Platforms such as VMware Cloud Foundation and Kubernetes can be tied into some public cloud vendors' services, too. But, for the most part, they don't extend public cloud management tooling into hybrid environments. Instead, users manage hybrid environments via the native tooling that's built into the platforms, such as kubectl on Kubernetes. That said, some integrations between these platforms and public cloud platforms exist. For example, it's possible to use the AWS Identity and Access Management framework to govern some permissions within Kubernetes environments hosted by using Amazon EKS, a Kubernetes service available through the Amazon cloud.

2. Third-party hybrid cloud monitoring and management tools

Because of limitations in native hybrid cloud management tools, it's sometimes necessary to add third-party management tools. These tools can offer broader, richer functionality. They also offer the advantage of working across multiple cloud platforms at once, which is usually not the case when using cloud provider tools. This capability makes third-party hybrid cloud tools useful for businesses whose cloud strategy includes multiple public clouds in addition to a hybrid cloud.

3. Physical infrastructure integration and management

Hybrid cloud management isn't just about digital assets. It also extends to the physical hardware that hosts hybrid clouds. It's necessary to keep track of the servers, which hardware resources they provide and whether they're adequate to meet the hybrid cloud architecture's needs. Cloud providers have extended their reach to on-premises by bundling hardware with services and linking back up to their clouds. These products eliminate the need for an enterprise to manage physical infrastructure. But, sometimes, there are tradeoffs.

For instance, with AWS Outposts, the servers must be acquired directly from AWS. On other hybrid cloud platforms, however, a company typically purchases and manages its own hardware.

Top hybrid cloud management tools

Hybrid cloud management tools represent a complex ecosystem that has evolved significantly in recent years through acquisitions and new product launches. The evolution is likely to continue, making it important to keep up to date with the hybrid cloud tooling landscape.

At present, key vendors and offerings include the following:

• Amazon (CloudFormation, Amazon CloudWatch and AWS CloudTrail). These cloud services integrate with Amazon's hybrid cloud frameworks -- particularly Outposts and EKS Anywhere -- to provide visibility and monitoring capabilities. Turnkey integration among AWS services makes them especially easy to deploy.
• Broadcom (VMware Tanzu CloudHealth and Tanzu Observability). Originally built to help administer VMware-centric private and hybrid cloud environments, these offerings are now part of the Broadcom portfolio and support virtually all types of hybrid environments, not just those built using VMware and Broadcom technology.
• CloudBolt Software. Offers a suite of products for hybrid cloud monitoring, reporting and compliance management, with particularly strong capabilities in automated governance policy enforcement.
• CloudSphere (Illuminate360). A holistic IT monitoring and visibility offering that can deliver visibility into hybrid cloud environments as well as on-premises, private clouds and public clouds.
• Flexera (Snow Commander). Built up through a series of acquisitions, Snow Commander aims to provide a highly automated approach to hybrid cloud management and monitoring. User self-service capabilities further reduce the administrative burden placed on IT staff.
• Google Cloud (Google Cloud Operations). A visibility tool complete with monitoring, logging, debugging and tracing capabilities that integrates easily with hybrid clouds built on top of Google Cloud using Anthos.
• HPE (HPE Morpheus). Creates a centralized control plane for monitoring and tracking hybrid cloud environments built using virtually any underlying platform, such as AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, VMware, Kubernetes and others. It is notable for strong vendor agnosticism. 
• IBM Cloud Pak for Multi Cloud Management. A hybrid cloud management and monitoring service that integrates most tightly with Red Hat OpenShift -- a Kubernetes-based management platform owned by IBM. Although the product is tightly coupled with IBM's native cloud offerings, it can support third-party environments so long as they also run a version of OpenShift.
• Micro Focus Hybrid Cloud Management X (HCMX). Provides a highly centralized approach to managing and monitoring workloads across virtually any hybrid or multi-cloud environment, with a strong focus on compliance and cost management.
• Microsoft (Microsoft Azure Automation and Azure Monitor). These services integrate seamlessly with hybrid clouds constructed using Azure Arc or Hub solutions.
• Scalr. Aims to centralize hybrid cloud and multi-cloud management by using infrastructure as code to automate workload deployment, provisioning and governance. It offers a few native monitoring and observability capabilities but can integrate with third-party tools to fill this gap.

The tools should work with all parts of the IT infrastructure and cover all related management needs -- something that native management tools built into hybrid cloud frameworks sometimes can't do.

Evaluation criteria for hybrid cloud management tools

Given the wide selection of hybrid cloud management tools available and the varying use cases they support, organizations should weigh a range of factors when considering options. These are some key areas of evaluation:

• Platform support. Not all hybrid cloud management tools work with all types of cloud platforms. For instance, some logging and monitoring tools might work with the public cloud platform on which the hybrid cloud is partly based. But they might not work well -- or at all -- with the abstraction layer, such as Kubernetes or Cloud Foundation, that runs on top of it.
• Tool integrations. Consider how well the tools integrate with other offerings. For instance, if a hybrid cloud management tool automates log and metric collection, does it integrate well with analytics tools to help interpret them?
• Centralized visibility and operations. Some management platforms are stronger than others regarding their ability to support all aspects of hybrid cloud administration, asset tracking, workload deployment and so on via a single, centralized vantage point.
• Prescriptive and predictive capabilities. In addition to providing visibility into hybrid cloud environments, some tools offer features to predict how workloads will evolve over time and provide recommendations to support goals such as cost optimization.
• Security monitoring. While performance and availability monitoring are the main focus of most hybrid cloud management tools, some also offer security monitoring and threat detection capabilities.

Chris Tozzi, senior editor of content and a DevOps analyst at Fixate IO, has worked as a journalist and Linux systems administrator with particular interest in open source Agile infrastructure and networking.

Editor's note: This article originally published in 2023 and was updated in 2026 to include more hybrid cloud management tools.