IT Infrastructure · Case study 07 of 12

Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure

A global enterprise running 2,400+ cloud resources across Azure and AWS needed an operations console that could proactively surface issues before they became incidents — replacing a wall of passive metric charts with an intelligent, action-oriented operations experience.

Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure — IT Infrastructure interface design by Yellowfirst
Client
Confidential Enterprise
Year
2023
Industry
IT Infrastructure
Role
Operations UX · Dashboard Design · Automation UX

The challenge

The ops team was monitoring 14 separate dashboards across Azure Monitor, AWS CloudWatch, and 3 third-party tools. Alert routing was manual. Critical incidents were being detected on average 47 minutes after they began — often by a customer complaint. Weekly reporting took 6 hours of manual collation across systems. The team was reactive by design, not by choice.

The solution

We designed a unified hybrid infrastructure console with a proactive intelligence layer. The system aggregates signals across all cloud providers, correlates related alerts into incident clusters, and surfaces the top 3 operational risks requiring attention. Automated reporting runs on schedule and distributes formatted summaries to stakeholders — no manual collation. Manage, Analyse, and Protect workflows are unified under one interface with a consistent interaction model.

Our process

  1. 01 Signal Inventory

    Catalogued 340 distinct metrics across 14 monitoring tools. Identified 28 that predicted 90% of production incidents.

  2. 02 Alert Correlation Design

    Designed the UX for ML-based alert clustering — grouping related signals into incident narratives rather than isolated alerts.

  3. 03 Proactive Dashboard Architecture

    Built a health-state model: green/amber/red per service, with trend direction and time-to-threshold projections.

  4. 04 Automated Reporting UX

    Designed report templates and scheduling interface. Reports auto-generate with commentary derived from metric trends.

  5. 05 Cross-Cloud Unification

    Designed normalised resource cards that display Azure and AWS resources identically regardless of underlying API differences.

Outcomes

  • 47→6 minMean time to incident detection
  • 6 hrs→0Weekly manual reporting effort
  • 14→1Dashboards replaced by unified console
  • 99.97%Uptime maintained post-deployment

Technology

  • Azure Monitor
  • AWS CloudWatch
  • Terraform
  • Angular
  • Power BI

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