Monitoring the Cloud

Network monitoring and management applications have become a dime-a-dozen lot. We’re all familiar with the big (and expensive) management solutions from HP, CA, IBM, etc. However, the open source market is once again heating up with new developments that take on the “big-boy” competitors. While many of these platforms have remained true open-source environments, it’s not uncommon for once “open” projects to develop business-focus environments that offer lots of functionality for comparatively little cost. Users and consumers of cloud computing have been known to give up monitoring control to their providers, who assume responsibility for day-to-day monitoring and management of their environment. But what happens when these environments go sour, and the cloud customers want monitoring and management control? Hyperic, who develops open-source and business-focused systems monitoring environments, recently announced a Google App Engine Plugin for its CloudStatus platform. “A free, third-party hosted service, CloudStatus provides a comprehensive measure of service availability, latency and throughput for cloud-based infrastructure and application services. It allows users to obtain detailed, service-specific metrics on any of the monitored offerings, providing the perspective needed to determine the cause of any performance changes within their cloud-based applications.” (Hyperic) With the new Google App Engine Plugin in place, Hyperic is pioneering the way to provide end users of cloud services with systems monitoring environments. This adds to Hyperic’s portfolio of cloud environments, including support for Amazon Web Services, Rackspace’s Mosso, and Coghead. The cloud environment is definitely a new frontier. The addition of monitoring environments such as CloudStatus makes it a more viable solution, offering granular-level monitoring for such systems. For more information, check out CloudStatus or Hyperic.