As Cloud-based delivery models start to make their presence felt, a host of monitoring and management players are making their moves. The Cloud computing industry cannot realize it’s potential, without this important piece of the puzzle taken care of. After all, enterprise customers need the comfort and visibility into their applications and business services on the cloud – as they do with their internal systems or with existing service providers – before they make the leap.  

 In our last post we talked about why cloud monitoring and management is different from regular datacenter monitoring. Hence, slapping on a “cloud monitoring” moniker on top of an existing NSM solution would not cut it. The major IT vendors have focused on releasing new versions of their IT management stacks – from provisioning, to governance, portfolio management and even application middleware on the cloud. Of particular note is IBM’s partnership with Amazon (who would have imagined this a couple of year’s back?) and new managed service models from HP, CA and BMC. Clearly, cloud versions of their monitoring platforms are yet to be addressed and start-ups / early stage companies have the lead. Here are a few vendors we have come across that seem to have what it takes and why.

Hyperic has certainly gained first mover status with their open source Hyperic HQ software platform (supporting Amazon Web Services and Google Apps) and the Cloud Status service. They have developed a native Java implementation of the collectd protocol and released it under the GPL. This gives them a breadth of coverage from the existing library of collectd plugins and ensure further extensibility through the open source community. For more information visit the HyperForge community.

CITTIO has taken an interesting approach of leveraging standards based DMTF protocols and management stack to ensure long term interoperability across any cloud provider. They have used the well known open source SBLIM stack for Linux instrumentation and added their own first-of-a-kind-providers for Hadoop monitoring. They also support VMWare and Citrix Xenserver providers (the latter through Project Kensho). CITTIO has released the agent instrumentation via the open source Project Zeppelin initiative.

Tap In Systems is another player with open source roots that is making a play at cloud monitoring. Their plugins are mostly sourced from the Nagios project.

RightScale has moved early to provide a complete architecture, deployment and management service for enterprise customers looking to migrate their applications to Amazon EC2 for instance. Like Hyperic, they also leverage the collectd plug-ins for system metrics.

Interestingly all the current initiatives around Cloud Monitoring have open source roots. John M Willis has a broader list of possible open source  cloud monitoring tools in his blog here.

It is indeed exciting to see an entire industry take shape. So feel free to send us comments and observations in this area as you see it.