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Mark Hall

On the Mark

Monitoring online services: What's your CloudStatus?

2 comments

TAGS:Amazon, cloud computing, CloudStatus, EC2, Hyperic, S3
IT TOPICS:Emerging Technology, Enterprise Software & Services, Internet, Networking, SOA & Web Services, Storage

You may avoid putting your data into Amazon.com's S3 cloud-based storage repository; and you also may eschew its E2 on-demand compute services. But your business partners in your supply chain or IT service suppliers may utterly depend on the cloud for their operations. Well, then, in effect, you do, too.

That's why you should take a look at a free monitoring service from Hyperic Inc. of San Franicsco. According to Jon Travis, principal engineer, CloudStatus keeps an eye on, for example, the I/O condition of your applications in Amazon's S3 storage cloud or the connectively of APIs in EC2, among other monitoring functions.

The value, says Travis, is if you have an application that depends on one of Amazon's handful of cloud-based services and there's trouble, CloudStatus can quickly let you know whether the problem is on your end or Amazon's. Just knowing that can save you signficant time during troubleshooting tasks.

Currently, IT operations are slowly mixing online services with those in the corporate data center. So, you and your business partners might not be doing so today. But as Travis observes, "It is foolish to assume people will not be moving to a hybrid environment."

Currently, CloudStatus only monitors the health of Amazon services. But Travis says next on the roadmap are services from Google, such as its AppEngine service.

And don't forget, it's free.

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Hybrid Environments

Submitted by Steve Henning on August 18, 2008 - 4:22 P.M.

I think the mention of hybrid environments by the author is very timely. Clearly, there are going to be many types of hybrid environments that IT teams are going to have to deal with in the near future. In fact, they already are dealing with many. One example is hybrid virtual/physical environments supporting mission critical business services. As companies look to consolidate servers, many service components (web servers for example) are being virtualized. Some components (due to demanding I/O requirements for example) will always reside on physical servers. When a complex business service spans multiple technology silos, some physical and some virtual, it becomes much more difficult to manage the performance of the overall service. This is why real-time analytics solutions that can automate the root cause analysis that is so manual and time consuming currently are coming to the the forefront. Companies like Amazon that are providing cloud computing resources should certainly be looking into these solutions as the downtimes currently being experienced are scaring potential customers and delaying mass adoption.

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Another Nimbus

Submitted by KobyB on August 15, 2008 - 4:13 A.M.

"IT operations are slowly mixing online services with those in the corporate data center" is a quote from
Mark Hall's article above describing a potential components that form a cloud.
There is another cloud that we already use today, but it is not called a cloud yet. I mean the mixing of data in central data-centers and those on distributed computers on the SAME network.
There are not too many tools that give an idea about the usage of this cloud. LaceWatcher PRO is one of those tools (Free for small networks) that give you as a side benefit the basic idea of the usage of your "Cloud". It is available from http://www.disklace.com/SysAdmin.html

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