Hyperic Launches Industry’s First Cloud Management Service

By VSM News Staff
published: Tuesday, June 24 2008

CloudStatus Provides Free, Real-Time Performance Information for Amazon Web Services.

Velocity Conference-San Francisco, Calif.-June 23, 2008 - Open source web infrastructure management provider Hyperic Inc., (Velocity Booth #6), today launched the beta of Hyperic CloudStatus (www.cloudstatus.com), the first service to provide an independent view of the health and performance of the most popular cloud on the Internet, Amazon Web Services (AWS). The new service gives businesses that use the cloud the perspective they need to determine the cause of performance changes in their cloud-based web applications. CloudStatus beta is a free service built on the Hyperic HQ management platform and will expand to include additional cloud providers this summer.

CloudStatus provides a comprehensive measure of service availability, latency and throughput for cloud-based infrastructure and application services. Users can drill down for detailed, service-specific metrics on any of the monitored offerings. The initial beta release provides metrics for AWS, including Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Simple Storage Service (S3), SimpleDB (SDB), Simple Queue Service (SQS) and Flexible Payment Service (FPS). These metrics are specific to each individual service and are designed to answer the questions most often asked by the developers and administrators that rely on the services for their business.

Cloud computing is the biggest technology shift taking place in the market today. The cloud offers companies access to on-demand, scalable IT resources from reputable vendors such as Amazon. However, companies that rely on the cloud don't get a free pass when their web applications go down simply because someone else is hosting the infrastructure.  It is this gap in manageability prevents many businesses from moving business-critical services to the cloud. To trust their businesses fully to the cloud, companies need a way to monitor it and understand how its availability affects their operations.  They need to determine "is there a problem in my application, or is the cloud?" Until CloudStatus, this hasn't existed.

 "Few management vendors have tackled the question of what it means to monitor and manage cloud computing. The potential to use the cloud as a base-layer and extension of existing IT is looking very attractive right now," said Michael Cote, Redmonk analyst. "Adding in management support would make it even more so, and attractive as broad IT resource. So it's nice to see Hyperic beginning to support cloud computing by providing monitoring of Amazon Web Services."

Built and operated by Hyperic, CloudStatus is a hosted service.  It will continually be updated as cloud services evolve. Planned enhancements include more detail on the measured Amazon services, personalization of CloudStatus feeds and their integration with existing Hyperic HQ monitoring installations, as well as monitoring of cloud services from additional providers.

"Cloud computing dramatically improves the ability for businesses to deliver new services quickly, and to scale alongside demand," said Javier Soltero, CEO of Hyperic. "However, while the cloud may speed the time to market, it give companies a shortcut around the fact that if a business depends on technology, it must shoulder the responsibility of ensuring the overall health and availability of that technology. That job can't be outsourced to the cloud. New tools are needed to accomplish this, and Hyperic's CloudStatus is paving the way."

Hyperic is the only provider to offer complete monitoring and management for web applications on premise, through virtualization, or in the cloud. Its open, modular architecture first demonstrated success with distributed systems through its support of virtualization, Hyperic is building on this expertise in by extending its reach into the cloud.

The company already provides web infrastructure management for vendors and customers of cloud services including Mosso, Coghead, Contegix, and more.

For more information on the business problem and how CloudStatus will help bridge the management gap for companies with services in the cloud, download Hyperic's white paper on the topic here: http://download.hyperic.com/pdf/cloudstatus.pdf.

About Hyperic Inc.

Hyperic (www.hyperic.com) provides open source monitoring and management software for all types of web applications, whether hosted in the cloud or on premise. Its software reduces the workload for operations teams at the world's biggest web companies, including CNET Networks, hi5 Networks, Contegix, Rackspace's Mosso, and more. Its award-winning Hyperic HQ software auto-discovers and updates asset inventory and allows operations teams to quickly pinpoint, correct, and prevent problems at every major layer-including hardware, networks, virtualization, cloud environments and applications. Founded in 2004 and headquartered in San Francisco, California, Hyperic is a private company funded by Accel Partners and Benchmark Capital.