Rackspace Launches Tool to Monitor the Health of Clouds

Rackspace has launched a new cloud tool designed for businesses to verify the proper operation of the technology infrastructure from anywhere. Rackspace Cloud Monitoring has just seen the light to help any company in the process of monitoring the health of their infrastructure in the cloud. The technology comes from the acquisition of Cloudkick in 2010.

The tool allows evaluating the performance of any technology resource connected to the Internet (via an IP or URL) if not protected by a firewall. Customers can interact with the system through an API or a control panel all in the cloud.

“This is something that doesn’t just work at Rackspace, but it works across services that run anywhere. So it could be one of our competitors or on-premise. Everything that has an IP address we can monitor,” said John Engates, CTO at Rackspace.

Rackspace said the company’s newly developed application programming interface (API) built on node.js is flexible enough to work with hybrid computing world with infrastructure on-premise, private clouds, and public clouds located at different places.

“We want to make sure customers have the freedom, choice and flexibility to do what they need to do on their own terms, and not be dictated to,” said Engates. “The API is the real power behind the service. It gives customers not just a user interface or front end, but also access to the monitoring engine that Rackspace uses behind the scene.”

One of the main features of this tool is to monitor the status of the clouds to warn of possible falls or changes in the performance of resources, so that administrators can take action and avoid these problems.

Additionally, Rackspace Cloud Monitoring can configure policies to scale cloud services in the event that there is an increase in demand. Going forward in future upgrades, administrator can expand the capabilities of the tool to be able to individually monitor processors, disks, memory assets to custom applications and service metrics.

Rackspace is the early adopter of open source technology, a trend that is growing very rapidly across organizations. The company recently introduced Open Cloud platform based on OpenStack for private, public or hybrid clouds.