During the past 2 weeks Amazon made a CloudWatch announcement, Nimsoft announced its Cloud Monitor on Rackspace and (this morning) Rackspace announced the acquisition of CloudKick. Clearly, IaaS providers have realized that while their service makes it possible to provision computing environments with the snap of a finger, many of the teams and even individuals doing this do not have the tools to manage the environments they set up to deliver the desired performance and availability in a reasonably efficient manner.
What we’re seeing here is just the beginning of a trend that will lead to a rich complement of cloud monitoring and management tools. In many cases infrastructure cloud vendors –similar to traditional HW vendors- will provide a set of tools with their cloud offering, but just as there are independent software vendors in the traditional IT market- there will also be independent SaaS vendors offering cloud-agnostic tools for those who prefer not to lock themselves in.
Since one’s ability to manage is only as good as one’s ability to measure, the first generation of tools provide basic monitoring of the cloud infrastructure. Over time, the monitoring will need to become more fine-grained and deal with resource usage and utilization at the level of applications or entire business services, as well as individual users of these. Tools to pro-actively manage resource consumption to increase efficiency and reduce costs, are the logical complement of the monitoring tools.