20 Cloud Monitoring and Management Tools Part II: Which Are The Best?

By samdizzy

When Talkin’ Cloud published a list of 20 cloud monitoring tools that we plan to track and cover, readers weighed in with a range of reactions and suggestions. Our goal is to help cloud services providers (CSPs), managed services providers (MSPs) and customers to proactively monitor and manage applications and infrastructure across public and private clouds. So let’s keep that dialog going. Here’s a sampling of the feedback I heard from readers and vendors…

1. Apica: The company offers a web load testing tool, web performance monitoring and more. Apica has a lengthy list of cloud partners — including Amazon Web Services, Rackspace and RightScale.

2. AppDynamics: This tool was in our original article, but Director of Business Development John Fritsch says he would not categorize AppDynamics as strictly monitoring. He notes: “We help customers manage their clouds as well. We monitor the health of apps and pinpoint the root cause issues, but we also enable our customers to manage the performance of their apps by enabling cloud bursting. How does Netflix manage 7000 to 9000 nodes in EC2?  AppDynamics is the answer. “

3. AppNeta: I’ve tracked AppNeta (formerly Apparent Networks) a bit over the past few years, but I had a brain freeze and forgot to mention them in my original post. AppNeta’s tools can monitor hosted, cloud or enterprise services from an end user perspective, a company representative notes. The company originally offered VoIP Network Assessment tools. Now, the company offers video and data solutions — with a particular emphasis on real user monitoring capabilities.

4. Embotics: The company’s V-Commander is developed for IT managers and administrators in mid-sized enterprises who are building or managing private cloud infrastructures, according to a company spokeswoman. I’m intrigued but generally speaking the original list I published was focused more on public cloud monitoring.

5. GroundWork: Another company I know well but failed to mention in that first article. The latest release, GroundWork Moniter Enrterprise 6.7, includes a so-called Cloud Hub capability, according to a company spokeswoman.

6. LabTech Sofware: Better known as an RMM (remote monitoring and management) software provider to MSPs, the company is working on at least two cloud-related projects but I don’t know if I can share details just yet. Stay tuned.

7. Librato: Confession — I had never heard of Librato until VP of Marketing Nik Wekwerth sent me a heads up. The company launched its service about a year ago. The goal: To provide a monitoring platform for any type of time series data. “We do that by being fanatic about our API and building our service around that,” Wekwerth wrote in an email to me. “We collaborate closely with the open source community to ensure that our users can leverage collection tools such as StatsD, CollectD, Sensu, Diamond, FluentD, Logstash, .. and quite a few more.”

8. ScienceLogic: Not on my original list but we just blogged about the company’s multitenant monitoring and management capabilities yesterday.  A company spokeswoman claims that many of the world’s Top 100 MSPs are ScienceLogic customers.

That’s all for now. I am not endorsing the companies above nor did I specifically endorse the 20 cloud monitoring tools in our original article. But I do promise to keep the dialog going. I’m curious to know which of the companies I’ve mentioned build the most enduring, highest-value relationships with CSPs and MSPs in particular.