Google Cloud Monitoring Service Enters Public Beta

Looking for a cloud monitoring tools for Google Cloud or AWS? Google (GOOG) has officially launched a public beta of Google Cloud Monitoring, a service that lets organizations see the performance metrics, capacity and uptime data for apps that use Google App Engine, Compute Engine, Cloud Pub/Sub and Cloud SQL.

The service also can monitor open source apps that run on these services such as MySQL, Apache, MongoDB and others. Google Cloud Monitoring comes from Google’s acquisition cloud monitoring service, Stackdriver. Google released its first iteration of the service, which also has roots in monitoring Amazon Web Services (AWS) as a private alpha test in June 2014. The plan is to enable the service to again monitor AWS, but no time frame was given for that. Meanwhile, Amazon Web Services already offers its own cloud monitoring service, Amazon CloudWatch.

Google said in a blogpost that the service streamlines operations by unifying infrastructure monitoring, system/OS monitoring, service/uptime monitoring and charting and alerting.

Google Cloud Monitoring lets organizations define their own alerting rules for each application, including email, SMS and more. Alerts can be set on individual metrics and thresholds or on aggregate group performance, according to Google

The service can be used to monitor overall health of the cloud stack environment, usage and utilization patterns and capacity, uptime, performance and incidents, according to Google.

Cloud monitoring would certainly be one of the top requirements of any born-in-the-cloud IT service provider. And the more agnostic such a service is, the better. The question is, will we see these cloud monitoring options extend beyond the cloud to also monitor on-premise IT? Or will IT service providers and managed service providers (MSPs) be working with a handful of key tools instead of just one tool for the foreseeable future?