GroundWork Unveils OpenStack Open Source Cloud Monitoring Tool

OpenStack, the open source cloud operating system, offers some metering tools as parts of the core OpenStack code. But it lacks a robust performance monitoring framework, which is why GroundWork has rolled out a new solution for tracking the performance of various parts of the OpenStack public and private cloud infrastructure.

The new tool, which is available through GroundWork Cloud Hub, allows OpenStack users to monitor the operating status and performance of Nova compute, Neutron networking and Cinder storage, which are all key parts of the OpenStack infrastructure. The GroundWork solution also monitors the underlying physical hardware.

GroundWork hopes the solution will appeal to enterprises that require more information about how their cloud environments are running than the basic OpenStack modules provide. "Existing monitoring modules built into OpenStack are focused on metering and billing, which is an important, but very different set of capabilities than the availability and performance monitoring that GroundWork offers," said David Dennis, vice president of Marketing and Business Development for GroundWork, in a statement. "OpenStack cloud operators concerned with total cloud capacity, performance tuning and scaling will gain insight into chokepoints at multiple layers of their OpenStack deployments."

Products like this are a signal of the continuing evolution of the OpenStack ecosystem, and a sign that as enterprises move further along the path to OpenStack adoption and production deployment, value-added solutions that provide functionality beyond that of the core OpenStack software will be an important part of the picture—just as they already have been with Apache Hadoop, which is to open source Big Data what OpenStack is to the open source cloud.