Stackdriver Rolls Out Monitoring-As-A-Service Solution For AWS

The monitoring-as-a-service solution addresses the gap between infrastructure-level analytics offered by AWS cloud options and a growing necessity for application-level analytics, said Izzy Azeri, co-founder of Stackdriver, one of CRN's April Hot Tech Startups. Azeri said that as more companies are moving from dedicated servers to dynamic cloud environments, programs that monitor cloud usage and performance will become more critical.

"It's all about agility," Azeri said in an interview with CRN.

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A recent IDC study estimates the public cloud market to be worth $47.4 billion in 2013, a number the research firm predicts will reach $107 billion in 2017. The study credited the cloud growth to a second phase of migration with customers focused more on innovation rather than previous cost-cutting motives.

The biggest concern from customers, Azeri said, was cloud availability rather than security. Analytics programs help address possible availability problems before they may occur by identifying application bottlenecks and performance issues, he said.

Azeri said there was a lack of analytics available to public cloud users. VMware and Microsoft, he said, offer native analytics tools, but AWS does not. Amazon's CloudWatch only presents infrastructure-level analysis, which misses application-level monitoring that could help proactively address performance issues, Azeri said.

"The rapid rise of new infrastructure platforms and new application architectures have rendered legacy management models and tools obsolete," Stackdriver co-founder Dan Belcher said in a prepared statement. "Cloud-native applications require solutions that handle hosted services, elastic capacity, and distributed architectures effortlessly, and this is what we try to be really good at."

The beta version was first released in April to a select group of customers, both large and small, and since then, Azeri said, the product has been "on fire." Stackdriver currently helps monitor 1 billion metrics a day.

Stackdriver accelerated its growth in response to a rapidly expanding cloud market, leveraging a $10 million in Series B financing led by Flybridge Capital Partners to help finance the project and additional company growth.

The product is available for free on Stackdriver's website for customers to try on a small scale with fewer than 10 resources, with options to upgrade to a professional version with expanded resources.

PUBLISHED SEPT. 18, 2013