Last May, Google announced that it would work with Stackdriver to integrate the latter’s cloud application monitoring functionality into the Google Cloud Platform. Since then, Google has been integrating and testing the service with select alpha users.
Starting this week, all users of Google’s Cloud Platform will finally have access to the service. On Jan. 13, Google announced beta availability of Google Cloud Monitoring for its cloud platform. Enterprises running in Google’s cloud environment can tap Cloud Monitoring to keep an eye on performance, capacity and uptime of Google Apps Engine, Compute Engine and Cloud SQL. At some point, yet unannounced, Google will make the service available to Amazon Web Services, as well.
Cloud Monitoring introduces an important new capability to the Google cloud environment. As Google Product Manager Dan Belcher noted in a blog post Jan. 13, “Cloud Monitoring streamlines operations by unifying infrastructure monitoring, system/OS monitoring, service/uptime monitoring, charting and alerting into a simple and powerful hosted service.”
Put another way, Cloud Monitoring lets enterprises keep an eye on usage, uptime, performance and overall health of applications and services running in the Google Cloud. With it, businesses will be able to gather and monitor metrics related to capacity and utilization of Cloud Platform services, and test the continued availability and functionality of Web servers and other key cloud resources and troubleshoot latency issues, error rates and balancing issues, Belcher said.
“The Cloud Monitoring Console provides a high-level overview of the health and key metrics for your environment,” he wrote. Google’s official description depicts it as a service that companies can use to create custom dashboards with performance metrics on Google Cloud Platform services, VM instances and open-source components such as MongoDB, Apache, Elasticsearch and Nginx.
Application performance monitoring is not a new concept. Enterprises have used performance-monitoring tools for years to optimize system, software and network resources. However, such tools are still only maturing in the cloud environment, and that helps explain why Google acquired Stackdriver last year for an undisclosed amount. Prior to the acquisition, Stackdriver primarily offered monitoring services for Amazon Web Services. Google has said the company will continue to offer all of its pre-acquisition services so customers can take advantage of its monitoring capabilities, regardless of which cloud service platform they are on.
The beta availability of Cloud Monitoring is one of two Cloud Platform-related announcements that Google has made so far this week. On Tuesday, the company also announced the availability of a Click-to-Deploy install option of Elasticsearch for Google Compute Engine (GCE).
Elasticsearch is a popular open-source real-time search and analytics engine for massive data stacks that more than 10 million people have downloaded and are using presently. It basically enables easier full-text application searches, visualizations and analytics on workloads running in Google’s cloud environment, Google Program Manager Chris Pomeroy wrote in a blog.
The latest announcements build on a series of recent moves by Google to make its cloud services more appealing for enterprise customers—a lucrative market that Google has not been able to tap quite the way it has the consumer segment.
Just last week, the company released a beta version of its Cloud Trace technology, designed to give developers a way to quickly identify and debug performance bottleneck in cloud applications. In December, the company released its Cloud Dataflow software development kit into the open-source community in a bid to spur greater development activity around its big data analytics managed service.