Last week, Google released the Beta version of the Google Cloud Monitoring platform. Derived from its May 2014 acquisition of Stackdriver, Google Cloud Monitoring enables users to obtain insight into the performance of Google App Engine, Google Compute Engine, Cloud Pub/Sub, and Cloud SQL. As noted in a blog post by Google’s Dan Belcher, Google Cloud Monitoring delivers integrated monitoring of infrastructure, systems, uptime, trend analysis and alerts by way of a SaaS application. In addition, Google Cloud Monitoring enables users to create aggregations of select resources for monitoring and leverage dashboards that elaborate on metrics such as latency, capacity, uptime and other performance-related metrics. The platform also enables users to configure alerts specifying the achievement of designated metrics as well as endpoint checks notifying users about the lack of availability of APIs, web servers and other “internet-facing resources.” The beta release of Google Cloud Monitoring comes after months of preparation that culminated in the ability of the Stackdriver-based cloud monitoring platform to support the needs of Amazon Web Services customers as well as Google Cloud Platform customers alike. The release also follows soon upon Google’s announcement of details of Google Cloud Trace, a Beta platform that allows users to analyze remote procedure calls (RPCs) created by a Google App Engine-based application to understand latency distributions between different RPCs and “performance bottlenecks” more generally. The larger significance of the Beta release of Google Cloud Monitoring is that it delivers a monitoring tool that can monitor both Google Cloud Platform and Amazon Web Services infrastructures, whereas Amazon’s CloudWatch, for example, is dedicated solely to monitoring the AWS platform. For now, though, the product underscores Google’s commitment to building its IaaS infrastructure as exemplified by two Beta releases within the space of the early weeks of 2015.
Cloud Computing Today 