It is great to see the affirmation of our vision towards global application transparency being adopted by cloud providers.  Google has put itself on the right track, but there is much more work to be done.

Specifically, centralized management, alerting, and visualization of applications is important.  Many App Engine apps are built in a heterogenous fashion (reliant on external web-services or facilities), which requires a different type of dashboard to see all components side-by-side.  Hyperic HQ is able to pull application-specific metrics from App Engine and render them along-side data from the rest of your infrastructure.  Google’s interest is not in performance management across your infrastructure, but the metrics which they capture in their environment is exceptional, which is why we would call on them to make their dashboard data open and accessible via web-services.  Users with heterogenous applications must be easily able to correlate performance issues from different parts of their environment.

The next year is going to be very exciting for cloud platforms, and we’re proud to be among the essential tools that developers need.  Keep your eyes on cloudstatus.com next year — the cloud is about to get … less  cloudy.

– Jon

Now past its 5th year of production usage, it’s incredibly cool for me to see how this product has evolved from what we conceived back in 2002. With the help of hundreds of customers and thousands of users, we’ve been able to stay focused on two key themes that drive everything we build into our product:

1- the desire to build products that help people manage large scale web environments
2- the desire to build products that do not create new problems while attempting to solve old ones

HQ 4.0 represents a big step forward for both of those themes. HQ 4.0 provides unique levels of visibility into every aspect of web applications and then uses that visibility to offer insight into diagnosing complex issues from virtualization layers all the way up the stack, forecast capacity requirements, and helping operations teams get reliable, detailed notification of problems before they create a crisis. HQ 4.0 also delivers these benefits alongside a whole new set of automation capabilities including extended, open API’s, UI automation workflows, and automatic agent upgrading. In a time when the demands of data center operations teams increase while resources are scarce, we want to make sure our technology helps people manage more with less.

4.0 also represents Hyperic’s continued commitment to innovation in the management space. 4.0 introduces the worlds first web application management solution designed and packaged natively for the Amazon AWS cloud. HQ for AWS is packaged as an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) which leverages technology like Elastic Block Storage to provide a fully cloud-enabled solution that can be deployed as easily as any other EC2 AMI out there. It also provides the first cloud-friendly management agent which allows users to manage cloud based virtual machines securely and reliably from either inside the cloud, or from HQ 4.0 installations inside your datacenter. Our good friend John Willis wrote up his impressions on the importance of this new development in HQ’s architecture on his blog.

CloudStatus.com, our free cloud monitoring service is actually built on HQ 4.0 and has been running inside EC2 since inception. We use this experience to build the coolest, richest monitoring and management product for companies looking to deploy production web applications inside AWS. Over the next few weeks we’ll be announcing innovative pricing plans for users of this HQ 4.0 for AWS and additional management features aimed at letting HQ 4.0 users leverage the benefits of all Amazon Web Services as part of their applications.

Thanks again to all our developers, customers, and community members for helping us create this very exciting release.

“A recent IDC survey of IT executives, CIOs, and their line of business (LOB) colleagues shows that cloud services are ‘crossing the chasm’ and entering a period of widespread adoption. Moreover, IDC expects the cloud adoption trend to be amplified by the current financial crisis. The cloud model offers a much cheaper way for businesses to acquire and use IT – in an economic downturn, the appeal of that cost advantage will be greatly magnified. This advantage is especially important for small and medium businesses, a sector that will be key target in any plan for recovery.”

The report goes on to cite that spending on IT cloud services will triple in the next 5 years, reaching $42 billion and capturing 25% of IT spending growth in 2012 and nearly a third of growth the following year. With he overall IT market spend being $383 billion, this kind of growth validates that the opportunity deserves the attention it is getting.

IDC is also first to point out that its not just cloud vendors – the Amazons, Googles and Salesforces of the world will not get this pie exclusively. In fact, just as important are all the offerings that support the development, delivery and deployment of those consuming these services, which is the market Hyperic is in – bridging the gap for monitoring between the datacenter and the cloud

In fact, in the survey, two of the top 4 demands are areas that Hyperic is solving:

CloudStatus – providing real-time visibility into the health and availability of cloud providers, giving users a third-party perspective into SLAs

Hyperic HQ – providing real-time trending, analysis and control capabilities to maintain the performance of your web applications. This can run the gamut of possibilities from helping to improve the performance of your application, to making critical infrastructure architecture decisions quickly (e.g., spawning new virtualized resources or shifting loads from the cloud to your datacenter and vice-versa based on demand or performance changes).

I am sure there will continue to be pundits of all kinds of caliber, and while cloud computing may seem at times too much like inflated marketing-speak, the delivery model and innovative services that are powering this growth are unquestionable. Its nice to have some independent analyst numbers to back it up. Thanks Frank & all the rest of the IDC team for sharing this.

Maybe I’m an idiot, but I have no idea what anyone is talking about. What is it? It’s complete gibberish. It’s insane.

And of course, Richard Stallman, founder of the Free Software Foundation, who told the Guardian his opinion of cloud computing:

It’s stupidity. It’s worse than stupidity: it’s a marketing hype campaign.

I wasn’t surprised at Larry’s reaction, as the more classical IT enterprise that his business serves is by definition going to be a late adopter. I was surprised at Stallman, however.

His arguments went for a general theme of cloud computing being too much risk for the CIO. Funny, as open source suffered the same start. Open source weathered many years of questions on what it is, how could businesses accept the indemnification risks, and of course how mature were the products being developed under its banner.

Hyperic has embraced both. We open sourced our software in 2006, and have roots in open source starting in the nineties from Netscape to Apache from our founders. It’s also no secret that Hyperic, and its users, are early adopters of the cloud. We’ve been part of this trend unfolding, visibly so with our CloudStatus service.

We didn’t do either because they were cool, or for any desire to be some sort of fashionable IT software company. We did it because it makes sense for our users, and both are an approach to building more affordable, useful, and scalable IT.

Open source is a business model for us to work with our users – they are building modern web-driven applications and need better monitoring and management for these dynamic, custom-built environments. Since they are web-afficianados when they have a problem they consult, that’s right – the web. They do a Google search, they look for how others solved it – and they look for the straightest line to applying the same solutions to their unique situation. They want self-service. They want quick results. Open source lets them download and use the software without unneccesary limits on time, scale or its application. Once our software establishes its value, if there is more opportunity to help them more, we have an educated, successful, in-house champion to help work through the sale. We save a lot on the cost of sales and support this way. The customers in turn save time and money in completing their solution. Open source is way to package our products and services to ease adoption so everyone benefits.

Cloud computing is much the same. Cloud computing is a system of technologies and services that have commoditized IT to make it more readily consumable, scalable, and cost-effective for everyone. It has leveraged the innovation and expertise of Internet giants like Amazon and Google, and is making it accessible to anyone with the next big idea. It removes the investment in physical and human resources to scale up a business. It affords more folks to try their ideas and vet its worth in the market. It also affords these same businesses to scale out as quickly as their business demands. Cloud computing, same as open source, is a way to package products and services to ease adoption so everyone benefits.

Open source was sexy because it was toppling the big guys by eroding their market shares. They *mostly* now all get that it is a better way to do business with a larger, more unpredictable market that prefer to leverage open components to construct their own inventions.

Cloud computing is sexy because it taps into the entrepreneur’s “CIO envy”, as the451group’s Rachel Chalmers called it when we last spoke. This “CIO envy” channels the aspirations for anyone to be the next Facebook. It removes the need for deep pockets and a deep technical bench to scale up their business to go to market, and scale out to capitalize on customer demand. It will come in all shapes and sizes, from infrastructure services to software application services to development platform services and all the surrounding implementation support services that typically surround IT. Regardless of the form, its purpose will be the same – to reduce IT complexity to create scalable, building blocks that can be consumed and paid for based on real usage.

In short, the term may evolve to become not as sexy, but the concept, just like open source, is too big and attractive to ignore.

The latest release of Hyperic HQ, 3.2.5, is live and chock full of the good stuff. Notable changes and additions include: Changes in a platform’s fully qualified domain name are autodiscovered, the new JMX console allows you to display and control MBeans and troubleshoot JVM issues, script actions for alerts, metric display auto-reset from email and new escaltion pause options.

• Download it now!

CloudStatus Supports Google App Engine

Google App Engine is the second significant cloud service to be monitored by CloudStatus, which launched in June with support for Amazon Web Services. Hyperic’s free CloudStatus service delivers real-time, independent insight into the health and performance of the App Engine, giving users a greater level of confidence in the reliability, availability and scalability of web applications running on Google’s infrastructure.

• Learn more
• Try it out!

Hyperic opens UK office

• You heard right, Hyperic has just opened operations in London. Not London, Ontario, mind you. London, England. So, you know, tally ho!

Upcoming and Archived HyperCASTs

Be sure to tune in to this month’s amazing and informative webinars:

• Hyperic HQ 4.0 Beta Program – Do you want to get a sneak peek at Hyperic HQ 4.0, while earning fame and prizes? Praise and accolades? Envy and respect from your friends and family? This HyperCAST will show you how to get all that and more with the all new Hyperic Beta Program. It’s fun, it’s free, and it just might change the world of monitoring and management.
• Choose the next HyperCAST! We know you’re dying to know how to optimize or configure something or other. Everyone has something they’d like to better hack. So you tell us what our next webinar ought to be. Better plugins through HQU? How to make the perfect Manhattan? If we choose your idea, we’ll send you a free parting gift. It might be a year’s supply of Turtle Wax, or a trip to the Olympics the next time they’re in Beiling. But it’s probably more like some Hyperic branded merchandise.

If you missed or want to re-watch any of our HyperCASTs, we have built a library of archives. Some of the recent ones include:

• The Citrix XenServer Plugin
• The Hyperic Roadmap

Hyperic HQ Iterations for 4.0

Tick tock. The dawn of 4.0 is about to break. To get a glimpse:

• Hyperic HQ 4.0 Iterations
• Hyperic HQ 4.0 Roadmap

Plugin of the Month

• Congratulations to Graeme Dunlop! Graeme wins plug in of the month for August 2008 for sending us code fixes for our JMX measurement plugin tutorial. Thanks Graeme!

Best of the Blog

• Meters, breakers, and other cloud analogies. “Software, regardless of who is developing it, always fails” says Hyperic CEO Javier Soltero, “what role do providers have in providing management technology to their customers?”

Hyperic in the News

• Om Malik is the first to post on the CloudStatus + Google App Engine announcement!
• No cloud computing for Dell case closed.
• Business Week recognizes open source at Red Hat convention.

Hyperic Professional Services

• Did you know that Hyperic sells Professional Services like Advanced Troubleshooting and Implementation or Upgrade assistance? Well, it’s true. If you’re interested in hearing more, contact sales.

Amazon AWS Loves CloudStatus.com, Here’s The Proof (Hyperic Video 2/2) from Toon Vanagt on Vimeo.

My favorite is Virtualization.com’s for a few reasons:

1. Trav still had the mohawk in that video. Yes, people – the girlfriend won, and he is now back to the short haired Nebraska boy his momma knew well.
2. A couple typos turned Javier into a Xavier and Trav got promoted to a CTO!
3. Last, and definitely mostly – the videographer, Toon Vanaght managed to catch Amazon’s CTO Werner Vogels the next day at Structure and get it on tape that Amazon thinks CloudStatus is important and good for their customers!

We saw internal server errors coming from the majority of our S3 and SQS monitoring agents. In addition, we experienced other problems with EC2 (many ec2 zombies being created) that may be related.

The outage has lasted nearly 5 hours, and Amazon is still working hard at rectifying the issues.

CloudStatus: Performance metrics and health
For discussion, please visit: CloudStatus Forums
For Amazon’s status report: AWS Status

It looks like Google Apps suffered a brief outage this morning. How did we find out? Well, from Valleywag of course. After all, the best place to get the status of key cloud based applications and infrastructure is also the same place where you can find out the latest gossip about the valley. Seems natural, right? No thanks.

More proof that for all the benefits the cloud offers, it’s still just one lousy powerstrip/drunk ops guy/evil hax0r away from being just a 500 error page with an old logo on it. Good thing we’re working on adding Google’s cloud services to CloudStatus.com! Stay tuned…

Hyperic is pleased to extend the capabilities of Hyperic HQ with cloud monitoring. Use CloudStatus to monitor your Amazon AWS cloud performance.

• Part the Clouds
• Learn More
  

Clouds Are No Substitute For Competence

Hyperic CEO, Javier Soltero explains the cloudy nature of distributed computing during his Velocity keynote. When there’s an outage, and there will be, is it your application? Or the Cloud? Javier unveils CloudStatus.com and takes the audience on a test drive.

• Watch it at BlipTV
• Check out CloudStatus

Velocity Conference Recap

The Velocity Conference was a sold out show with many of the sessions being standing room only. We met face-to-face with many of our customers and community members, some of which came all the way from Europe for the event.

• Velocity Conference Videos

NEW Developer Guide For HQU

If you’re a user, developer or partner looking to customize HQ, then you need to check out the HQU developer’s guide. Learn how to extend the HQ portal, automate HQ functions and integrate HQ with other sytems. It’s totally groovy.

• Download the HQU Developer’s Guide

Upcoming and Archived HyperCASTs

News from the future! Get a glimpse of tomorrow’s Hyperic, today! RSVP for our Product Roadmap HyperCAST:

• The Hyperic Roadmap and YOU! – Chip Witt, Product Manager and Charles Lee, VP of Engineering, July 8, 11am PDT / 18:00 UTC

If you’ve never seen any of our HyperCASTs, we have built a library of archives. Some of the recent ones include:

• Building HQU Plugins
• VMware Management

Plugin of the Month – Cisco Content Services Switch

This Hyperic HQ plugin monitors Cisco CSS Interface and Cisco CSS Service of a Cisco Content Services Switch with SNMP. Check for availability throughput and utilization. The plug in was developed by Ernst-Jan Verhoeven and Aljoscha Vorst at the University of Amsterdam, and AmsterDAM it’s a fine plugin.
(disclaimer: we cannot vouch or provide support for this plugin)

Congrats to Ernst-Jan and Aljoscha! As a reward, we will provide them with a $250 gift certificate.

• Read about the plugin
• Download the plugin

Hyperic HQ Iterations for 4.0

Our engineers have been publishing iterations-pre-alpha versions of code-on SourceForge.net. If you’re very curious and love to tinker and hack on developmental code, take a look:

• Hyperic HQ 4.0 Iterations
• Hyperic HQ 4.0 Roadmap

Best of the Blog

• It’s a Wrap. – Stacey Schneider gives us a blog’s-eye view of Velocity.
• Obscured by Clouds – Just in time for our CloudStatus launch, Google Apps Went Down.
• “Hello, World!” – Jeremy Hogan joins us as our new Director of Community Management, promptly releases belated newsletter.

Hyperic in the News

Lots of news about CloudStatus, some of the highlights:

• A Window on the Cloud from GigaOM
• Nik Cubrilovic wrote about it at TechCrunch IT
• Michael Coté opined at Red Monk and John M Willis agreed
• InformationWeek ran the news as well
• CloudStatus blipped onto O’Reilly Radar

Of course, also exciting was the launch of CloudStatus – and Javier’s keynote. To see him in action, check out this video:

For a first year event, to bring in that many people is quite a feat – so congrats to the entire O’Reilly team that put it together. As many know, there were two other events that also “competed” for the same web ops audience’s attention this week here in the Bay Area. Structure 08 is going on today, and Cloud Camp was last night. However, in speaking with the O’Reilly staff last night – I shared that I think it was a good thing. The confluence of events in the same general vicinity made it so many folks were able to travel from Europe and around the country because there was not one, but three events here that they couldn’t miss.

As the world moves to cloud computing, service level insight gets foggier. Don’t let your performance get lost in the clouds.

www.cloudstatus.com