CloudSleuth Community Aims To Provide Cloud Insight

At the Cloud Expo 2010 conference, Compuware officially launched CloudSleuth, a partner-driven cloud community specifically built to spotlight the performance of the cloud’s “federated infrastructure”.

Partners are the backbone of the CloudSleuth community and play an integral role in collaboration and thought leadership on the site, Compuware said in a statement. Additionally, CloudSleuth gives partners the opportunity to provide third-party verification of the reliability of their services. Initial CloudSleuth partners include: OpSource, CDNetworks, GoGrid, Internet Initiative Japan (IIJ) and Teklinks.

Free community

CloudSleuth is a free community for both cloud service providers and consumers who are considering, building or managing cloud applications. In addition to cloud computing resources and information, CloudSleuth provides real-time insight into the performance and availability of cloud-based applications using measurements from around the world. Compuware launched CloudSleuth on 1 November at the 7th International Cloud Expo Conference in Santa Clara, California.

“Being a CloudSleuth partner is an important part of our commitment to providing unmatched cloud performance,” said John Rowell, chief technology officer and co-founder of OpSource, in a statement. “We look forward to sharing best practices with CloudSleuth members as a part of this rich, growing community.”

“Our commitment to cloud-based network performance and superior customer support set us apart from all other CDNs [content delivery networks],” said Jeff Kim, vice president of Product Management at CDNetworks, in a statement. “We see the CloudSleuth community as an important forum for bringing together providers and consumers for a constructive exchange of ideas. We are happy to be one of the founding CloudSleuth partners and look forward to being an active part of the community.”

“As a pioneer company that has played a major role in the creation of Japan’s Internet industry, we understand the importance of cloud performance monitoring and are excited to be a CloudSleuth partner,” said Kokichi Matsumoto, executive officer and director of marketing at IIJ, also in a statement. “The Internet has become an indispensible infrastructure and cloud computing only adds to that complexity. CloudSleuth will help us stand strong on our commitment to ensure high quality services to our customers as well as give us the opportunity drive thought leadership and contribute to the CloudSleuth community.”

Quality of service management

Effective quality of service (QoS) management requires visibility across the entire application delivery chain, including third-party providers. The CloudSleuth community brings together these service providers, encouraging the free exchange of information and best practices to solve common problems.

“CloudSleuth is a timely offering that will help boost market awareness of public cloud QoS issues,” wrote Laurent Lachal, research director at Ovum, an independent research firm, in the research report titled: “Compuware Boosts Cloud Performance Visibility”. “This [CloudSleuth] is timely because enterprises are becoming increasingly hungry for actual data about the quality of service that public clouds offer.”

CloudSleuth was created because Compuware saw a need in the marketplace – and received interest from customers and partners – for an independent, authoritative source for cloud performance and availability data. Customers and partners also sought a community that encourages the free exchange of information to learn about cloud offerings and to solve common problems around cloud performance.

“CloudSleuth establishes Compuware as the market’s leading cloud performance thought leader,” claimed Mark Hillman, vice president of Strategy and Product Line Management at Compuware, in a statement. “With our unique position in the industry providing outside-in visibility across the entire enterprise-Internet application delivery chain, it makes sense for us to start a community like CloudSleuth. We look forward to an open exchange of ideas, information and resources that will benefit the market.”

New applications

Meanwhile, Compuware has made two applications available:

• Global Provider View continuously monitors a sample application running in each of the major cloud service providers. It allows users to see first-hand, in real-time, how well the sample application performs over time from the perspective of end users around the globe. Global Provider View leverages the Gomez network, including both backbone nodes and Last Mile peer collection points around the world.
• Cloud Performance Analyser is a new application that provides users the ability to explore the impact of Cloud services on web application response times. Cloud Performance Analyser continuously monitors a sample e-commerce web application built with commercial third party services. It allows users to see first-hand, in real-time, how third party services impact application performance from the perspective of end users around the globe. Cloud Performance Analyser leverages the Gomez network, including both backbone nodes and Last Mile peer collection points around the world.