Google Improves Cloud App Monitoring With The Acquisition Of Stackdriver

Google has announced that the cloud monitoring start-up Stackdriver will become part of its Cloud Platform unit.

Stackdriver, which is headquartered in Boston, has built a monitoring service that allows developers and administrators to benchmark performance, track errors and improve availability of their public cloud apps. This capability is now expected to be integrated into Google’s cloud infrastructure.

Financial details of the acquisition have not been disclosed.

Monitoring-as-a-Service

Stackdriver was founded by former VMware employees Dan Belcher and Izzy Azeri in 2012 after their research suggested that many businesses were struggling with the management of large, distributed applications.

The co-founders wanted to create a single product that would give IT staff better visibility into applications powered by the public cloud through the use of analytics and visualisations. It was meant to replace a number of open-source tools widely used in the industry.

Stackdriver Intelligent Monitoring supports metrics across the entire ‘stack’ including application, system and infrastructure levels. It also provides a policy system to alert users when predefined thresholds are breached, and fixes some of the “commonly recurring AWS issues” automatically.

The service is mainly aimed at environments which have adopted DevOps – a rapid approach to development that breaks barriers between developers and operational staff. It supports Amazon Web Services, Rackspace, Google Cloud Platform and several other cloud service providers.

“Our new colleagues on the Google Cloud Platform team share our passion for helping developers build great products. They also know a thing or two about data visualization, analytics, and cloud computing,” wrote the Stackdriver team. ”We could not be more excited to join forces and innovate together.

“And because Google is fully committed to the cloud, expect us to continue to be as agile and responsive as ever as we begin this next chapter in our journey.”

The start-up says it will continue providing service to all of its current customers regardless of the cloud provider they use. The 14-day trial of the Stackdriver Intelligent Monitoring Pro and Elite remains available on the website, with up to ten servers monitored for free without any time limit.

A post on Cloud Platform blog also suggests that Google will be announcing further investments into its cloud products in the coming months.

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