News

Google Stackdriver Monitors Google Cloud and AWS

• By David Ramel
• 03/28/2016

It seems everybody wants to help Amazon Web Services Inc. (AWS) users monitor their cloud deployments. Shortly after IDERA updated its cloud infrastructure monitoring tool by integrating a bevy of new AWS services, rival Google announced its own monitor to track hybrid implementations that span both the Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and Amazon clouds.

"Stackdriver is the first service to include rich dashboards, uptime monitoring, alerting, log analysis, tracing, error reporting and production debugging, across GCP and AWS, in a single, unified offering," the GCP team announced in a blog post last week during the company's GCP NEXT 2016 conference in San Francisco. "This combination significantly reduces the time that teams spend finding and fixing issues in production."

The native monitoring capability lets users track applications spread across GCP and AWS clusters from a single dashboard.

"Strong support for AWS is an essential part of Stackdriver," the GCP team said. "If you're running a Web application behind an Elastic Load Balancer, for example, Stackdriver provides you with a comprehensive view of the health of that cluster with no setup, including configuration information, uptime, recent events and summary metrics as well as per-availability zone and per-host breakdowns."

Google said its new solution -- built on top of the company's own homegrown software -- reduces the number of discrete tools typically needed to find and fix problems. It's also integrated with other GCP solutions such as BigQuery, Cloud Pub/Sub, Cloud Storage and Cloud Datalab.

"Within Stackdriver, you can configure uptime checks that monitor the availability of your application endpoints," Google said. "You can incorporate logs and metrics from your cloud platforms, systems, databases, messaging queues, web servers and application tier into the same monitoring system. You can maintain critical context, such as the timeframe of an issue, as you follow an issue across the monitoring, logging and diagnostics components. For many customers, this will eliminate the need to manually correlate this information across five or more disconnected tools, saving valuable time during incidents and outages."

With the tool now in beta, users can try it for free, after which, Google said, it will keep supporting existing Stackdriver customers and help them move to the production tool when it becomes generally available.