News

Ruxit Seeks To Improve CloudWatch Monitoring

• By David Ramel
• 05/05/2015

Ruxit, an application performance management (APM) company, announced it has added the Amazon Web Services Inc. (AWS) cloud to its list of supported technologies.

The Waltham, Mass., startup, which emerged from stealth mode last fall with its artificial intelligence-based monitoring software, said its solution seeks to improve upon existing cloud monitoring tools.

CloudWatch is such a tool, offered by AWS itself. Ruxit said it has integrated its technology with the CloudWatch API and now can offer service superior to CloudWatch and a bevy of other monitoring/analytics offerings listed on the AWS site.

"Other APM vendors offer limited CloudWatch monitoring support, providing you with raw data and ambiguous notifications," said company exec Karolina Ruszkowska in a blog post yesterday. "Only Ruxit delivers powerful CloudWatch analytics that provide deep insights and solutions to performance problems."

Ruxit said system-level performance counters help it enrich CloudWatch-generated metrics and present relevant information about the entire AWS stack in a single dashboard, helping users quickly glean performance insights.

One such insight is the automatic discovery of dynamic EC2 compute instances, for example.

"Ruxit auto-detects AWS resources as well as application services and draws a real-time map of the dependencies between your applications, services, processes, and AWS infrastructure components (EC2, ELB, RDS, S3, and Availability Zones)," Ruszkowska said. "Other tool vendors that have integrated with the CloudWatch API only offer a list of the AWS services detected in your environment."

Another advantage is smart problem notification and root-cause analysis, the company said. Often, alerts don't provide enough information, the company said, such as the significance of an alert. Ruxit seeks to provide more information, such as the number of users affected and how their experience is affected.

Along with Ruxit, other monitoring/analytics offerings listed on the AWS site include Cloudability Pro, CloudCheckr, Cloudlytics, CopperEgg, GoSquared, Librato and New Relic.

The Ruxit entry says a self-starter package is available for a one-month free trial using up to 10 hosts and 2 million user visits, with standard pricing kicking in afterward. A portfolio package with a two-month trial is also available. CloudWatch itself comes in a free tier for basic monitoring and per-usage fees for service above the free tier limits.

The entry lists application performance metrics are available for Java and Node.js, with .NET, PHP and Ruby support on the way.