We’re helping companies move faster, especially startups and their developers. Cloud computing is a big part of this. How else could you stand up 1,000 new machines at a time or accommodate demand for a hot new app? It’s exciting for us to see and support these new, cutting-edge applications at scale.

But no application is perfect. Things can look great in development but go sideways in production. Issues pop up and it’s a constant game of whack-a-mole to get them fixed.

Development, Test and Production used to be a long cycle, cascading from one functional group to another with plenty of opportunity for quality assurance and in-line fixes before things went live. We’re seeing that change though. When speed is at a premium, everything gets compressed.

We’re taking this change seriously here at Rackspace and are committed to offering better, more powerful tools for developers.

Our recent acquisition of Exceptional Cloud Services is another step to filling out developer toolkits. The Exceptional service provides critical error reporting on web services and Airbrake collects error data from other applications and rolls it up into a single view.

This kind of visibility is critical when you’re at Silicon Valley speed. The explosion of data, users and interdependencies make this kind of awareness a fundamental requirement. It’s no surprise then that developers here are on these services like hipsters on fixies.

Going into production is the make or break moment for startup developers. When users start hitting the system things are most likely to go wrong. Exceptional Cloud Services will help us help customers during this critical time. It will allow them to focus on what’s important: working on the app, not running the database or endlessly hunting errors. It will keep the feedback loop tight, and help customers understand the inevitable errors. In short, it will keep developers focused on what matters most: getting traction, getting scale and accelerating their business..

This offering will roll into our suite of tools to help developers manage applications better. Our aim is to better enable our customers to quickly build amazing things and have fun doing it.

We recognize that startups have unique needs. Speed, agility, rapid cycling and feedback loops are the currency of the Valley, and we’re confident that the Exceptional team’s innovations will our customers keep the pedal pushed right down to the metal.

Continuous Development To Innovate Faster

About five months ago, we offered our customers early access to Cloud Monitoring. Now, it is generally available to all. Throughout the early access program, we have made improvements to Cloud Monitoring to shape it into a rock-solid foundation on which to innovate. Here is a taste of some of the changes since we opened the Early Access Program:

• There are hundreds of Cloud Monitoring deployments in production
• Cloud Servers with a Managed Service level have used Cloud Monitoring since June
• All new checks for Managed Cloud use Cloud Monitoring
• The ability to detect string changes and alert you to them, which is very useful for security monitoring
• Numerous new APIs to facilitate monitoring various resources

This velocity is possible because of coordination across all monitoring zones, and the tool that helps us best leverage that is dreadnot, the open source technology that enables continuous deployment.

Ease Of Management With New Control Panel

Another giant leap forward we’ve made is integrating Cloud Monitoring into the new Rackspace Cloud Control Panel, the slick new cloud management interface. This integration puts us on a path to continue iterating and improving the UI experience.

Here is the simple check creation widget. This is a quick and easy way to bootstrap creating Checks and Alarms in the Cloud Monitoring API. This will also help teach you about the different concepts by bootstrapping some of the configuration in the UI. This appears on the Server details page, and is showing the creation of a ping check:

Check out some examples of creating a HTTP monitor. The process is simple to set up and easy to maintain.

After adding the check you can see the different checks and their corresponding statuses. This is a clean view that gives you all the information at your fingertips.

New Features And APIs

Here’s a quick snapshot of other new features we’ve recently added to Cloud Monitoring:

• Alarm Examples API – Having trouble configuring an alarm? This API will help describe examples and how to best use them.
• Status Interpolation – String messages give a human feel to an alert; substitute place-holders for the point in time value.
• Enhanced emails – Observations are included in the email you receive on state changes.
• Traceroute – Run a traceroute from our monitoring zones. Get unprecedented visibility on networking issues, view the docs here.
• Test existing check – Test an existing check, execute it in-line and get a result back.
• Cascading entity deletion – Save time by just deleting the entity and having all children objects delete with it.
• Type checking on alarms – Get notified when you try to use incorrect metric names.
• Add a previous operator – Compare values against the previous time period. This is powerful for detecting string changes or growing numeric values.

Check out the release notes for details on other features.

Developer Center

We also have a new developer center, which is one-stop shop for all your technical needs. Check to the following content to get started.

• Getting Started Guide
• API Developer Guide
• Release Notes
• FAQs

And if you are looking for a more advanced integration, check out

• Chef integration
• Ruby bindings (fog)
• Python bindings (libcloud)
• Raxmon CLI

Also, please visit the Control Panel to configure monitors. This will give you great examples of some of the capabilities of the monitoring system.

What’s Coming?

We’ve invested a lot in building a world-class monitoring system for the cloud. And we’ll continue to grow and add more sophisticated features. Here’s a sample of what’s coming:

• Agent – This is incredibly important for a number of reasons: first and foremost, it opens up Rackspace Cloud Monitoring to be able to monitor anything on the host, from standard CPU, disk and memory, to custom metrics from application servers to MySQL. To learn more about the technology behind the agent, check out the presentation on Virgo or forum on compiling the agent.
• Metrics, metrics, metrics… – The single most important thing is right around the corner.
• Aggregation – Look at sets of data versus individual points.
• Summarization – Help get more than just data; get recommendations and summarizations

If you are interested in a preview of the agent, please fill out this short form.

Stay tuned for more features. We’ll update you as they come.

Sign Up Now!

Sign up for Rackspace Cloud Monitoring now. The whole team is really excited to get feedback about current and future functionality.  You have a seat at the table to make this product awesome so please sound off on our feedback site.

Some of the highlights of capabilities available during the early access program include API-driven monitoring; availability in five data centers – ORD, LON, DFW, IAD and HKG – and the ability to provision a check on any one; the ability to send an email or get a webhook when something goes critical, and the ability to change where the alert goes for warnings and recovery; IPv4 and IPv6 remote Internet based checks for monitoring services; historic APIs for status changes to figure out if something went bad; simulation of alerts that enable you to test a configuration before you deploy; and the use of Alarm Language, a flexible language to describe thresholding.

We’ve made a lot of progress these last few months and I’d like to recognize and thank all of the beta participants. Your feedback is and has been invaluable and has helped shape the next generation of cloud monitoring. Please keep the feedback coming!

What is Cloud Monitoring Early Access Program?

While the Cloud Monitoring private beta was available to only a limited number of customers; the Cloud Monitoring Early Access Program makes it available to anybody who wants to access the next generation of API driven monitoring. Cloud Monitoring is available at no charge for a limited time.

Here are some important things you should know about the Cloud Monitoring Early Access Program:

• Early Access does not include service level agreements (SLAs).
• Initial configuration of Cloud Monitoring is accomplished via the Cloud Monitoring API by following the getting started guide.
• Rackspace support will be able to help troubleshoot the API if you experience problems.
• If Cloud Monitoring identifies an issue with your Rackspace products, contact support through your normal channels. The support organization will help find the root of the problem.

What progress have we made throughout the private beta?

We’ve spent a lot of time getting the next generation agent ready for external use, and it’s coming together rapidly. Using the lessons learned during the private beta, we’ve been able to create a better, more iterative agent that will deliver on the promises of more insight, a more open development process and a higher quality system. We’ve based a lot of the technology on the Luvit project, which is taking Lua, an excellent embeddable language, and pushing it to be the agent platform for Cloud Monitoring.

We’ve also improved the documentation – we have a getting started guide with excellent examples of how to use Cloud Monitoring and a developer’s guide that details the features that are available.

Our decision to open source DreadNot and utilize it for our continuous delivery model has led to approximately 300 releases in the past three months, which include a variety of features and fixes, such as:

• A new test notification endpoint /test-notification
• The ability to test an existing notification with /notifications/ntFOO/test
• The addition of JSONP support to the API
• Rate limiting and including the limits in the header
• Inclusion of rate limits with the object limits on the /limits handler
• Better type checking for the alarm subsystem
• Detection of missing metrics, and automatically outputting a failed state
• A more than a 10 times increase in the speed of the overview
• Unifying the language around the different states in the system
• New access control headers so you can use the API cross domain from the browser
• The addition of a label to the alarm field
• Unification of the webhook payload to be the same across alarm change history and webhook payload
• The addition of previous_state to the webhook field
• An added status field, which is the human readable message describing the status of an alarm
• And a lot more

You can read about the new features and fixes in greater depth in the official Cloud Monitoring release notes.

This is just the beginning, and we hope to continue and increase the velocity. In the meantime please join the Cloud Monitoring Early Access Program, get to know more about the product and let us know if you have any more feedback. We’d really like to spend some serious time with our customers and figure out how we can make their lives better through monitoring and alerting.

And as always, we are hiring!

From the inception of Cloudkick, we’ve followed one paramount goal: make the lives of system administrator easier.  We feel our Cloud Monitoring product meets that goal and are seeking beta testers to help us improve it all the way to general availability.

Please note: this beta is API only; control panel integration is planned for 2012.

Cloud Monitoring Overview

What is Monitoring?  Monitoring helps a user keep track of the overall health of an application.  There are a number of different techniques, ranging from making sure a web address is responding to http requests to ensuring a port is sending the correct banner as defined by a specific protocol.  Internet service monitoring in general is a must-have to ensure business continuity.

What is Rackspace Cloud Monitoring? It is an API driven cloud service built for infrastructure monitoring.  It offers a simple yet powerful feature-set, allowing extreme flexibility in configuration and execution.  Starting with the private beta, we are offering 5 datacenters (monitoring zones) from which polling services will be available.

How does it work? If you are familiar with traditional monitoring tools this system is similar in a number of ways. This product checks the health of a variety of internet-based services.  Very simply, we help answer the question, “Is my service up and running?”  To do that, we have two simple objectives:

1. Alert you (the site or application owner) before your customer knows
2. Take measures against allowing the system to go down in the first place.

We’ve taken careful measures to ensure we are processing events as fast as possible; and do our best to deliver those alerts in a failure scenario, in a timely manner.

Why use Rackspace Cloud Monitoring?

We offer unique features and configurable controls:

● Monitor various components – Monitor websites and URLs (for link inaccuracies, missing content, 404 pages, max response time etc.), ports and protocols to ensure services are behaving the way you need them to.

● Multiple Monitoring Zones Perspective – Monitor a single resource from many different monitoring zones.  With a mixed perspective you control the consistency policy: SINGLE, QUORUM, or ALL.  This allows you to optimize for time-to-alert or accuracy of alerts.  These controls tune whether to alert at the first sign of a failure, a majority agreeing, or when all datacenters “agree” the service is down. Monitoring multiple zones helps in reducing false alarms (e.g. if one of the datacenter is down but the end customers are still able to access client website then it’s a false alarm).

● Auditing – Use an API to retrieve time series data from the system. Use this to go back in time and verify which notifications went out and why. Also, track all changes to an entity, check and alarm.  Get the before and after of every changed object in the system.  You can even add a “who” and “why” parameter to each POST/PUT request to keep a log of why the changes were made!

● Remote IPv4/v6 checks – Monitor IPv4/IPv6 services via IP addresses or using DNS resolution. Using DNS resolution, specify which type of address to resolve, A or AAAA.

● Data Model – We’ve disconnected the concept of alerting and data collection.  This is important for creating robust and rich monitors.  Check many aspects of a single resource; for instance, make sure the site is responding with a 201-status code, and features the copyright as a body match on the bottom of the page.  Ensure all these conditions meet before the status of an alarm is “OK.”

● Alarm Language – Create a unique query with our language purposefully built to express thresholds and alert conditions. String compare metrics, use a regular expression operator, check the rate of change, and much more. With each of these primitives you can chain together multiple conditional’s to set the state of an alarm. Our documentation highlights best practices for building robust monitors and alarms.

● On-demand Simulation – Run a check on-demand, to verify its status before adding it.  This allows you to get a feel for a monitor before being alerted by it.  On top of that, you can take the results and pass it another endpoint to simulate your alarm language criteria match!  This is extremely powerful as it takes some of the complexity out of guessing and allows one to simulate responses as they happen in normal operation.

● Change Alert Destination – Depending upon which event is generated, you can execute different notifications; for instance on a warning alert, fire a webhook, but on an error alert, and send sysadmin@yourcompany.com an urgent email.

I am extremely excited about getting this product in front of the right customers.  The Cloud Monitoring Private Beta is intended for those familiar with monitoring systems and REST-like API’s.  Access to the API is managed through an existing Rackspace Cloud account, but you do not have to be a current Rackspace customer to be considered.

Interested in Participating?

To apply for the beta program, please fill out this short survey with your contact information and use case and we will determine your eligibility within 24 hours.

We’re looking forward to what this product will bring us in the future.  If you’d like to get in on the ground floor, let us know and as we’d love to hear from you.

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Read also Technology Behind Rackspace Cloud Monitoring.