scout

As a longtime Unix sysadmin, I’ve beaten my head against more system monitoring tools than I care to remember.  However, I’ve recently been playing around with Scout, a hosted monitoring solution, and have been very impressed.  As a bonus, I discovered a cool feature that makes monitoring clusters of cloud servers much less time-consuming.  This article will show you how to use the Scout “Cloud Image” feature to have your new servers automatically monitored.  It assumes that you have already signed up for a Scout account (there’s a free trial) and have the ability to deploy Rackspace Cloud Servers.