Cloud Monitoring FAQ

What is Cloud Monitoring?

Rackspace Cloud Monitoring 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. Basically, we help answer the question, "Is my service up and running?" To do that, we have two objectives: to alert the resource owner before their customer knows, and to take measures against allowing the system to go down in the first place.

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Aren't my cloud resources already being monitored?

We will only notify you if there is a problem with our infrastructure that impacts your cloud resource, but we do not run monitoring checks on your individual Cloud Servers, Cloud Load Balancers, or websites to verify functionality. This leaves a lot of exposure in situations where the infrastructure is working fine, but a given application or resource in your cloud setup has stopped functioning correctly, leaving your site performance degraded, or totally inaccessible.

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What kind of monitoring is available for my cloud resources?

It can take a lot of administrative overhead in order to correctly configure and maintain a robust monitoring application. If there is no built-in redundancy for the monitoring application, you could lose all monitoring services if the server hosting your monitoring application runs into trouble. A simpler option, with built-in redundancy, is to use the Rackspace Cloud Monitoring service. It provides you with four key pieces of information that can help you manage your business as well as address and prevent infrastructure problems before they affect your customers:

• Current system health
• Alerts on failure conditions
• Collection of historical data (in future releases)
• Trending and capacity planning (in future releases)

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What does it monitor?

Anything with a URL or an IP address that is not blocked by a firewall. Details can be found here.

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What are the ways to receive an alert when my website is down?

Right now we support email and webhook. The most up-to-date information is here.

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How do I install Cloud Monitoring?

With Rackspace Cloud Monitoring your don't need to install any software as the service is provided through the cloud. No set up, no maintenance, and no upgrades for you to manage.

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How do I get started?

Rackspace Cloud Monitoring is an API-based system, and there are various was to access it. First is a CLI, the raxmon toolset. Second is by control panel, which gives you a quick way to configure the various primitives in the system. Those individuals desiring a concise walkthrough of the CLI system or a detailed list of check types and notification options can consult our Cloud Monitoring Getting Started Guide, and the more technically advanced Cloud Monitoring Developer Guide.

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Will this be available globally or US only?

This is a global product which is supported in both the US and UK.

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I am a Rackspace customer, but I only have dedicated/managed servers. Can I use this?

Yes, but you will need a Cloud Account.

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Can I monitor non-Rackspace servers also through Cloud Monitoring?

Yes.

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Where can I find more information about Cloud Monitoring?

Check out our Cloud Monitoring FAQs for answers to common questions. Also, visit our Cloud Monitoring Getting Started Guide for additional information about Cloud Monitoring.

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