MSPs who work with Amazon Web Services (AWS) or Rackspace Cloud can now keep better tabs on these operations with the help of Stackdriver Intelligent Monitoring from cloud management startup Stackdriver.
The new tool, delivered as software-as-a-service (SaaS) from the new company, has just gone into beta and is already in the hands of some 100 AWS customers.
Stackdriver isn’t your typical startup. Sure it has $5 million in funding. Fairly typical. It is also filled with vets from big players such as EMC, Oracle, Red Hat and VMware. Again, not unusual.
What is not average is the fact that the company, in its early stages, was run out of a Northeastern University conference room, and that the CIO of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is part of Stackdriver’s advisory board.
The way it all began is also a bit unique. The $5 million came from Bain Capital, as did the co-founder Izzy Azeri. The company began last year, and is aimed at DevOps professionals.
The two founders, Dan Belcher and Azeri, met when working at VMware and saw that companies had a lot of problems handling large cloud applications. They surveyed a number of people about these pain points, research which informed the company’s meaning for being – to improve performance and availability and reduce complexity.
The short descriptor the company uses is “intelligent monitoring for your infrastructure, systems and app.”
The SaaS monitoring-as-a-service tool:
- Lets DevOps build dashboards.
- Monitors Rackspace Cloud and AWS, including infrastructure, systems and apps.
- Gets notifications of problems and anomalies.
- Apply metrics to application performance.
The company claims all this will let DevOps automate management tasks, find the cause of problems to fix and prevent them in the future, and detect problems before they degrade customer performance.
“Previously, many of our customers invested significantly in their own monitoring systems and struggled to maintain them as their AWS and Rackspace Cloud environments grew larger and more complex,” said Belcher. “Our most important goal with Stackdriver Intelligent Monitoring is to simplify the task of managing these environments at scale – when there are too many resources and too much data for common visualization and alerting tools to be useful.”
One customer, social learning company Edmodo, is using an early version of the software. “The technology stack that powers Edmodo's online learning platform is very sophisticated. We use a variety of application building blocks, including AWS services and open source server software,” said Kimo Rosenbaum, infrastructure architect. “Before Stackdriver, we monitored our stack with many disparate tools, often designed without the dynamic nature of the cloud in mind. With Stackdriver, we can monitor our systems, AWS services, and applications with one simple interface built for cloud-based services.”
Co-found Azeri sees research, his own and IDC, backing his strategy. "Hundreds of thousands of businesses count on their cloud-powered applications being fast and available, yet our research indicates that 50 percent are dissatisfied with their existing monitoring solutions,” explained Azeri. “With IDC estimating that the Public IT Cloud Services market will approach $100 billion by 2016, the need for intelligent management will become even more pervasive.”
Three Questions for Dan Belcher, Stackdriver Co-Founder
MSP Today: What is in this for MSPs?
Belcher: To be frank, while the founders both have deep experience working with MSPs, we didn't set out to build a solution for that audience from the outset--thinking instead that we would add features that would appeal to MSPs over time. Surprisingly, several MSPs expressed interest in the private beta and are pleased with the capabilities of the product today. Atomwise is an MSP that has been involved in the private beta and have agreed to serve as a reference if you would be interested in a conversation. The specific capabilities that appeal to MSPs include:
- The ability to monitor all customer environments using a single login.
- The ability to organize cloud resources by customer account.
- The ability to create custom dashboards per customer.
- The ability to set unique policies at the global, customer, customer group, or resource level.
MSP Today: This appears to have some of the same attributes as a PaaS but is more specific. Can Stackdriver explain how it is similar and different?
Belcher: In the long run, one way to think about Stackdriver is that we will enable customers to combine the operational simplicity of PaaS with the flexibility and control of IaaS. Our customers can choose the optimal architecture and configuration for their applications (benefit of IaaS), but our service will handle a lot of the analysis, troubleshooting and operational tasks (benefit of PaaS) that people spend too much time on with IaaS.
MSP Today: What can you tell us about the history of the company?
Belcher: The concept for Stackdriver grew out of a broad market research project (hundreds of survey responses targeted at public cloud users, dozens of interviews with target customers, identify pain points, test hypotheses, etc. – all before putting any thought into product or technology) with founders that had sales, marketing and consulting backgrounds. We would contrast that with the stereotypical vision of a couple engineers working in a garage to create an interesting/innovative technology. Most of the core team had all worked in large environments where the company spent too much time dealing with operational issues in the cloud – and several built internal tools to help address these issues. Now we want to be sure that others don't waste time building the same thing.
