Apparent Networks usually specializes in solutions for monitoring the health of a VAR’s network services, distributed applications, and your own cloud services. But now the company has turned the magnifying glass outwards with the launch of the Cloud Performance Center, a free tool for examining the health of public cloud services like Amazon Web Services, Google, GoGrid, Salesforce, and others. Here’s the scoop on a potentially handy tool for picking a cloud provider.

The Apparent Cloud Performance Center (CPC) polls a dozen cloud services from the perspective of ten major US cities minute-by-minute, providing insight to where, when, and how they fail, according to the press release.  Apparent is also touting the drill-down capabilities and metrics included in CPC, with statistics like bandwidth capacity, available capacity, jitter and true application latency.

And when services do go down, performance alerts are sent out, alleviating the perennial question “Is it down for everyone or just me?” Which is to say, they’ll make sure you know the issue is with them and not you. And you can see historical data from each provider.

Microsoft launched a BPOS service health dashboard recently – but that’s only for subscribers. The Apparent CPC could well be a useful resource for VARs wondering if service disruptions are going to affect their cloud business.

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