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IBM, Amazon Cloud Monitoring Tools Emerge; Will MSPs Plug In?
Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) and IBM (NYSE: IBM) have each introduced new cloud monitoring tools, offering MSPs new ways to proactively maintain cloud services
2 Min Read
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Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) and IBM (NYSE: IBM) have each introduced new cloud monitoring tools, offering MSPs new ways to proactively maintain cloud services for end-customers. The big question: Will traditional remote monitoring and management (RMM) software platforms evolve to offer similar cloud-monitoring capabilities? Do MSPs even need those capabilities? Here are some initial perspectives.IBM announced a sweeping OpenStack strategy today, vowing to help partners and customers to deploy open, standards-based clouds. IBM also launched a related monitoring tool called SmartCloud Monitoring Application Insight. The tool helps businesses monitor the real-time performance and availability of cloud applications. It’s slated to be available in Q2 2013, IBM indicated.
Amazon, meanwhile, is offering a free trial of its AWS Trusted Advisor monitoring tool. Amazon says:
“The AWS Trusted Advisor inspects your AWS environment and makes recommendations when opportunities exist to save money, improve system performance, or close security gaps. We are continually expanding the number of checks available through Trusted Advisor with over 100 additional best practice checks in our development pipeline. Trusted Advisor is available to customers with Business and Enterprise-level support.”
You Better Get Ready
Are small business owners willing to pay for cloud monitoring services? Increasingly I believe the answer is yes. Let me give you an example: Two of our three websites are hosted on Rackspace’s cloud. The sites run well. But for an additional fee, Rackspace is willing to proactively monitor and manage everything for us. I was just about ready to open my wallet for the service — but we are currently transitioning a lot of our cloud services over to our parent company, Penton Media.
I am not suggesting that the IBM and Amazon cloud monitoring tools are ready for the MSP channel. Amazon’s offering is in beta. IBM’s will launch sometime in Q2. But a lengthy list of cloud monitoring tools are already available, as we’ve covered on Talkin’ Cloud. And I suspect a good number of your small business customers will soon run workloads in Amazon’s cloud.
I can’t help but think MSPs will need some cloud monitoring capabilities in their own toolsets…
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