Rackspace Hosting gets new tools for cloud server management and automation with its acquisition of Cloudkick, a 2-year-old Y Combinator startup based in San Francisco and serving 1,500 customers of its own.

Rackspace said the acquisition is a play to improve its trademark “fanatical support” by helping clients and partners better manage their cloud servers. That’s especially important in the wake of the company’s earlier announcement that it is making available managed cloud hosting — Rackspace employees themselves will be using Cloudkick technology to keep tabs on customer deployments.

The Cloudkick offering provides a unified web dashboard to view all servers under an administrator’s control, giving options for automation when it comes to tasks like deployment and scaling. Cloudkick also provides “robust” views into the cloud server’s health.

And for Rackspace’s MSP partners, the Cloudkick technology provides even more visibility into and control over their customers’ managed servers, taking some stress out of the equation.

Said Rackspace Chief Strategy Officer Lew Moorman in a prepared statement:

“But as cloud computing has made it easier to launch servers, companies launch a lot more of them, and use many of them inefficiently — and even lose track of some. Cloudkick brings order to that chaos and sprawl.”

Cloud management tools aren’t the only things Rackspace gets out of the deal: Cloudkick’s offices become another Rackspace outpost in the San Francisco Bay Area, offering support to local customers and furthering cloud R&D efforts.

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