The startup CopperEgg, born from some old hands in the networking space, announced its Reveal Cloud real-time performance monitoring solution today as part of its debut. While only available for Linux and Unix servers, it is an interesting idea.
You can sign-up here and start in a matter of seconds, for free. The idea is to track problems before they fester, because you are only as good as your cloud provider’s uptime, as Digg and others who have been hurt from AWS’ availability issues can attest. You can also do benchmarking across cloud providers, something that is catching on. To instrument your servers, you copy a line of code that connects them to your own Web-based dashboard. Each of your servers is keyed to your particular URL and as long as you keep it private no one else can view your stats. Information displayed includes network and CPU usage and disk activity. RevealCloud’s claim to fame is that it continuously monitors your clouds, unlike some other solutions that poll or ping every few minutes. This can highlight capacity and load issues that less frequent monitoring service might miss.
Right now the service is free, but CopperEgg expects to add additional features that they will eventually start charging for. They also have a separate storage performance monitoring solution as well.
CopperEgg has gotten an initial funding round from Silverton Partners and is led by Scott Johnson, who was one of the founders of Thomas-Conrad Corporation, an early networking pioneer (remember Arcnet, anyone?).
This approach could be complementary to what Uptime Software is doing here. The company has put together a collection of screencast videos showing how to install and use it, and comparing what they do with AWS’ Cloud Watch service.
