

Amazon Announces Free Monitoring for Amazon EC2 Instances - krf
http://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/

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ericflo
I've been a Rackspace Cloud customer for years, and happily so, but it's this
constant drumbeat of innovation and forward momentum at Amazon that makes me
seriously reconsider my choice.

I really want to see Rackspace step up its game over the next year, if for no
other reason than to keep Amazon on its toes.

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chopsueyar
Let us know when/if Rackspace decides to step up to the plate (those publicly
traded bastards).

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europa
What will be the impact of this on third party monitoring apps like
CloudKick.?May be they have to provide more value addition on other areas of
cloud computing like custom building of servers , automating sys-admin etc.

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mark_l_watson
CloudKick is nicer, but then free is free. I use CloudKick for my stuff and I
don't think I'll stop. Some customers however need to cut their costs for
many-Ec2 instance deployments, so the free monitoring is good.

I just checked most of the large instances my customer runs, and noticed some
are very underutilized; wonder if free monitoring might reduce Amazon's
revenue?

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trotsky
Better info in the email they sent out:

 _Dear Amazon EC2 Customer,

We're excited to let you know that as of today, all Amazon EC2 instances come
with free Basic Monitoring metrics from our Monitoring service, Amazon
CloudWatch. You don't need to do anything to make this happen. It's there for
you to use. Simply sign in to the AWS Management Console and select one of
your active instances. You will immediately be able to view graphs and track
performance on metrics such as CPU utilization, disk reads and writes, and
network traffic.

Basic Monitoring for Amazon EC2 provides metric data on instance performance
at five-minute frequency. Customers can optionally choose to enable Detailed
Monitoring, which provides metric data at one-minute frequency for an
additional $0.015 per instance-hour.

In addition, starting today you can now set alarms for any metric that Amazon
CloudWatch monitors. You can configure these alarms via API call to send
notifications or initiate Auto Scaling actions when metrics cross certain
thresholds. Alarm pricing starts at $0.10 per alarm per month.

All the features mentioned above are available immediately in all regions
(US-N. Virginia, US-N. California, EU-Ireland, APAC-Singapore), and we invite
you to try them today! Learn more about Amazon CloudWatch at:
aws.amazon.com/cloudwatch.

Sincerely,

The Amazon Web Services Team

P.S. Amazon CloudWatch monitoring remains free of charge for Amazon EBS
volumes, Elastic Load Balancers, and Amazon RDS DB instances._

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Corrado
Wow! Amazon just keeps getting better and better (and cheaper and cheaper).
Hmmm...what are they up to?

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chopsueyar
It is a race to the bottom. Amazon is attempting to commoditize all aspects of
their Cloud offerings.

If something becomes a standard feature, a competitor or service cannot pick
up the slack and use it as a differentiating feature.

~~~
pegmanm
I agree. This is not the first time that Amazon have targeted the companies
that can/could be used to add value to their offerings.

There was a company (cannot remember the same sorry) that provided MySQL in
amazons cloud before they launched their RDS service. And an much better
service it was too. The startup did not ask you to give them a 4 hour window
where they can bring down your DB. But still it was an Amazon service so the
brand awareness was there.

This seems like a direct attack on the likes of cloudkick. I do not understand
the motivation to be honest. They were making some money from their own
monitoring and not they are making none, but they are pushing companies like
cloudkick away from survival and innovating more.

While the free micro instances offer was obviously a push to put the boot into
Rackspace and attempt to take the remaining % of the IaaS market this I
understand less.

It seems Amazon have ignored the old rules where in a new market there is less
direct competition as there is plenty to go around and have gone straight for
total market domination.

Disclosure: My project has(had) as a highlight feature IaaS monitoring,
metrics and alerting. So if the above sounds a little unreasoned please
forgive me while I contemplate a pivot. :-(

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joshhart
It was FathomDB (I worked there). FathomDB is still going actually, but I'd
basically warn anyone away from building a convenience service on top of
Amazon's stack - they're using the Microsoft playbook.

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smoody
a direct link to the post being referenced: [http://aws.amazon.com/about-
aws/whats-new/2010/12/03/announc...](http://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-
new/2010/12/03/announcing-free-monitoring-for-amazon-ec2-instances/)

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terra_t
This definitely sweetens the deal. AMZN's monitoring facilities have been
expensive and not really all that good.

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europa
I agree with you, it very expensive for small startups not taken off yet. For
example Cloudkicks charges $99/month for their entry level offering. May be
their target customers are startups/companies which are taken off (profitable,
VC funded). Also as suggested by other commenter (troels) , monitoring may be
not essential for all startups at the early stage.

~~~
terra_t
I've often been unhappy with off-the-shelf monitoring systems, because every
major site I've worked on has had some unique kind of problem.

For instance, there was one site where user abuse was the real problem... Bad
enough that I built something that detected possible abusive behavior and
would beep my pager.

For another project we had about 20 geographically distributed mirror sites,
and we had to monitor network connections to all of them and make sure they
were all alive and staying synchronized.

Right now I've got a site where the caching system screws up periodically and
then I start getting 500 errors. Sooner or later I'm going to really fix the
problem, in the short term what I really need is something that gets in my
face whenever the 500 error rate spikes.

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ovi256
Cop up, who's startup just died ?

I hope it was more like a "startup idea" though.

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jasonkester
Amazon has had monitoring for their instances for a year now. The only change
is in the way that they price it.

It used to be expensive enough that you wouldn't leave it on at all times, but
would turn it on to diagnose something or check up on one of your boxes, then
turn it back off when you were done. Now you get a baseline low-fi version for
free.

I think they just realized that nobody was paying for this service, and that
it really didn't cost them anything to provide it. So they just made it free.

As far as Startup Killing goes, I doubt this will hurt any "Cloud Monitoring"
startups significantly. If you look at the 5 basic charts they give you, you
can see it's in line with their stand on reporting across all their services:
They give you the basics, but leave plenty of room for somebody else to step
in and deliver something better.

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SwaroopH
After the introduction of micro instances, cloudwatch costs were simply
unjustified. Way to go Amazon – best news I've heard this week!

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tonycore
Kudos! But this should have been done long ago.

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wladimir
Free monitoring... right, yes, I suppose you get monitoring by the NSA for
free :)

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listic
If you are not a US citizen, of course.

~~~
wladimir
If you are a US citizen, there's also an agency for that...

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nivertech
NSA, CIA and FBI "free monitoring" is not free - the billing is via another
3-letter agency: IRS ;)

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SRG
Free Monitoring, it's like when they kicked out Wikileaks from their cloud?
Nice feature.

